Update the game engine

Community General Discussion
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Engine is fine gas is always better then electric

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42

What would be the newest game engine? Something like Unreal Engine would cost millions in licensing fees.

Currently, the game is running on the newest WOW Game Engine. They just built on top of the Warcraft III engine and then update it as time goes on.

Switching engines brings up cost and return on investment. Would such an undertaking actually make more money or is it throwing money away?

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43

Don’t worry, Microsoft is probably having the sentient AI they hide in their basement create a new game engine that any of their absorbed studios can use for upcoming projects.

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Azeroth (WoW 2)

I’d play as long as I could capture the basic look of these gobby girls.

And it has to have all of the old places that we’ve already been through opened up (I’m talking BC, Draenor, etc).

Set however many years in the future.

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Updating an engine isn’t really that simple. You can’t just swap it out for a new one, unplug the old one out and plug the new one in.

But the truth of it is, WoW has received multiple updates to its game engine. Could you imagine skyriding in 2004? Dynamic vehicle controlling? Housing with fully customizable objects?

The reason there’s so many bugs these days are twofold.

  1. No QA
  2. It’s simply a huge game that has been going for 20 years. Touching one thing might break 10 other unrelated things.
47

If there was a new engine like 80% would quit cuz they wont be able to run the game

48

Ooops, good point. Someone should tell Ion and the team to flip the new engine switch.

You do realize how massive an undertaking it is doing this, right? And chances are they are already doing that. Lots of folks in the WoW community are already assuming this is what is happening.

Preach made a video pointing out that it’s kinda been happening. Upgrading the base backpack? Should have been impossible, it was very hard coded into the game (and in fact when they did update it, a lot of the game broke that patch. Unrelated or not, its assumed that there is relation as that patch was VERY broken) Dragon Riding? Should have been impossible on a technical standard. They found a way to make it work. Player housing should have been possible but as we are finding out, somehow someone (probably multiple someones) found a way to make it work even though it shouldn’t have.

So a lot of people are thinking that right now Blizzard is slowly rebuilding the engine.

On top of that, a lot of changes happening recently (Addition of proper controller support, One Button Rotation coming, restriction of addons like DBM/WA in the near future, announcement that as a result of addon pruning they will be simplifying content/combat encounters) really leans towards possible console port (I know I know, we have heard people claim this for years) in the future. If that is the case, they will need to rebuild the game in a way that consoles could handle.

There is no concrete proof of any of this but all signs point towards the base engine is being updated, a sort of “WoW2” in a way by updating the 20 year old engine. But it’s not going to happen over night. The current assumptions are that there will be a major overhaul after The Last Titan that gets put into play.

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Simply put, all their existing game assets are not coded for that engine. Essentially this would be utterly recreating the game from scratch. Plus, of course the cost of licensing the newer game engine when the existing one is all theirs for no additional cost. You ready to pay 60+ USD a month for your request to be filled?

50

What it’s not just rearranging a bunch of 1s & 0s???

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I’m not sure anymore :clown_face:

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  1. The engine HAS been updated. 10 times since launch. It’s updated every expansion.

  2. Unreal is not an MMO engine. Recreating empty “realistic” version of WOW zones in Unreal is not the same thing. It’s not even apples and oranges, it’s apples and tuna. Those “realistic” zone renderings have no players. No mobs. No quests. No gear. No players. Because Unreal is not an MMO engine and can’t do those things.

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Even Oblivion Remastered still uses it’s old engine for the code and game itself and only uses Unreal for the graphics update in this weird Frankenstein meshing of two engines.

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UE5 would require Blizzard to pay 5% of revenue to Epic in perpetuity. The engine is only royalty free for for the first $1 Million in sales. Something WOW achieved in the first few minutes it was available for sale back in 2004.

If I was on the management team, this would be a very big turn off in switching. Especially with what would probably be millions in development costs.

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Because they want as many people to play as possible and that would shut out a lot of people with older PCs.

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Yep, also UE5 is horrendously inefficient, and games running on it often look worse than games from 10 years ago. There has been a lot of discussion about how new games are looking worse because of it.

Most high end GPU’s are running new games at 720p or 1080p at maximum and having to use upscaling just because of how inefficient things are getting.

57

They wouldn’t shut it down.

If they were to redo the engine. They’d basically make a whole new game in the background while the current wow continues to chug along.

But the amount of work it would take, they’d be better off making wow2 vs redoing the engine from the ground up lol.

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58

Actually, :nerd_face:, it is running a few MMO’s

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59

They do, every expansion. It’s why the system requirements go up.

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60

No, also i don’t think it will actually work. Was saying it tongue in cheek