You’d spend more money fixing their engine than it would take to pay them licensing fees and royalties.
People who swear by UE5 are the Tom Brady fans of game engines. They see the 60 yard pass highlights and think “what an explosive player!” then ignore his 30+ check-downs every, single game. It works. But it’s boring artistically. All the colors are muted or darkened to the extreme in shadows and it makes your game look eerie or dark.
UE5 is a good engine. But there’s a big reason why artists tend to not render custom assets with it. Without a bunch of tweaking, it transforms their art negatively. So they stick with visuals from Blender or ZBrush. Rarely do you see UE5 images on artstation profiles.
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Please let’s not. I don’t need WoW to look like every other game.
I think it would mostly come down to licensing fees and changing code that works for their game. Which means you would have to have multiple versions of UE. So, it’s easier for a game company to just build their own engine so that it’s easier to change code and not pay out a fee.
Besides the last rebuild that I am aware of was Cataclysm where they added flying to old world content as well as revamps for a bunch of zones. Might have been more after that but I left because of MoP announcement, as EQ just put out their own Asian theme just before it.
Coder here - while it partially depends on how they’ve implemented things between game <-> engine, it would still take a longggg time. Major changes make a lot of things break, fixing those breaks then breaks other things in turn, etc.
It would be a lot less work for Blizzard to change how things are currently rendered than to try switching to UE5, and even then I don’t think with the current visual style that they’re aiming for Thrall to have photorealistic pores at all.
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Well i hope you’re ready to spend 5k+ on a computer to run it @ 10 FPS
WoW can be ran on potatoes and that’s a big positive for it. Anyone can pick up any rando office PC and do stuff. Can legit pick up an old HP off the street and raid. Sure it might be at 10 fps but I think many of us have been there with regards to WoW.
One of the main reason. Money. Using your own engine you dont have to pay per use. Meanwhile UE5 you do when reaching a certain point
yep what is it about 1million or something like that
don’t know how epic has it set up
no, you’d have to re-write each asset individually.
I couldnt say for Epic. But I mean 5% of each 1M in royalty can get up quite fast.
Maybe they managed to have a diff deal or something that Blizzard couldnt get. Or they make so much money they dont even care
I think Blizzard only aims to optimize and push its current engine to its limits, and then leave it there. WoW is what it is.
Highly unlikely WoW will merge into Unreal Engine 5. In fact, if I recall correctly, WoW uses it’s own engine
No, not really. BDO uses UR5, and a large amount of players in 1 area isn’t really add that bad actually.
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I run wow on a box with an GTX 1080 driving three monitors (2x 1080, 1x 4k) and I get 50-70fps in raids, on linux no less. Maybe raytracing is killing you, or your cpu is anemic.
But to the topic here - Warcraft has a distinctive artistic style that really doesn’t lend itself to high resolution environments. Maybe Warcraft 2.0 will be different, but I can see no advantage to investing a massive amount of work into a port of their code to UE5. Not to mention Blizzard would never pay licensing fees for someone elses game engine when they already have their own.
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unreal engine 4 is at the end if it’s life cycle and it’s still garbage engine that even AAA games can’t perform or look well on it, unless it’s game from Epic itself.
UE5 hasn’t even been explored enough to think about something like this