why doesn’t WoW keep up with the times when it comes to their game engine? I watched an ashes of creation video today showing off their PvP castle siege gameplay and it didn’t lag at all with what looked like over 100 people all clumped up together casting crazy spells and with siege vehicles.
This was Alpha footage and it already runs smoother than a fully released game with tons of years of development. Yes I know ashes of creation is a new game so it’s using the latest technology compared to what they had in 2004 for WoW but why don’t they totally revamp and upgrade everything and keep up?
There’s absolutely no reason why anyone should lag in WoW when you try to have a large battle (in a massively multiplayer) game WoWs engine can’t even handle 40 people without almost blowing up and it’s sad that people accept this as normal.
This isn’t the first time this topic has been brought up. Such a move can provide both front-end (gameplay) and back-end (technical) improvements. We may be able to change the first bag slot for a change, lol.
That could very well be true. Even Sega admitted they had to postpone their next story episode for PSO2 when they upgraded their engine for the New Genesis expansion.
Blade and Soul is about to release their engine upgrade on Sept 8th.
Runescape did theirs some years back.
Despite the state of the genre, it is being done and these others may be just a fraction of Blizz’s size. I guess the real question is, how much work will it involve with WoW’s code, and will the move be profitable for them?
Because it takes years to develop an engine. And you cannot just take the existing core and paste it over a new engine. You’re about 2/5’ths of the way into creating an entirely new game at that point from a resources invested standpoint.
When other games are cited as evidence of other companies doing this, we’re talking about games with a much smaller collection of code than WoW. It’s not a weekend job. It’s a lot of resources and time. Did you see how long it took Classic to be coded without developing an entirely new engine?
I’ve said this over and over. People think 2004 is the birthdate of the engine and code. But it was in development years before that and then the years while the game was being designed on that engine. It’s ancient and I’'m impressed those dev’s have been able to coax the few new tricks out of it that they have lately.
Game is decrepit when compared to modern MMO’s in most departments. But when you realize that it’s still miles ahead in multiple areas (raiding, combat) after 2 decades - you realize why this game took the world by storm years ago. Absolute tour de force in the mid 00’s.
WOW is running on a slightly boosted version of WC3s engine.
It’s definitely ancient, but it would take an enormous amount of work to essentially rebuild the entire thing from the ground up.
And WOW doesn’t have the numbers to back up that kind of investment. I’m sure if Bliz ever makes another MMO, it will have a massively improved engine. But since Titan got scrapped, that day is a long way away.
My question, why does the graphics matter so much, and the engine. I love the fact that i can still have a relatively basic computer, and still be able to run the freakin game. In general, maybe make it so that wow looks like a xbox mini fridge game, or the playstation wireless router, but still have the option of going dirt 2004 graphics and engine.
They can have the design to appeal to both i guess, people who want to min max the heck out of their graphics and engine settings, and leave people like myself who do not care, and quite frankly, still play super nintendo and gamecube games, have the graphics that look outdated. But i do not really see the need or the reason to really update it. Just as an option is all it would really take.
This as well. It is like with zelda or mario games. Often times, they just modify the existing games engine, and mod it into the new games, changing it slightly. Especially if it is a sequel.
For example, zelda wind waker, zelda twilight princess, and even zelda skyward sword, use incredibly similar engines. Skyward sword is the most modified. I remember testing it out, but doing a jump slash in skyward sword is pretty much the same motion as in twilight princess and wind waker. Skyward sword engine is more heavily altered, with hand to hand motion plus control stuffs.
Same thing with breath of the wild, and the sequel. Making the game with the same engine shaves so much time off development. So for world of warcraft, it makes sense to me as to why the same engine and overall graphics settings are repeated again, and again. It is just so much cheaper and less time consuming.
Pretty much this. Doubt most folks besides the hardcore videogame addicts that eat, drinks, breaths world of warcraft, are going to want to go spend a couple grand on a computer just to play wow every few years, and Blizz knows this, so they try to keep the game on par, or that will run on low budget pc’s. Especially since the game has a sub base model. Look at the recommended system requirements for Shadowlands. No these kind of threads are made by folks who are desperately needing a fictional fantasy cartoony type of videogame to be more like reality for some weird reason. Heck some of us out there actually do like the graphics update they have already done over the years, and are content with what we have now. Op wants flashy graphics, then go play ashes of creation whatever. Also, if you are lagging in raids, etc with a lot of people in certain areas, then maybe you should look on your end op. You know like internet connection type of things, ram, etc, instead of trying to blame wows game engine lol.
The engine is being worked on as we speak, and have been updated many times since the launch of WoW. But it still lacks many “modern” features (or perhaps Blizzard intentionally choose not to add such things to avoid slowing down development). Like for example, normal maps.
I think you’re misunderstanding why people want the engine redone, and what an engine revamp would actually do.
If they revamped the engine to provide better backend tools and to use more efficient calculation methods that have been designed from the engine’s first release in 2004, then lower end computers would work better than they do even now. One of the major pain points for the game client (the app that actually runs on your computer) is that its not very multi-core efficient, which means faster cores > more cores. If the engine was revamped, we could see that flipping which would help for people with slower CPUs, but leveraging more than 2 cores.
The arguement from the server-side is that with more efficient calculations, and better streamlined code, it would take less time to develop new content and it would cut down on some of the game-destroying lag that happens in major WPvP scenarios ( a la Nazjatar battles) or World boss/zone lag issues (think Mortrageth and Korthia becoming slideshows)
Or proper multi-core support? But even beyond that, zone lag like what happens in Korthia and even some older zones seems to be more and more prevalent nowadays, so it seems obvious that there’s something very problematic with the back-end and maybe re-designing the engine might help them put in better calculations and more streamlined and efficient code to help alleviate future issues
They have added multi-core support. Or maybe it was multi threading. I forget.
Edit: i just loaded up the game and CUPID HWmonitor shows all cores engaging. Some less than others, but they are all involved with something.
As for the lag. That stems from a few issues. From what i’ve heard, the code is a complete catastrophe. Partially due to how old the game is (too many “bolt-on” features and spaghetti code), and partially because they have had so many different people work on the game over the years.
The second reason is that the servers are virtual these days. That’s pretty common in the industry, but the problem stems from how hardware resources are used. Each shard (which is effecitvely it’s own virtual server) doesn’t have enough processing power to run smoothly when everyone in the shard is in combat. And most of the time, it works fine, because most people aren’t in combat all the time. But sometimes too many people do to many things and the server just dies.
And thirdly, i’ve heard (but don’t believe it to be true) that the servers still run on hardware from late 2000’s or very early 2010’s. But i am like 99% sure that’s not the case. It should all be in the cloud now and not some weird server blades.
