Guild Wars 2

Right here.. The gw2 engine is a pretty amazing piece of software. After dabbling in a ton of other mmo’s and most recently ArcheAge.. I still can’t get over how this game not only looks the best, but runs the best out of all of them.. Even on dated hardware..

I am not here to change gw2 in anyway..

But I want to get a message to the developers..

Take this game engine and make a hybrid sandbox/themepark game…

Out of all the mmo’s I have played, I have found I enjoy leveling in this game the most. The quest progression from area to area is seamless and easy to solo.. Even more fun in a duo with someone but totally casual and easy enough for everyone to enjoy themselves.

But this game really lacks in other aspects.. The sandbox element is non existent in this game and I think it is doing a great dis-service to the beautifully coded engine that this game has.. Even Gw1 was amazing for its time.. They really had/have? one of the best coders out of the diablo 1 trio that splintered off..

I’ve experienced star wars galaxies and ArcheAge as my only two sandbox type games and I have to wonder to myself why more companies don’t use some of those game designs/elements? I realize everyone was chasing the mythical 10 million wow subs, and don’t get me started on that because those numbers were so artificial its a joke..

So as everyone tried to copy wow and failed for the last 10 years, we are drowning in a sea of boring theme park mmo’s that all have that same “been there, done that” feeling.. it makes me wonder when more companies are going to get back to that epicness of the original idea behind mmo’s. It was about being able to do everything from fishing, to farming, to mining, to crafting using complex systems that required rare resource spawns etc.. Where are these games? We don’t need anymore clones to be honest.. You could make the best of the best theme park wow clone and it will still fail because the direction and strictures typically associated with theme park games.. They are designed on rails and more like riding a train across country.. It will get boring and fast no matter how pretty the scenery or how luxurious the cab-cars are.. Mmo players have what I like to call theme park burnout.. Caused by years of playing wow and the subsequent clones.

… tbc

Gw2 is different enough and the btp really helps.. I wish more companies would follow that model, it is the best I’ve seen as far as not “paying to win” goes.

What I would love to see, is a game made with this games engine that offers things like farming, housing, mining, open world pvp flag systems/factions and complex crafting that focuses on player driven economies.. The game should emphasize the same questing theme park ride to max level with dungeons and end game raiding.. But also incorporate a similar pvp wvw system we see here for those who like instanced pvp.. But open world pvp can be really fun as well as long as its not forced on anyone. At which point you could have a mercenary class/bounty hunter class system where people could place a bounty on other open world pvpers heads.. Basically if you open world pvp you open yourself up to the bounty system…

Mmo’s today lack mini games.. That is what we need.. games within games that allow players to progress their character toons through an endless sea of player driven content. I would go as far as having certain npc’s in game or wanted billboard that these mercs or bounty hunters could use to sift through a list of bounties.. The players creating the bounty could offer gold and items.. Maybe rare items and such to make it more appealing to the hunters.. i know wow had some kind of weak bounty system but it never really came close to the star wars galaxies system.. Nothing has came close to that.. the feeling of tracking and hunting was amazing and if you haven’t experienced that, you missed out on some of the most fun times I ever had in any game to date…

The class system needs to break the traditional mold wow started of warrior/rogue/healer/caster.. I mean what did that game have like 6 classes? Boring.. This game doesn’t do much better either by the way.. Super weak class system here… Really one of the biggest downfalls to this game and the balance people are slow at fixing issues… How can the ranger still be so kitten so many months later? baffling….

..tbc

Take for example the old buffing system in SWG.. I know it was a bit time consuming.. Well 10 minutes at most for a dancer buff.. But just standing their in the cantina with 10 or 20 other people buffing all socializing having fun chatting up the dancer etc.. Then boom, a jedi comes force running by with 2 bounty hunters hot on his tail… How freaking epic was that.. Everyone would rush out side to see the fight ensue.. Man the good ole days..

I swear for the first 3 months of that game, I never left tatoine.. Me and my brother were out in the desert using hand held survey tools, harvesting water/ore/minerals etc.. And each resource that came up had varying degrees of stats on them There was no tier 1 nodes or tier 5 nodes.. It if required ore, that is what was used.. So the end result when you used it in crafting, always produced something either really good, or something kind of average.. It was a mini game in it self hunting for the best resources to craft that perfect high damage laser blaster.. Then you could also hunt for rare motors and tissues that would enhance them as well.. It was one amazing system. Not like the cookie cutter system we see today..

