Since it’s about to be the 20th Anniversary of WOW, has any thought been given to upgrading to something like the Unreal Engine (4 or 5)? Most computers now can play the game at 100FPS+… isn’t it time? 
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Could be cool, but I hope they keep it cartoony. It’s what drew me into the game in the first place.
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As a tech nerd, i’d love to see the entirety of WoW (including our characters, guilds, achievements etc) onto a more modern engine, i just don’t see Blizzard being willing to put that much money and effort into a game that has one foot in the grave. I’m not saying WoW is going to die anytime soon, it’s just that its best years are behind it and we’re in maintenance mode.
I must say, it hurts to play modern games on modern budget hardware and seeing how beautiful things can be, then you come back to WoW and it looks awful by comparison, plus it needs a pretty beefy PC to hold 60 FPS at ultra.
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need my pc to be able to handle it
I feel is generally overrated to a ridiculous degree that’s become synonymous with anything slightly resembling photorealism.
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Not to mention it’s unrealistic to expect people to have machines capable of running it. It would affect a significant amount of players.
You don’t keep releasing new expansions in maintenance mode.
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isnt going to happen as it would essentially require them to completely scrap the game and start over from scratch. you dont just upgrade graphic engine without rewriting every line of code and programming in the game.
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I think you vastly overestimate the potatoes many people play on
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Even if it could run great, I feel like it would be like asking for Pokemon Let’s Go Eevee to run on Unreal. Like, we all know that Warcraft is heavily stylized, right? Not even talking about the goofy shoulder pads, but the literal painted textures. On each blade of grass and the new skyboxes as you overlook the very top of Thaldrassus.
This game is literally art.
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It depends on how modular the code is written. Any major piece of software that has gone through this many major versions trying to keep up with hardware changes over this amount of time can get rather unwieldy.
And that’s true even if it is modular and well written from the start. If it started off as spaghetti code or even something in between, forget it.
Also, what ever development time goes into a change like that would mean minimizing what we see in the next release.
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They upgrade the WoW engine every expansion.
Why would they build the game from scratch onto a new engine?
To be fair, this is also the Unreal engine:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1138651714602410014/1149213768442724382/rainbow.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/906234294333218826/1155716700898086964/VAL_20230924_5.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/906234294333218826/1155717411245412392/VAL_20230831_4.png
That’s a game created by former WoW devs. And I’m still convinced it’s named Palia because of the Tuskaar village Pal’ea.
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I wasn’t meaning that it had to be that engine, it was just an example.
That’s a good point.
Yeah you do, it’s about maintaining the current state of affairs (meaning periodic patches/expansions), not stopping.
I’ve seen videos online showing the game in Unreal 4 & 5. I’m not saying that is the right way to go, but it’s beautiful.
You clearly don’t understand what “maintenance mode” is so here you go.
" A game in maintenance mode, then, is effectively the closest you get to a finished game in the MMO space. Generally speaking you can still expect seasonal events to run, even though they’re all familiar events at this point; you can expect the occasional technical patch and for everything to stay functional. All that remains unchanging is actual content. Once you have theoretically finished off the hardest content in the game, there’s nothing left to do and no hope for anything else to arrive."
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Keep in mind that’s not the game itself, just small sections rebuilt with it.
They’d have to rebuild WoW from the ground up. And there’s no way they’d stop using their own engine.
Given the context of this conversation, i said it in relation to the engine side of things, not necessarily to do with content. I simply meant that they’re not looking to spend massive amounts of resources on evolving the tech, what we have now is all we’re going to get pretty much.
Changing to the Unreal engine would be a downgrade, not an upgrade.
They do upgrade/update the engine with each expansion. That’s the benefits of using an inhouse engine versus renting from someone else. You get to make changes to it whenever you want.
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But even that doesn’t make sense. Because the engine is upgraded every expansion and has new tech to it.
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