This is a rather common inquiry that I see being asked periodically (including most recently on Reddit which I am not a normal reader of). I’ve occasionally briefly mentioned the reasons for this in prior blog postings but I don’t think I really ever made a standalone entry about it (until this one). I’m basically just going to repost what I wrote in that Reddit posting with some minor edits.
As for whether or not Krafton will redo TERA in Unreal Engine 4 (similar to what NCSoft is currently doing with Blade & Soul), they haven’t done it because re-doing the engine will be akin to doing an entirely new game. TERA was built using an older build of UE3 (a build in the 4000 range). Krafton’s (Bluehole) other MMORPG A:IR, uses a much newer build from the 10000 range) where Epic had over the years, added capabilities that didn’t exist in those older builds. Note that Epic did begin licensing out their engine in the late 90’s (UE1) but it was still primarily designed for first person shooters (as was UE2 and earlier UE3 builds). Lineage II (NCSoft) was one of the first MMORPG’s that licensed the engine (UE2) in 2003. Design studios did this since the tools allowed rapid world building and character/modeling design. What the engine lacked (for MMO game systems), many studios rolled their own custom code. Epic also has an Integrated Partners Program (IPP) which allows the interoperation of other middleware (such as a physics engine). Back in the earlier days, this was primarily Karma Physics and Havok; nowadays, it is mostly PhysX.
This is also why a lot of Korean MMO’s (PC platform) in development from before 2015, had their production pipeline around UE3. Lot of the expertise came from NCSoft (many of their designers went on to form their own studios using their experiencing in UE3 production back when the venture capital money was going directly into PC MMORPG’s and web portal’s that published them in Korea).
In TERA’s case, the original development team for Bluehole (which came mostly from NCSoft’s Lineage III development team), had to create a lot of custom extensions. While they could still move to a later build of UE3, it would likely still require refactoring a lot of code. Most of the original development team is gone though (and they’ve had different teams managing the game to varying degrees of competence). With that said, the UE3 build and custom extensions Krafton did for A:IR, is something that TERA could benefit from. It wouldn’t be as costly as trying to move the game to UE4 where they would need to pretty much rewrite large portions of the game. And given the higher fidelity level that UE4 allows for graphics, would mean it would make sense to redo a lot of assets (textures, modeling, and animations since the latter allows more granularity when it comes to rigging). This is where the production costs balloon. That doesn’t mean the game will be miraculously optimized either. UE4 is no different from UE3 in that regards where the development team still needs to do tuning passes and tweak things to get the most optimal configurations for various hardware.
The cost/benefit analysis was likely done years ago (probably before PUBG blew up though) where it didn’t make sense to invest that sort of money into a game that was released in 2011 (after spending 4 years in development). The leadership back then also squashed any idea of a TERA 2 and chose to focus on Project EXA, Project W (which became A:IR), and their then newly acquired Ginno Games subsidiary (which became Bluehole Ginno and later renamed to PUBG Corp) game Devilian which Bluehole initially threw money at to completely overhaul (with assets and a few game systems derived from TERA). The thought process back then was “mini TERA with ARPG style combat and mechanics”. Devilian of course closed completely in all regions last year (and ironically, some of its systems and unused designs are being implemented in PC/Console TERA).
Bluehole back before PUBG, was a tiny blip of a studio in South Korea unlike Nexon or NCSoft (which is why they are able to invest the resources into redoing some of their UE3 games to UE4 like B&S for example). Their solution for increasing the longevity of the TERA franchise back then was to license out the TERA IP (most of which were by mobile development studios) as opposed to investing in improving the underlying foundation of the game. Ironically, Bluehole ended up acquiring two of those (SQUALL and Red Sahara Studio). Longtu Korea licensed the IP for TERA Classic. All of these mobile titles (TERA Classic, TERA M, TERA Frontiers, and TERA Origin [which is a version of TERA M that has been overhauled for the Japanese market]) have all been done in UE4.
Basically, this isn’t anything new for Korean design studios (take the revenues from the money maker and use it to fund the next thing). Take a look at XLGAMES (ArcheAge) where they squandered a lot of the worldwide revenues from AA into over 2 dozen mobile MMO failures (and even when Jake Song returned, they are on-track to release another mobile title). As for Krafton, it remains to be seen if they will change strategies with PC TERA given the amount of money they have made with PUBG.