But what made a game like that really work, and I know some people didn’t like this aspect nor do I expect many who began with wow or the subsequent wow clones to understand what 1 character per server meant…

Yes, you had one character, a set amount of skill points to allot into skill boxes and not everyone could craft because they wanted to pvp or pve.. That meant crafters were crafters and the community relied on them to drive the economy.. It was genius in design and way ahead of its time (thanks Raph).. He was brilliant in some of his designs aspects and I am shocked he isn’t working with a big triple A company right now on the upcoming hybrid sandbox/theme parks I mentioned are coming.. There is probably a group of men sitting around a conference room table right now trying to think how they can make their mmo popular, like wow.. we want the 10 million subs.. Well forget it.. It is not happening and never will because the market is so saturated with mmo’s that people are spread out over 20 mmo’s games, not the 3 or 4 that were around when wow launched.

..tbc

But like I said, i would never ask them to change this game because I know people like it just as it is.. And you would have to"baby step" some of the players into using one character name/toon per server.. You know what that meant though? Your reputation was everything.. You act like a kitten in game, then people knew you as a kitten in game.. You want the feeling of being an epic pvper, standing in town with the best of the best gear, you will never get that in an mmo that caters to 6 alts.. never..
There was no paying to change your name.. There was no hiding behind an alt character.. That game was endless content for people because you had to drop class skills to pick up other ones by re-grinding out xp for said skill box. I am not saying it was a perfect design, but it was fun to me and a lot of people because it was endless.. I subbed to swg for 2 years straight never losing interest till they wrecked it with the new game experience.. Even the CU was tolerable..

I made so many friends in that game that I knew by name because of the one character system.. Truly epic in design… And I think if you haven’t experienced it first hand you can’t really compare what the community was like with a system like that. But take a game like this for example.. Guilds mean nothing, the people I meet in game mean nothing because I don’t really know who they are.. I don’t really look up to anyone like the best of the best pvpers I saw in swg.. That feeling is just not present in any mmo in 2014..

I would love to see them use this game engine and make a truly amazing game that really emphasized social, player-driven communities. Many of you only know what wow designed and made popular for the instant gratification crowd that it breed over the last 10 years or so.. Most of you truly missed out on the golden era of mmo’s. Once you got a taste of it, nothing else came close to the true mmo feeling of playing and experiencing what those mmo’s offered players.. It would be like fillet mignon to hotdogs.. That is how I would compare it. They were truly addicting and worth every single penny-15/month sub..

It has it’s draw backs. Not being able to scale conditions beyond 25. Distant handled by client rather than server making hacks possible. It looks good yes, but the game is actually crazy CPU reliant. If you don’t have intel, you will struggle.

I read the first page and only scanned the others but I’m sort of with you on this. I’d love more sandbox-y stuff.

(You may want to do something about the “digression” on page 3)

Interesting proposal. However, the engine has a few things which must be addressed – notably, how CPU bound it is in performance, and at the same time trying to keep minimal system requirements stable and workable. And the whole “Conditions” thing needs to be looked at closer, since it’s really . . . concerning how limited it can be.

Also I have my suspicions this engine may be derived from something else, which means marketing it out like the Unreal engine was for a long time . . . well . . .

This engine is still using Direct x 9, that alone is enough to not make it the “best”..

To the OP DL,DR

GW2 uses a heavily modified GW1 engine.
It uses an antiquated API
It uses FXAA which is just terrible
It is uses 3 heavy threads and doesn’t use multi-core processors to their full capacity(AMD users know my meaning ).
It uses 3rd part occlusion which is pretty broken

In my opinion GW2 has one of the worst engines out there but does have fantastic art and animators

No real open world (seamless zones) what also means invisible walls all over the place. Visible objects without collision detection. Also no collision detection on players and the water does not look that great.

Just a few things that are better in AA.

And stuff mostly looks nice because of the design not likely not so much because of graphical quality what is also the reason it might run a little better on older hardware.

What I do think is extremely good however is the whole movement of characters. When you turn your character really turn (using it’s feed), now thats more an animation but still. When you are standing on an angle the characters feet are also standing on the floor not half floating and movement including jumping is excellent. That is a part other games can learn from.

