Ember Sword's New Engine Could Be a Major MMORPG Game Changer | Interview

mmorpg.com:

With Ember Sword’s first group dungeon The Ultra Deep now laid bare for the public to scrutinize, Bright Star Studio’s has stood firm that they are willing to show a little vulnerability in favor of making progress. During my time at Bright Star Studios (BSS), I had the chance to speak with several of the developers, and while I still have more information on the way, today’s article will focus on one of the most enlightening conversations I had.

Joris Huijbregts, the Chief Development Officer and one of the Founders of the studio sat down with me so I could understand the team’s “groundbreaking” engine. In our conversation we touched on the innovation of their custom game engine, the power of asynchronous streaming, and building an engine that might one day revolutionize MMORPGs as we know them.

When I stepped into the room with Joris, what once looked to be an old recording studio, now retrofitted to be a dimly lit, cozy conference room, I felt more like I was walking into the lion’s den. After all, my previous tests with Ember Sword revealed a lack of performance with engine, resulting in some strange hiccups. However, Joris, having built the engine, knew many secrets that Ember Sword’s infrastructure held that would eventually shift my perspective, and he didn’t seem too worried when my first question alluded to the unimpressed assumption that the original vision was to essentially stream the game to players from a cloud server.

“The entire engine is built around asynchronous streaming,” Joris began. “Which basically means that, as you play the game, it kind of trickles in and loads things as you go. So, the way it works in Ember Sword is that, if you start walking in a certain direction, the game basically predicts