Originally posted by muffins89
World of Warcraft. [mod edit]

One side of WoW that I do find impressive is the integration of instancing, phasing, and cross server dungeons combined with the back-side databases that drive it all.  Especially given the scale on which the datacenters operate.

Although not part of the rendering engine itself, the C/S environment and communications are part of the greater MMO framework.

I'm of the opinion that WoW's rendering side has always been a bit behind the times.  Shader water introduced in 2010?  Even the engine I work with (an el-cheapo) had it since 2007.

Engine is one thing, but to me, things on how the UI and controls are implemented count as well. It's a whole package, and not only one thing....

For the Engine alone I'd say TERA because of it's well done implementation ot the U3 engine. But when I look at how the UI works, I think it's a sucky one. Same would go for FFXIV. Engine is very well done (what are they using BTW), yet the UI is garbage.

Looking at the whole package as I described above, I'd say Lineage II (mentioned before). Large scale raids & sieges are possible with limited lag (unless you battle against waler using clans...), UI is very well, and controls with point & click allow you to type-chat during all moments of the game.

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by DavisFlight

DAoC or Darkfall, easily.

No other MMO engine has been able to handle so many people on screen at once.

I can immediately think of three Lineage 2, Aika, Conquer Online. There's probably others, as well.

 

Edit: As to the original question, I couldn't begin to guess how many different sets of criteria everyone here is probably using to arrive at their answers. I can't say which might be the best, but I do know one that I'd really like to get my hands on, the Asheron's Call engine.

Heh, no. None of those had 600 people fighting in the same spot at the same time in a zoneless instanceless realm.

Can show more pics (and movies) of Lineage II where 600+ players are in a siege for one of the major castles....

Originally posted by DavisFlight

In Darkfall, no zones, no instances, no loading screens, real time FPS combat. The engine is above and beyond ANYTHING else.

 

Would love to know what kind of drugs AV is shipping these darkfall fanbois.  It must be soemthing powerful to make them this  mindlessly obedient.

Originally posted by CalmOceans

Engines that are optimised and run well and look good, for me,

FFXIV is really nice, espcially how they render vegetation, it's really pretty imo:

Vindictus is really nice for the animations

I actually though that the Vanguard engine was really good too, it crashed, yes, it had bugs yes, but it looked so good.

 

planetside 2 is horrendous lol

Actually the texture quality took a sharp drop in ff14 2.0. Probally because the game had to be dumbed down for ps3 players, kinda like how the ps2 was holding ff11 back from being improved graphically. A semi-decent gaming rig today has more power than a ps3 does. in v1.0 of ff14 you could Zoom in on your chars clothes and see every little strand of thread, that has been removed in favor of lower res textures. Mind you the game still looks better than anything else on the market atm. Id not bother with lineage eternal myself, since its the same boring grind garbage lineage 2 is, just in a prettier wrapper.

My vote goes to SWTOR using the Hero engine.

Lol.

Originally posted by DavisFlight

DAoC or Darkfall, easily.

No other MMO engine has been able to handle so many people on screen at once.

In Darkfall, no zones, no instances, no loading screens, real time FPS combat. The engine is above and beyond ANYTHING else.

 

Planetside 2 is pretty damn impressive too.

To bad darkfall and Planetside 2 are both shit games. Also dark age of camelot wants to talk to you, i've been in battles with 1000 players on screen and it was fluid. DAoC is a better game than darkfall can ever hope to be. Darkfall has load times trust me, they just use a streaming system to hide the load screens, it probally starts loading once you get near the area's border. Darkfall could be good if it would remove the player char looting on any death part, if they removed that, they would get far more people interested. I just find having to replace stuff every death to be a pain in the ass, and a unneeded part of the game. It just wastes my time having to replace gear all the time, and it would also make me not want to bother with pvp really.

The so called hardcore pvp crowd are mostly greifers that like to camp noobs due to the fact they cannot handle a fair fight. I see it all the time in these types of games. There is very VERY few of them that are really pvper's because ganking someone who has no chance to fight back is not a pvp fight, its just a pve fight bascally.

Originally posted by Aelious
I would choose the smoothest engine that looks good with a lot people are on the screen. I'd also vote for the broadest toolset.

For now I'd say it's the Forgelight engine even though they are working the bugs. You can have a lot of people fighting at the same time in a huge persistent world. It also has a built in physics engine and great atmospheric graphics and lighting. For those with good rigs check your config file to turn the graphics up higher than you can in game.

I like your quote Aelious, sadly reduce 3 weeks down to 1 week, because thats how long it takes the average mmo player to hit cap in a mmo. Some people can do it in 3 days.

Definately Darkfall - sweet looking world - awesome atmosphere.

Vanguard would be my next one for the same reasons

CryEngine 3 is really impressive - look at Warface on max settings... It's sick.

At Pax I had a chance to play Defiance (upcoming Trion 3rd person shooter) the engine is silky smooth, was VERY impressed how good it was for alpha, and its their own engine too from what they told me.

To this day I still feel that Blizzard has created an amazing engine w/ what they are able to do in WoW.  Yes, it's dated but as far as pure movement/responsiveness it's #1 in my opinion.

MMO - Planetside 2

MMORPG - TSW's DreamWorld engine.

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by DavisFlight

DAoC or Darkfall, easily.

No other MMO engine has been able to handle so many people on screen at once.

I can immediately think of three Lineage 2, Aika, Conquer Online. There's probably others, as well.

 

Edit: As to the original question, I couldn't begin to guess how many different sets of criteria everyone here is probably using to arrive at their answers. I can't say which might be the best, but I do know one that I'd really like to get my hands on, the Asheron's Call engine.

Heh, no. None of those had 600 people fighting in the same spot at the same time in a zoneless instanceless realm.

Ignorance at its finest. Lineage 2 had no real limitations like that, the world was seamless and allowed for 600 players or such to fight at one spot without instances. The same also goes for EVE Online so maybe next time you should look up facts before making claims.

I used to lead a smaller clan in L2 with and even for raids we had a lot of people showing up to fight the other clans:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMTmykoLLdA

On topic though, Unreal Engine is amazing but you need the full license sadly (not the UDK) meaning smaller developers aren't able to push out projects with more than 64 players in the game. Other than that it's simply amazing IMO, always been always will. :)

Well if were basing on which engine is better by what game runs the smoothest than WoW is the winner. Lets be honest no mmorpg runs better or smoother than that.

I really do like the Cryengine though... I can seem to run most games with that engine pretty well.

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Originally posted by Roxtarr
To this day I still feel that Blizzard has created an amazing engine w/ what they are able to do in WoW.  Yes, it's dated but as far as pure movement/responsiveness it's #1 in my opinion.

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Have to agree, All round wow has a great mmorpg engine, Is scales well now with players, Zoning technology is excelent, and an array of features that has been added over the past 8 years.

The graphics system is but 1 facet of an Game Engine, and here were talking about mmorpg engines which require a much greater level of complexity with their networking implementation.

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Eve online

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