I have also seen some great effects like rain and mist however thats not used a lot or not used correctly (as I have only seen those great effects done right a few times).

But considering the elements where the engine lacks I can’t say it’s the best MMO engine ever. Far from.

Going to point out that the game lacks sandboxy elements because the “best mmo engine”, as you put it, cannot handle it. The same engine that apparently can’t handle a better condition system. The game engine in GW2 is optimized for smaller maps and lower numbers of people(maps cap at ~150 iirc) and this is in order to keep memory usage lower(less stuff to load in) as well as CPU/Server usage lower. WvW is really where the engine shows it’s flaws as far as handling data and tons of effects/textures/players. The game engine runs well for what it is, but there are certainly better engines out there for other aspects. Now they could continue to develop the engine, but that would cost a lot of time and money. A lot of stuff in the game would get broken and need redone.

Stormcrow.7513:

In my opinion GW2 has one of the worst engines out there but does have fantastic art and animators

This, just how much programming experience does the OP have. The engine is poor.

Honestly, if it weren’t for being tightly held in Java, I think Minecraft has a better chance at sandbox-MMO

GW2 looks great because of it’s artists, not because of it’s engine.

Not even close.

Cryptic’s Engine has the best settings.
GW2’s options are pathetic to say the least.
You can’t save graphics presets or automatically switch settings depending on game mode, you can’t switch off many settings. You can’t customize the UI. You can’t set custom control presets…
With Cryptic’s engine, you can turn of and tone down the settings so much that their games run in computers 15 years old. And you can set the controls to play with a combination of whatever input devices you want, and comes with presets for XBox controllers. And you can customize the position and size of the UI so much that you could see the interfaces of two different players without realizing it’s the same game.

Blizzard’s has the best performance. Those guys have the moneys for that. Their games can be set at high settings in older machines.
GW2’s engine can’t even properly use the GPU and overuses the CPU.

GW2 looks great thanks to the artists and their use of visual trickery, not thanks to the client’s engine.

The genius behind GW and GW2 is the background, server-side. What’s in the servers, not the client. The virtual server system will allow to keep the game alive even if there’s a greatly reduced playerbase. Only 10 players left? Get a calculator, power it with a potato battery, and put the servers running there. And it’ll probably work.

oh man, the engine is terrible in this game. The game has amazing art and great combat, but the engine itself is pretty crappy for a game in this decade.

Just imagine if Guild Wars 2 wasnt instanced…

The GW2 is super old, they modified the GW1 engine which is at least 10 years old.

wow engine is quite old too right? but seemed to do the trick.

The wow engine got an update with every expansion..

No, GW2 is not really actually the best MMO with the better graphics.

You have more games in Beta who come 2015.

- Black Desert Online (f2p) -> Open World wo loolks like Skyrim (modded+enb) and ArchAge.
- Icarus
- Bless
- Core Online
- Blade And Soul
- Asura Online ( Better Cinematic and Immersion)
- Division (MMOTPS)

And coming RPG more better that skyrim:
– Kingdom Come: Deliverance

WELCOME 2015

I came here only to say to the OP: I love you, man – we played SWG together. Such fond memories.

But with the amount of money WoW was bringing in they could afford to do a native Mac port, a Dx11 port, a 64-bit port and now a major geometry/texture update for characters. At it’s peak it brought in more money in one quarter than this game has since release.

“Gw2 has the best mmo engine ever designed…”

Yet everyone runs around in circles in EotM avoiding battles. Somewhere down the line the amazing potential of the combat engine is not used because of flawed implementation of new content.

Arenanet’s engine just doesn’t seem to be very well engineered to me. Being a game programmer myself I can “smell” a lot of things about it, like for example why is it so hard to port it to Mac natively? (If you don’t know, the Mac version is using an emulator called Cider.) Please don’t tell me that gameplay code links directly to the Win32 API… Of course it’s not a little feat to port a game to another OS, but if a game engine is reasonably well engineered, it’s not impossible either.

I’m also very curious why they have to cap condition stacks to 25 for “programming reasons” whereas other MMOs don’t have that problem, and that limitation has serious consequences on gameplay. I understand that in GW2 each individual condition in a stack has its own timer so there are a lot more timers to keep track of for the server. (Whereas most other MMOs have a global condition timer for the entire stack of a debuff so it’s easier on the server.) But GW2 doesn’t have a very large number of stacking conditions compared to those other MMOs so I’m not sure why it is so bad it can’t be done.

