Why The Elder Scrolls Online Isn’t Using HeroEngine

Our readers might remember that ZeniMax Online licensed HeroEngine four years ago, making it easy to assume that The Elder Scrolls Online is powered by the same engine as Star Wars: The Old Republic. However, going by a recent GameInformer Q&A, it appears that the MMO set in Tamriel will utilize its own proprietary engine, while the HeroEngine was simply used to initially prototype features:

You licensed HeroEngine a long time ago. What role did the Hero Engine play in the development of ESO?

We started ZeniMax Online from scratch, with no employees and no technology. We had to build everything ourselves. It takes a long time to write game engines, especially MMO engines, which are inherently more complicated than typical single-player ones. So, we decided to license the HeroEngine to give us a headstart. It was a useful tool for us to use to prototype areas and game design concepts, and it provided us the ability to get art into the game that was visible, so we could work on the game’s art style. Our plan is for ESO to be a world class MMO, with the most advanced social features found in any MMO to date so while we were prototyping the game on HeroEngine, we were simultaneously developing our own client, server, and messaging layer that were specifically designed with ESO in mind. Think of HeroEngine as a whiteboard for us a great tool to get some ideas in the game and start looking at them while the production engine was in development.

What were your project’s needs that drove your decisions as to which pieces of tech to use?

When you’re creating something this big and complex, writing your own engine makes debugging and new feature creation far easier. Also, our plan is to have ESO run on just about any PC or Mac laptops included that have been bought in the last five years. Of course the better your computer’s graphics capability, the better the game looks, but we want to be sure that just about anyone can play the game and have a great time exploring Tamriel. Because of this, we needed to write our engine to be versatile enough to add or cut back on graphical features based on the user’s hardware. To do this, we had to write our own renderer with our own shaders.