WoW's engine just can't keep up with the expectations of people in 2023

Community General Discussion
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When asked in an interview about the possibility of WoW 2, Ion H. said that they plan to keep WoW going for the foreseeable future with no design plans on a WoW 2. That being said, people are talking in droves about how the game just breaks down with any decent amount of people for world events.

If Blizzard truly thinks people are going to stay for an engine that should have been retired ages ago, they are sadly mistaken. Also, I think it’s dishonest to charge people a premium and delivery them an old used car like WoW’s engine really is.

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With Phil Spencer saying he wants as many people on as many platforms playing WoW as possible, I imagine one of the first things R&D at Microsoft will put money and time towards will be expediting World of Warcraft’s considerable back catalogue of hand painted 2D assets to a digital medium and new engine.

Even ESO has upgraded its tech specs in the past, and it’s older than WoW by just barely a hair.

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WoW will go f2p before it even thinks about dying. Or at least they’ll expand the f2p greatly like FF14 did.

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ESO came out 10 years after WoW…

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What are you even talking about

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WoW feels better and smoother to play than literally any other MMO I’ve touched.

When I go back and play classic, it genuinely blows my mind that they have turned that fossil into what I’m playing today.

The engine is fine. Like, I feel like the people working on it deserve literally all the money in the world for modernizing it and making it what it is today.

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ESO is not older than wow.

You might be thinking of eq2?

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They’ve been upgrading the engine over time. Trying to use a new engine would require remaking the whole game, which will never happen.

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I don’t know what happened in the culture that led to the layman knowing, vaguely, what a game engine is, and what Unreal is, but whoever caused that to happen deserves so much crap.

Nothing is more exhausting than the folks who act like you just copy and paste WoW into Unreal 5 and suddenly it’s gonna be so awesome!

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WoW uses a modified version of the WC3 engine, and up till recently all the armor and stuff we wear as well as the models themselves used as skeletons were texture maps with painted on art designs and assets. In short… WoW isn’t 3D rendered. This is one reason why: it takes longer, we can’t have things like sliders because the skeletons are preset, etc.

I think so yes.

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How many people do you think are bothering to look into how old the back-end tech engine for a game is before they play it? Because I’d bet the actual number is lower than that. By a lot.

Nobody cares when the game engine was created, they care how the game looks. And WoW looks fine compared to its contemporaries. Even if it didn’t - they can upgrade models without re-making the engine. They’ve done it before.

WoW 2 is never going to happen. You even have it on paper now. Get over it.

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Texture mapping is common in pretty much all games. It’s very weird of you to frame it as this ancient, archaic, “hand-drawn” practice.

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This is true.

Classic is unplayable for me as even with… questionable decisions on retail, the game runs far better, looks better, and feels better.

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I’m 99% sure virtually everyone posting about WoW’s engine has no idea what that actually means.

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Not true. I know exactly what folks are talking about. It’s super simple.

You just open up the code, have some nerd write some new lines and there! A brand new game!

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Well, you see, a game engine is like the internet; it’s essentially a series of tubes…

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WoW 2 would be a disaster, and here’s why:

Sequel MMOs don’t work out for the simple reason of the sunk cost. No one is going to move onto WoW 2 when all their stuff and years of progress are in WoW 1. This happened with Maple Story, this happened with Everquest. Everquest 1 is still going while Everquest 2 is dead, same deal with Maple Story. Guild Wars 2 doesn’t count because it’s not an MMO, neither was Guild Wars 1.

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I really hope they FF14 it.

And by that, I mean destroy Azeroth, perhaps literally.

And give it a complete rework, with a different philosophy in mind.

One about replayability, and fun rather than RNG. More sandbox elements in places, like housing.

Evergreen content, like if Timewalking was up forever, and new rewards that rotate in and out, so people would be doing them constantly.

No more Zaralek Caverns type stuff.

It wouldn’t really be a WoW 2 like FF14 wasn’t a sequel to itself, but a major overhaul nonetheless.

WoW is pretty solid, but I’d love a reason to keep ALL of the continents relevant and not just one at a time.

Also, more cities than just SW and Org.

Imagine if the others had portal rooms, people would spread out more often.

Maybe merge several servers as well, boost the remaining population as well.

There’s a bunch of ideas they could do, that are major adjustments, without a WoW 2 or without changing WoW’s combat nor removing old content people enjoyed. (And if they did, we could go back in time like we do with Zidormi in Blasted Lands, Arathi, etc.)

Or rather, maybe they just need to de-Cataclysm EK and Kalimdor, because they are stuck in stasis.

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When they’re talking about it like you can just create a new one overnight, I’m over 9000% sure they have no idea what that means.

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