Now, I don’t blame the programmers for the state of the engine. I know how it is: when you are buried under a mountain of jira tickets for bug fixes and incoming new features that other people are waiting after, a full engine rewrite which will occupy programmers for months if not years only for fixing something that “already works” and “doesn’t add anything new” is a very very hard sell… You’ll have an easier time selling a fridge to an Eskimo.

Cider is commonly used if the developer really doesn’t want to hire a Mac specific team. Cider is a fork of the Wine Windows Linux emulator but targeted at gaming for the Mac. Since Mac gaming is tiny compared to Windows gaming, many developers don’t see the ROI in doing a native port. Dragon Age 2 uses Cider in it’s Mac version. The Mac versions of GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas uses Cider.

It’s a lot easier to port code if you go into it knowing the platforms you are planning to support at start time. Mac uses OpenGL as it’s graphics API so you need to plan ahead to avoid doing something in Dx3D that isn’t easy to translate into OpenGL or vice versa.

They cap conditions so 100 players don’t kill a boss with 100s of DoT effects. It’s simply tougher to scale damage on a curve.

GW2’s engine is likely very efficient because it’s constrained to only doing what they wanted to do with guild wars 2, as is the case with most efficient engines (HeroEngline in CoH is another example).

While this is great for system resources of users, it’s terrible for engine diversity

rapthorne.7345:

GW2’s engine is likely very efficient because it’s constrained to only doing what they wanted to do with guild wars 2, as is the case with most efficient engines (HeroEngline in CoH is another example).

While this is great for system resources of users, it’s terrible for engine diversity

If you meant City of Heroes, it didn’t use the HeroEngine.

I can only imagine what GW2 would be like if someone ported it to Frostbite 3 or sumsuch… EPIC !

i guess it would be better if it would be graphics card based rather than cpu. XD

This is in fact one of the absolute best engines in the industry right now. I don’t know what it is that they do, but I get a feeling they take a quick double-check on the VRAM and don’t use corrupted sectors. My GPU, is currently dying.. so to speak. Basically any game (well, a large amount of games anyways), other than Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, will have polygons stretch out across the whole screen. This is not due to overheating, as the temperature is at a mediocre 50°C during load, my RAM tests shows no flaws there, CPU stress tests again is perfectly fine, so I can only conclude that I have over time, damaged some of the VRAM on the card. GW and GW2 however, seem to be able to ignore these damaged sectors, probably because it checks if it was written correctly before moving on. Whoever programmed it, is brilliant, and didn’t take shortcuts like most game developers do these days. Much respect to them for that.

In my opinion this engine is far from being best. Graphics is inferior to some others mmorpgs which came out at about same time, yet the frame rate isn’t as stable. And all this fog in the distance is kinda annoying as well, because draw distance is really short. Another thing is pathfinding, playing with pet sometimes might be quite a pain. It’s not exactly engine flaw, but chances are it could be related to it.
In the end it’s a bit sad, because game has superior design. But it seems that the engine can’t keep up with it.

KarlusDavius.1024:

It has it’s draw backs. Not being able to scale conditions beyond 25. Distant handled by client rather than server making hacks possible. It looks good yes, but the game is actually crazy CPU reliant. If you don’t have intel, you will struggle.

What a nonsense statement.I have an Fx-8120 Oc’d at 4.6 and lag is non existant for me while i hear lots of intel users complain about lag where i never struggle.If you never actually used an amd to play this game…its best to not say those things because you couldnt be more wrong.

Stormcrow.7513:

GW2 has one of the worst engines out there but does have fantastic art and animations

Listen to this guy.

On another note, I’m curious to see this so called performance improvements they’ve been talking about.

It’s not the engine, for lack of a better word that makes the experience stand out. Imo it’s the art direction like Stormcrow said, appearance customization and unique stuff like SAB that makes it refreshing from other standard MMOs. I dont know if Gw2 changed people’s idea of a MMORPG, but it did for me as many aspects were out of the box and really creative.

Not sure if the engine was designed to support sandboxing in such way, for ex. I highly doubt they’ll ever be able to support voxel-based destructible world. It’s just not what this game was designed for.