How is it that World of Warcraft is one of the most popular MMORPGs, yet it does not offer the same basic features that modern MMORPGs do?
For example, most of the top MMORPGs offer things such as:
In-depth character customization with sliders
Player housing
Character idle poses
Armor dyeing
Body markings/tattoos
But WoW offers none of these things. It feels like an old game, and that’s probably because it is an old game, but the thing is is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Blizzard is and has been an industry titan for decades, they have the funds and developers to create these things, but they have not. Why? It seems to me that the answer is that they don’t care enough/don’t have the drive to be competitive in the MMORPG scene anymore. They are comfortable and making enough money from World of Warcraft in it’s current, outdated state so they have no incentive to be competitive and add features that other MMORPGs have had for over a decade. There is no excuse for it. “The engine can’t handle it”? Okay? Then upgrade the engine? Do what has to be done to make WoW hold up it’s weight in comparison to modern MMOs.
I can’t be the only one that isn’t very hyped for The War Within, right? From the features we’ve been told thus far, who really cares and is excited? Okay so we get new dungeons, new zones, a raid, an allied race, account-wide rep and transmog etc… sure, these are good, but they’re all relatively low hanging fruit? We progress through the new zones, level up, do some dungeons, perhaps try out the new raid, blah blah… but where is something of substance and creativity? It just seems like the same old stuff to me. How about an entire overhaul of the character customization system to give us a level of customization that other MMOs have had for over a decade? How about give us the ability to dye armor? Would it be a technical and graphical effort to do so? Absolutely it would. But would Blizzard be able to truly say that World of Warcraft is an MMO which can compare in depth to other modern MMOs afterwards? Yes.
WoW’s level of features are still very much stuck in the early 2010s. The game is beginning to show it’s age, and it’s time to stop making excuses for this.
This is far more technical than you can even imagine. The entire game would have to be recoded to work with a dye system. That’s not a joke either. Everything in the game uses the same system that armor does.
This is what a Dwarf looks like behind the scenes: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ECaqSmkXsAETajn.jpg
Every piece of gear, tree, building, character model, weapon, ground, EVERYTHING looks like this behind the scenes.
Will they do it eventually? Maybe??? It’s hard to say, because it’s a huge undertaking and would best be suited for a new release than a revamp of a 20 year old game.
I can’t post links for some reason like I used to be able to for the past few years, so you’ll have to copy/paste instead.
Wow is an old game that came out in 2004 which means it was build on 2000 technology. It’s a massive piece of code. Retrofitting all of those things would be a major development effort.
Second Life came out about the same time and Linden Labs did retrofit a lot of those kinds of things but then Linden Labs doesn’t have to worry about content because that’s the job of the “members” (i.e. the players).
For them to do that type of rewrite here would mean that two or more years go by and we would still be doing dragonflight.
No doubt, it absolutely would be a technical and graphical effort as I mentioned. But I don’t underestimate Blizzard for the simple reason that they are an industry titan with billions of dollars behind them. If anyone can undertake such a challenge, who better than them?
WoW is nearly 20 years old so I wouldn’t expect much. For a comparison, the FF14 developers gave a more in depth discussion on their graphical overhaul at FanFest and it’s kind of nuts just how much they had to do just to pull it off and that game is half the age of WoW lol.
It doesn’t have to be that way, either. Create a separate team that focuses solely upon making WoW a modern MMO, don’t focus the main dev team on it. They have the money to do this. They have the resources and pull to do this.
And why would they spend that money on a team to rebuild WoW’s graphics to your satisfaction rather than a team to make more raids, or a team to create new continents, or a team to make OW2 not suck (well, that might be out of reach), or even a team to make a whole different game?
The fact that Blizzard has resources doesn’t mean they have unlimited resources, they have to spend them in places that make sense.
Dude. Not just an effort. They’d have to pour years into just that alone. Think about everything you’ve ever seen in WoW. All of that stuff would have to be altered, possibly remodeled to work with a multi-layered texture system. We’re not even talking about the toll it would take on graphics cards. WoW runs on a lot of systems precisely because it’s not a complicated setup. You’d alienate a good portion of players that don’t have the best CPU and GPUs that play now. It’s a lot of work for a payoff that might lose subscribers because they can’t play anymore.
The treadmill players constantly say that these features are irrelevant and a waste of resources even though their recycled M+/raiding/pvp season requires almost no resources to set up.
Oh sorry the new raid that has the same 10 recycled fights still requires an amount of set up, I forgot that part.
They want to do the edgy badass “stand with your arms folded” pose from FF14.
That’s all this post is really, “why isn’t this game like FF14?” And the answer is because instead of spending money on meaningless fluff like FF14 does, they spent it on good gameplay.
Well, and they spent some of it on vulpera but that’s neither here nor there.