Ahahahaha. No. The heat death of the universe would happen before they ever write a new engine. Blizzard, even before Activision, had a cost to benefit analysis applied to everything they did and they wouldn’t do something if the return didn’t outweigh the cost significantly enough. At the current point in time they won’t even do proper QA anymore and push unfinished things on the paying customers to test for them instead.
Expecting them to spend millions and millions over the course of several years to write a new engine for an already existing game that’s raking in money hand over fist? That’s not happening, ever.
I think eventually, and I am speaking over the course of a decade. They will be forced to… I expect them to be kicking and screaming up to that point though and I get why. I know how massive a undertaking it is.
It would be easier to simply split the game in two but other mmos have proven that is kind of death.
No, QA used to be much, MUCH better. There’s a huge difference these days. Bugs will always exist, and even when you’ve done extensive testing things will be revealed when the scale of users increases exponentially. There’s only so many situations you can test for in an in-house environment. However for a long time now Blizzard basically pushes things out the door the moment something half-functions, and it breaks not only itself but a mass amount of other things.
QA costs time and money. In today’s video game market management sees this as unacceptable. Nothing but a waste that slows down how fast people can spend money on something. So we get to pay for the privilege of being their QA.
Nah, I think games in general just used to be much smaller in scope. Projects now are so massive that it’s pretty much impossible to release without significant bugs existing.
And even back then bugs would persist. QA can’t do the magical job we want it to, and it’s time to stop pretending so we can be outraged by jobs losses that were redundant.
It’s not just “projects are too massive.” It’s rushed development. Former Blizzard employees have mentioned this. DF was launched in a hideously buggy state. So was Wrath Classic. What do both have in common? Activision pushed Blizzard to release them ASAP. That comes straight from the mouth of a former employee who worked on them.
120 true in game FPS or 120 AFMF FPS? Because I can get 60-70 true in game FPS in Valdrakken, double that with AFMF with a slight latency increase.
But that’s not the point, why I am I able to get 250+ in game FPS outside of Valdrakken and 200 less inside? That’s the problem, and that’s what needs to be sorted by Blizzard.
It because of players. Your CPU is the main source of render when it comes to players. When you enter Valdraken, there are players not only you can see in the courtyard but also hidden in the buildings, especially where the target dummies are.
You cpu handles them, their actions, syncing them in time to you all kinds of things are happening. Thats why your frames drop.
Thats why when you are out and about, you get 200 to 300 fps but as soon as you enter valdraken, as soon as players start getting rendered, it tanks.
Wow uses an old, non-gpu optimized system that until they develop a new game, will continue to suck.
The motto of “Agile” is that “perfect is the enemy of good”.
The main idea is to release something sooner even if half-baked over a fully functional and polished product much later in the pipeline.
There are merits to both approaches, and in the specific case of live service games, I can see why they’d opt for pushing it sooner, but there should be a better cutoff point than the mess we have now.
“1 year of SoO” may be too much for some people (not me), but a 4 month beta is way too little (doubly so when most feedback AND bug reports are largely ignored, as usual).
They need to better divide their team between:
current patch
next patches of the current expansion
side events and SoD
classic updates
future expansions
What we’re seeing now is not only a messed up, no QA dev culture, but it’s a LOT of mismanagement, probably due to the home office and layoffs fiasco.
Personally, I think DEI policies might have some impact in there too, as they have in my actual work, but I can’t be sure of how much.
Back on topic, I think a engine rewrite/swap should have been in the works for over a decade now, and the lack of such endeavor is just further proof of mismanagement.
I also believe they never expected WoW to last this long.
Sure, it’s fine for me to, my point is fine should no longer be acceptable. Having a 200 FPS drop from just stepping into a major city or populated area is quite silly for a 20 year old game.
Fine for most people from what I gather are people doing just that, running minimal graphics on low settings due to them running a 6 year old CPU.
Which in a way is fine, it’s amazing the game can still run at all on older PC’s and I guess it’s one of the very few times I will ever give Blizzard credit for anything these days, but it’s far from acceptable.
Cpu: amd 5800x3d
Ram: 32 gb 3600 cl-14
Motherboard: asus rog strix b550
Gpu: 4070ti super
Drives :2 nvmes, one for OS one for games.
Cooling :arctic freezer 2 360 aio.
Psu: thermaltake gf3 850 gold
Case: nzxt h7 flow with all lian li fans
Windows 11
Main Monitor is Alienware 27" 1440 p 240 hrtz (over clockable to 280hrtz) second monitor is an asus tuf 1440p 144 hrtz 27"
And the psychotic thing about this is that you will have morons in the replies gaslighting you saying that you’re magically playing on a potato machine despite what you just said.
They will never address this problem, they literally do not care. The tech industry doesn’t get money if things are working as intended either.
That’s because people run the game ‘fine’ on an older machine and don’t care when you point this out as being the issue:
That is far from fine. I’m happy potatos can run this game, but in no way should a 12th gen Intel or equivalent AMD with an almost current gen GPU be dropping that much FPS for any reason.
You only really need a steady 60FPS, with low input lag to play WOW just fine. Yeah, it is little smoother at 100+ FPS, but not that noticeable and will still dip in big fights, or Valdrakken or Emerald Dream. This game also runs on an older engine that is not really optimized for multi-core CPUs, so Intel is better since Intel CPUs have better single-core performance.
And of course I have to add, NVIDIA GPUs are superior.