How Amazon's 'Lumberyard' Engine Will Improve the Indie MMORPG Scene

[eyecantseeover24fps]

http://deliddedtech.com/2016/02/10/amazons-free-lumberyard-engine-helps-indie-developers-create-mmorpgs/

 

Quote

Amazon seeks to reduce the barrier of creating online games by providing an engine for creating multiplayer games with ease, as well as utilizing their AWS service for hosting servers. This allows developers to focus on designing & building their game, rather than worrying about the challenges of creating an MMORPG engine, and maintaining the infrastructure for hosting a game that will be played by millions of players.

 

We've seen the announcement of Amazon's Lumberyard, but few sites seem to expand upon how much potential it has to be used to create MMORPGs. Most tend to focus on the graphical element of it, which is based on Cryengine. I personally look forward to seeing smaller companies make unique MMORPGs with Lumberyard. It's support for integration with AWS and Gamelift makes it very easy for small development teams to produce and release MMORPGs without requiring a dedicated team for infrastructure, and producing both a server and client.

[Yog]

That seems cool. Depending on how easy it is to use their servers it almost turns MMORPG creation into just RPG creation...could be an interesting time to be a gamer.

[Doobeedoo]

Good thing as far as ease of use without need for dedicated team for needed infrastructure. Let's see who does it first now.

[silberdrachi]

Kind of a cool idea because there is an immense amount of work to get multiplayer systems up and running. This leaves a lot more time to spend on improvements to gameplay or story. The only question though is how many of these "indie" MMOs will actually be worth playing for more than a month or two. I guess time will have to tell on that.

[ivan134]

Indie MMO

Nothing about this sounds appealing. I hope I'm pleasantly surprised, but I won't hold my breath.

[PerfectTemplar]

7 hours ago, ivan134 said:

Indie MMO

Nothing about this sounds appealing. I hope I'm pleasantly surprised, but I won't hold my breath.

MMO has lost a lot of it's meaning in past years. It went from meaning a hugely persistent open world to basically any game that has multiplayer and RPG mechanics that is popular.

 

 

For example, people consider DayZ,  and Destiny an MMO lol.

[Misanthrope]

So it will "improve" things by making it even easier to produce crap games on an already overly saturated market?

 

That's not an improvement, that's the opposite spectrum of improving things.

[That Norwegian Guy]

Written by a layman, obviously.

 

Anyone who has worked with CryEngine knows it has the absolutely most horrific spaghetti netcode you'll ever see in an AAA engine. So bad, that it took Cloud Imperium Games an extra year to weed it out with 240 employees. But their branch of CryEngine is separate from this one, and I severely doubt the Lumberyard team has had the foresight to put THAT much resources into it.

 

In fact I guarantee you that the most you'll see out of this engine for the foreseeable 3-4 years is standard shooters and maybe survival games with lobbies and no real persistency. Max player count per instance 24-30.

 

No good MMO will come of this engine unless it becomes an industry standard in short time.