The company intends to upgrade to Unreal Engine 4 for improved rendering speeds and all around higher performance. The engines Physical Based Rendering (PBR) will also bring improved real time visuals.
The last time I played B&S, it gave me a very strong reminder of how much FPS drops exist even in uncrowded hub cities. The move to UE4 will help with some of the rendering struggles.
It’s obvious that their rework of Project TL (formerly Lineage Eternal) with moving from UE3 to UE4 is bearing fruit/a working production pipeline. This is also going to put these two titles visually ahead of every other Korean MMO and if properly optimized, also offer performance heads and shoulders above every other Korean MMO that is deployed on UE3.
Bluehole’s TERA is one title that would benefit from UE4 but would still require custom optimization (something which never comes across as high priority for this company). PUBG Corp (formerly Bluehole Ginno) uses UE4 for PUBG but can’t optimize that to save their life. I actually doubt Bluehole will invest upgrading the engine for TERA anyway since they had a chance to do that when doing the console version.
They could have done the same with Ascent: Infinite Realm but they wanted to make an announcement on the coattails of PUBG’s success last year. While that uses a later build of UE3 (compared to the one they used for TERA which lacked some of the enhancements to better handle non-FPS titles), rendering still suffers greatly when there are a lot of assets on screen.
Project TL was effectively the only title on the horizon that I was looking forward to (which says a lot since I’m not a huge fan of NCSoft). Lost Ark’s development cycle is pushing any western release into the 2019-2020 timeframe (at which point, it’s UE3 engine is going to be outdated especially if NCSoft does Project TL’s visuals and gameplay correctly; a big IF considering how many times this game has been iterated pre-beta). This upgrade of B&S to UE4 has me even more interested since it’s a leap of taking an existing game and bringing its foundation forward.
