Ok, so YAY???? NCSoft announced the UE4 upgrade would be launching this year starting with Korea. Yet, they are shuttering the Frontier World Server in Korea in May (which is the UE4 version of B&S they launched last February as a separate enhanced server from the UE3 version of B&S).
So they effectively wasted a whole lot of time and resources trying to manage two separate versions of the game and trying to enhance the UE4 version, while not achieving the desired results. And people wonder why I’ve been saying they should just stick a fork into Project TL (a completely rebooted start over of Lineage Eternal) despite some folks taking what NCSoft executives vaguely say in their financial reports, and spinning it as the game releasing soon.
Rather than just focus on taking the core of UE3 B&S, recreating it faithfully in UE4 with remastered graphics, and then optimizing/tuning it, the decision makers got greedy and tried to monetize it as a completely separate enhanced version that failed to achieve any objectives. As I’ve mentioned before, just switching to UE4 doesn’t make things magically better. It still requires tuning passes and optimization. NCSoft couldn’t even achieve that despite all of their resources and original project hype.
Contrast this with Krafton Bluehole’s much more modest approach with bringing TERA forward (before it became in jeopardy of breaking on future versions of Windows without a solution in place). I’m the last person you want to hear actually seeing some good things coming out from Bluehole (they’ve screwed up more things than I care to say). They first focused on bringing the client forwards to 64-bit. That itself addressed some of the inherent limitations and brought forth some performance increases (taking advantage of asynchronous loading as one example). At the same time, they performed a modest upgrade of the engine to one of the last builds of UE3 which offers a lot enhancements over the older build that had been utilized. That was a lesson learned from ELYON.
It’s a lot less work than trying to transition from UE3 to UE4 (effectively making a new game). To take advantage of the actual visual improvements, you pretty much have to recreate higher quality assets. And that is painstaking work in order to recreate higher fidelity versions of what currently exists. You don’t want to move too far away from the original model designs where it completely changes the look and feel of the original. A smaller studio like Krafton’s Bluehole doesn’t have that level of resources and have to make calculated decisions; they went the modest incremental route taking lessons learned with developing ELYON (including the optimization work with extensions to the UE”3.5″ build). To date, they been addressing bugs in the 64-bit client and removed some of the rendering restrictions that were required with the older engine build. This has resulted in higher fidelity in some of the graphics in TERA.
They haven’t yet had time to focus on actual graphic enhancements and improvements (which the art production team wants to do but are being held back due to priorities). But the base difference was noticeable and much welcomed compared to before. It’s far from perfect but for a modest (to the player) upgrade, a much better playing experience. B&S’ experience with how they handled their UE4 upgrade (by focusing on ALL THE WRONG THINGS), resulted in players feeling like they were playing a slightly different game (and without the usual benefits one would expect moving to a newer engine).
This new “project” is what they should’ve been doing from the get go. I initially praised NCSoft for leading the way by moving all of their projects to UE4. But they’ve failed massively in the implementation of it. And they occasionally mention Project TL when asked about it during their financial calls; the info is often vague and target dates keep moving. Given how they mishandled B&S, I believe Project TL is much further off especially if they weren’t focusing on actual core game system designs and delivering something better than the original closed beta test from 2016 which ended up bare of content (not to mention, completely changed from what was shown at G-STAR 2014). I still stand by my assertion that they might as well stick a fork in it.
