Bioware, Neil Harris, and "HeroEngine"

With the recent news that the hotly anticipated Star Wars: The Old Republic would be built with and run on HeroEngine, many gamers weren't sure what to make of it. Neil Harris, Executive Vice President of Simultronics, was gracious enough to spend a few minutes chatting on the phone with me explaining what exactly the framework did.

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I'd love to see an MMO where the players can actually develop their own instances and build them directly into the game world. Environments and boss encounters developed by players, for players.
This would essentially be like building mods for an MMO, and would (theoretically):
a) Reduce the workload for the development team in creating new content,
b) Provide a greater variety of environments (there's only so many bloody Zul'[insert keyword] troll instances I can handle),
c) Allow direct player/designer feedback, and
d) Let the community create content with difficulty matching the target audience. The more "hardcore" guilds often complete endgame content before it's even reached the public test realms, yet your casual guilds will often miss out on a lot of the mid-level content. Blizzard's inclusion of the heroic raid option in Lich King was a great idea, letting casual guilds enjoy semi-endgame content, with aspirations of moving to a higher difficulty.

Bad idea. You'd get a thousand instances shaped like penises.

I remember meeting with Simutronics a few years back at E3. One of the goals things that most impressed me was the ability for their GMs to build events. If you have ever played one of their MUD games you know that the GMs put great amount of detail into any of the role-playing events they ran.

Watching them develop was pretty cool as well. It is an impressive engine for sure.

It does seem like an awesome engine, I read up on it a little. Seems a lot of the time-savers implemented in other high level editors (like unrealed, hammer, cryengine, etc) have finally made their way over to MMOs.

It's just sad I probably won't get to see how it works first hand :P

I think it sounds good. As long as they're not going to just use it all the time and get lazy in development, as that seems to be the danger with awesome engines.