Guild Wars 2

Hi. Arena.Net, while making Guild Wars games, has developped an in-house game engine capable to work with a great server infrastructure. There were a few game companies, that released their in-house tools for indie devs or other AAA game studios. Nowdays, there are no game engines, oppened to the public, specially designed for MMO development. Here, Arena.Net could strike. They have more than ten years experience in MMO development. They could combine their in-house tools to a development pack, then making it accesible via subscription. If, in their
pack, they also include visual scripting tools, then anyone, with no coding knowledge, could do awesome games, concentrating only on the artistic workflow. Another idea is to give, in that engine editor, some Guild Wars 2 mechanics as example. (a kind of demo).
Now, as an Arena.Net developper stated here, http://www.gamedev.net/blog/355/entry-2250155-why-you-shouldnt-be-making-an-mmo/ , the server part is some kind of dark voodo. For a valid mmo engine to work for indies, it needs a lot of simplification. As stated in that article, for indies, making a MMO is not a good job to start. Mabie, Arena.Net could simplify things in such a way that MMO development would become affordable to anyone.
What do you think?

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/result.html?sort=relevance&srch=top&query_txt=arenanet&submit=&patents=on

Once you let your IP out, it is hard to prevent people from reverse engineering it.

Working an in area that deals with IP, you need protections in place and that costs.

They can’t reverse engineer it. Once the users subscribe, they pay every month a fee. Before subscribing, they accept some legal documents. Arena.Net could actually get enough money for ip protection, because if you were releasing a mmo with their engine, you would have to pay to Arena.Net a percent of your sales. If Arena.Net keeps the C++ source code locked, they can’t even think to reverse engineer it. Even more…who would want to risk that ?

Why? They would hardly be willing to sell a proprietary engine to indie developers because it’s worth more to them than that, and they would struggle to sell it to AAA MMO developers who would be more likely to go with an established engine such as Unreal. Not to mention Arenanet is owned by NCSoft who would be unlikely to let them make their engine available for use beyond an NCSoft owned game…

I’m pretty sure the powers that be within Arenanet have already mulled over such ideas. I don’t think you need to bring this to their attention.

This industry is cutthroat and frankly, simply giving extremely expensive tools out for free, or even for a fee would let a ton of people capitalize on this. What’s more is that they would be directly supplying their competition to beat them at their own game.

It’d be like a gas station worker blatantly telling you that a different station down the road has better gas for less money.

Well Cryengine is free to use (they will charge you a percentage if you earn less than 2 million a year with the game that you make, if you make more than that you also have to pay a flat out fee, which is all good) and a lot of MMOs just release on that.

Having in mind that Anet is working with an old GW1 engine, just greatly improved I would rather Assassin’s Creed engine was set to public, because it has wonderful parkouring mechanics. Though unfortunately they won’t do that.

i use the crytek engine, it can be quite a pain at times (especially with textures >_< ) but it’s allot more powerful then what you see in GW2.
for one it has full physX and havok support and has realistic lighting that makes you wonder if it’s real or not, they even have tech they call the toad tech. (this shows how realistic they can render a toad, it’s just scary)

crytek is a bit to the extreme tho, there are other engines completely free that do quite some good work.
it does depend what you want to make, you can’t make a full 3D game with an engine specifically made for 2D work.
in case you want to sniff the goods, here is a list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines

sorudo.9054:

i use the crytek engine, it can be quite a pain at times (especially with textures >_< )

I’m on a computer games design university course and trough out all of our first year we were forced to use unity. Oh unity is painful. Collisions sometimes don’t work just because unity doesn’t feel like it. Then you find yourself traveling around all problems by using the silliest round about methods to get everything to work.

Who would want to use Arena.Nets Engine anyway? We hear about her limitations all the time. It may have been good five years ago, but nowadays it is one of the main problems holding the game back.

GreenAlien.5623:

Who would want to use Arena.Nets Engine anyway? We hear about her limitations all the time. It may have been good five years ago, but nowadays it is one of the main problems holding the game back.

Exactly. Anet has admitted to the numerous limitations of their engine. The upcoming feature patch is a result of them tweaking things. Even if they wanted to license their engine it probably wouldn’t be ready.

mahri.8410:

They can’t reverse engineer it. Once the users subscribe, they pay every month a fee. Before subscribing, they accept some legal documents. Arena.Net could actually get enough money for ip protection, because if you were releasing a mmo with their engine, you would have to pay to Arena.Net a percent of your sales. If Arena.Net keeps the C++ source code locked, they can’t even think to reverse engineer it. Even more…who would want to risk that ?

Agreement, intent and action are completely different things. If you’ve ever traded in or sold a video game in the last two decades, you’ve violated an agreement you signed by use of the product. It would be incredibly naive to believe someone wouldn’t get a hold of a copy of the game for the explicit purpose of reverse engineering it.. For smaller scale examples, look at a wide percentage of both the iTunes and Google Play app stores.

mahri.8410:

They can’t reverse engineer it. Once the users subscribe, they pay every month a fee. Before subscribing, they accept some legal documents. Arena.Net could actually get enough money for ip protection, because if you were releasing a mmo with their engine, you would have to pay to Arena.Net a percent of your sales. If Arena.Net keeps the C++ source code locked, they can’t even think to reverse engineer it. Even more…who would want to risk that ?

What planet are you from? It is not hard to reverse engineer anything. How do you think the Japanese became the power house they are today? Then reverse-engineered and then improved on the items.

The same can be done with anything.

Of course it is against legal agreements but it doesn’t mean that it is not done. That is a very simplistic attitude.

Sadly, they wouldn’t. There would be nothing to gain and everything to lose. Hobbyists are sadly not a large enough community to really gain much from extending a hand to.

If they were to release features to let the community build their own things, personally, I think it would be interesting to see them allow people to change the numbers on individual skills in custom arenas. The sPvP community can manage balance on their own, that way. It might be a bit of a shift, but other games have done it; smogon university being the biggest example I can think of.