Hello Blizzard,
I have played since Vanilla Beta and I love the game. I had to stop for many years due to my bone cancer but I am back after a 6 year battle with cancer. I am permanently disabled now and can’t walk so my escape is WoW. So now that I am back I have noticed your game is showing it’s age. However if you just toss World of Warcraft through Unreal 5 then your game would feel super real and you would get millions of players back.
Unreal 5 would cost too much for them to use. The model is free to use, but royalty based if you make over a certain threshold. If the royalty also applies to subscriptions it would cost them even more. The royalty is 5% of gross sales after the game makes $1 million which could cost them millions of dollars which would apply to in-game purchases such as the store mounts, pets, and services.
Inb4 people come in confused between art style and graphics capability (there are UE games with a cartoony art style), and “something something super computer” (they can also have similar spec reqs as WoW)…
First, WoW doesn’t need to use UE5 or any other developer’s engine for that matter. It’s like Beef said - royalties; they used (as well as many other MMOs) their own in-house engines to avoid those costs. The biggest disadvantage is probably having to split between maintaining the engine itself and the game(s) running on them.
Second, even if they stick with an in-house engine, the effort in transitioning to a newer version remade from the ground up is a huge undertaking and may not be worth it when considering the waning interest in WoW and just MMOs as a whole.
Third, as nice as these technical demo/concept videos of WoW are under UE, it’s the reason why gamers have the incorrect notion that UE = realistic art style. UE can have a cartoony style and other engines can have a realistic style. Regardless, in the end, you have WoW players that want to stick with the cartoony style, regardless of the engine. People rather have a newer engine to have layered armor and detailed customizations, among other things.
I understand the possibilities a new engine can bring to WoW:
WoW remade under a better engine is probably the “WoW-2” everyone is talking about. It is just unfortunate they didn’t improve the WCIII engine enough for MMO use to have better character customization from the start. Perfect World, released in 2005, was regarded as having the best customization up until Blade and Soul because they had the body adjustments players want now, and PW didn’t use UE.
Ahh yes, let’s get rid of the iconic art style that WoW has been best known for, for photorealistic graphics that are so forgettable, that they might be another Triple AAA Open World game by Ubisoft for how it looks. /s
Not to mention, UE can also be played on normal computers as well. Source: Destroy All Humans 1 running on my AMD FX 6300 with GTX 1060 and only 16 gb of ram at 60fps at 1080p. It works very well on that (with the exception of the zapper weapon sound).
Heck, as we seen with Spyro, it can also be on the Switch (which is amazing considering the Switch is like a generation behind Xbox 1), and for GTA definitive edition (as bad that was) on Mobile too even.
You know, i don’t really get why people say they need a supercomputer when all you need is a smartphone to run the game apparently. 
To be fair, a lot of this can be done with the current engine, given how some of the features like the guild tabard maker (Though the colors are just sepperate textures) and some gear with 3D models can be expanded upon.
This post is spot on. WoW being remade in Unreal does not mean it’ll magically gain an unremarkably generic psuedorealistic art style.
Unreal could enable high degrees of detail, better lighting/shading, etc, but that’d be best used to reinforce the Warcraft art style.
The Switch is so hilariously weak, in terms of hardware it’s basically a midrange 2014/2015 Android phone. Just about any laptop or handheld you can buy today is more powerful, even many of the dirt cheap ones.
The majority of the players who play this game, do so on a potato. Doing what the OP ask would probably be the death of wow actually because it would cut out most of the player base.
welp… the art style of the video is not something that works for me. the animations used would look stupid…
Exactly! I play the MMO Dragon Raja on mobile and I was surprised to find out it runs on UE4.
I half agree. Agree on unreal 5 but if they would under take that much work don’t waste it on another iteration of a 20 year old mmorpg.
I STRONGLY think blizzard needs a new IP to build a modern mmorpg on . I don’t want it to have the slightest link to any of their current franchises no StarCraft no Warcraft no Diablo and for the love of God no silly over watch link either. New fresh ideas/lore and fresh game play. Couple that with unreal 5.
As nice as the graphics are, most people would quit playing simply because how much it would cost to get a PC that can handle this engine. WoWs graphics weren’t meant to be hyper realistic, they were meant to be cartoony.
Hello Fellow WoW people both agreers and nahsayers a like,
Just read what UR5 does. It can still produce cartoon graphics and allow you to play on a potato. It will make the lives of developers easier as the new thing with UR5 is more than 1 person can work on a file at the same time which increases productivity which for us means better expansions with more level of detail and oversite. Also while still having the cartoon look we can have trees that look like trees and grass that Moves as you step on it and bugs fly away as you step down. Lots can be run on the servers as well so your potatoes can enjoy the graphic increase. But this knowledge would mean you had to have read about what UR5 does to all systems not just one. It will simply give the cartoon appearance a better everything shading, texture, lighting, environment like grass, water, trees and sand. If you want higher end graphics then turn it up. But if your someone who buys potatoes for computers you might think about getting a job or three and save up to buy a better computer. Before I was permanently disabled due to Bone Cancer I was an IT Director and in the IT world for 20+ years. What you do is this. But the high end or one step down mother board. But don’t buy the high end graphics card. Just but the model below or two models below to save money. Then buy high end power supply, memory, fans, case items like cdrom or whatever, buy at least an SSD for windows then whatever you want as back up and a second SSD to run just your game. Then about 4-6 years later but a high end graphics card and replace your old one in the machine. This will also give you a space graphics card if you break the one you just bought. If you want you can also replace the memory and/or get more. As your CPU should last 10+ years. Upgrading the graphics card is really all you should need to do for 8-12 years. This is why you never go cheap with the motherboard, CPU, CPU goo, CPU fan, Power supply and case. Because then you only have to replace a graphics card once and your computer will game for 10-12 years easily.
But if you truly enjoy potatoes then good for you. But companies don’t have to pander to potatoes this is why their is a minimum requirements on games.
um… did you see the video OP posted? no potato will run that
so why incur the cost of porting the engine and scale the game down so it can run on a potato? the current in house engine does that already
I fully agree with the OP and IMPO, I think that wow’s GFX engine should get a major overhaul at least once every ten years.
I’ve seen a lot of comments on that video saying that they would come back to wow if the graphics looked that good or similar. Graphics don’t make a game, but a game makes graphics.
At least For DF, Blizz should consider adding optional settings for ray-traced reflections and HDR.