No new expansion, instead WoW 2

[Gorsameth]

I really hope Blizzard makes WoW 2 soon. It's needed and defeating the Burning Legion is a good wrap up for Classic WoW.

This is a fan using Unreal Engine 4

WoW's grahpics age well compared to the hyper realism. Plus Blizzard has always been big about keeping their system requirements low.

[bufferunderrun]

I would like a series of single player game like elder of scroll is doing, the mmo + the single player series, it would be the best thing for both espanding the story and luring new player into the mmo.

[Deleted]

wow 2 will never happen. i seriously doubt blizzard will ever make a MMO again because the market is pretty much dead

[HitRefresh]

WoW2 would be a massive mistake.

WoW is the perfect storm. It was based on videogame lore that hooked people into it's story when it came out, it launched when MMOs were just becoming a hot new product, and it marketed itself to the widest possible fanbase through it's similarity to other unrelated properties.

But that's how it -started-. How it continued was by being the game anyone could play, and that anyone -should- play. You usually don't see people who are the only person they know playing WoW. Friends, family, friends of friends. The came is -lousy- with recommendations. The only reason I played it is because my 60 year old mother (At the time) had been playing from Vanilla through Wrath with my older brother and twin sister and finally convinced me to pick it up.

These connections, and the connections created within an active guild structure, really helped to give people a sense of community and almost family-like quality to the game.

WoW is not the finest game on the market. I honestly prefer Wildstar's combat system and SWtoR's focus on my character's personal story. And the Elder Scrolls and Dark Age of Camelot had a much better conceit for mass PvP in their territory control designs. No. WoW is the game that everyone plays. And most of us play for the Momentum of it. We've spent years playing and it's a part of our lives. So we keep playing.

Even when someone dislikes a given bit of content.

WoW 2 would undercut the hell out of that. It would destroy the momentum aspect by asking us all to start over. No more 3 million gold in your bank. All your mounts and achievements and transmog gear gone. Every pet and every toy you've found. All gone. All the old quests and dungeons and raids and environments: POOF! Gone.

There's some incentive to play the new game, but what you'd -lose- would wind up killing the attention of a massive portion of the playerbase who just aren't interested in trying to invest that much time, energy, and flat out cash in something new when they have something familiar and warm, like an old blanket.

I'm not saying that WoW2 wouldn't be a mistake, but I do feel like WoW has a huge reliance on long-time and former players. Getting new players is not this game's strong point, even from a personal perspective, it's been hard to get friends to play who haven't played before because the game is absolutely not designed for new players. The whole leveling experience is made for people to just get through as quickly as possible and everything that makes the game interesting towards end-game doesn't exist, so it's just spamming whatever damage abilities you have and killing everything super fast while doing quests that you don't care about since it's so hard to follow a story because you outlevel zones before there's any sense of story progression. Obviously a new player isn't going to do a bunch of gray quests because they want to get into the story that might not even be there, as their experience makes them feel.

I think that the best solution is just to focus on a better new player experience rather than create an entirely new fucking project. But I also feel like Warcraft could benefit from a new game, like Battlefield in the Warcraft universe with the style of the cinematics maybe...

wow 2 will never happen. i seriously doubt blizzard will ever make a MMO again because the market is pretty much dead

And they're pretty much dominating it now anyway. And they've already proven it's a mistake with Titan.

[nyc81991]

WoW's grahpics age well compared to the hyper realism. Plus Blizzard has always been big about keeping their system requirements low.

WoW's graphic style has aged well. However, it is reaching it's limit. Literally no one who doesn't play already looks at WoW and thinks the graphics are good in 2017. The old engine is also not capable of being truly innovative or even implementing a lot of modern gameplay mechanics.

It is time to bring the best MMO into modern times and revive the dying game / genre.

[Soulwind]

WoW's graphic style has aged well. However, it is reaching it's limit. Literally no one who doesn't play already looks at WoW and thinks the graphics are good in 2017. The old engine is also not capable of being truly innovative or even implementing a lot of modern gameplay mechanics.

It is time to bring the best MMO into modern times and revive the dying game / genre.

And realism would absolutely not be the way to go.

Something like Overwatch is closer to what a modern looking WoW would be, but of course, no computer can run an MMO like that at the moment.

[Danner]

*snip*

Wow2 has always been a terrible idea.

It basically works like this:
- The team can create X amount of content every 2 years. This is their physical limit.
- By making an expansion every 2 years, you get X new content, plus 6*X old content to play with. You now have 7*X content to play with.
- By making a new game instead, you only get X content to play with.

Sure, some of that old content is ... old. It's not gonna be awesome to go play your MoP dailies. But there is still some content there. Like the monk class? You wouldn't have that in Wow2. Like some of the Cata transmogs? Gone in WoW2. Old raids? Forget it. Assets to do Timewalking in? Nope.

What they should do instead is to improve what is there.

- Improve the engine and assets. They do this. Every expansion. Claims that Wow is a 12 year old engine is hogwash.
- Improve the basic gameplay. I want the game to be less about pushing a button every 1.5 seconds while watching TV. Take some inspiration from the witcher or something.
- Improve the class gameplay. My spec has been awesome in legion. It's a new game in many ways from this alone.
- Improve the UI. It's been stale since Cata. Mods are a necessity to play these days.
- Improve the experience. Legion did, massively. More of that!
- Improve the outdated. Cata spent a crazy amount of time revamping the old world, at the cost of new content. What if they put two people into redesigning an old zone in need of fixup every 3 months instead?

As long as they keep doing all of that, WoW won't need a replacement.

[nyc81991]

And realism would absolutely not be the way to go.

Something like Overwatch is closer to what a modern looking WoW would be, but of course, no computer can run an MMO like that at the moment.

Yeah I never said anything about making WoW look extremely "real". However bringing it into modern times would make it look more immersive / real than it does currently and also allow for innovative and modern mechanics that aren't possible currently.

There is a major issue with attracting new players to WoW, not to mention keeping players. Expansions won't do much at this point.

Also, an MMO with Overwatch graphics could easily be run. I don't know what you are talking about there.

[Biruta]

WOW needs a new engine because the current one is very old. Blizzard could launch an upcoming expansion with a completely new engine with far superior graphics quality and performance. When downloading the new expansion, we would be downloading a new game, but it would still be WOW, just with everything new. A good option would also be Diablo mmorpg, but why the hell would Blizard release a new mmo to compete with WOW?

[FertsBlert]

WOW needs a new engine because the current one is very old. Blizzard could launch an upcoming expansion with a completely new engine with far superior graphics quality and performance. When downloading the new expansion, we would be downloading a new game, but it would still be WOW, just with everything new. A good option would also be Diablo mmorpg, but why the hell would Blizard release a new mmo to compete with WOW?

Most of the current engine isn't that old at all there is a hell of a lot of legacy code plugging into it but the core engine was revamped completely in Cata and has been upgraded for multiple systems since then.

The absolute last thing WoW needs is better graphics, those better graphics were available when WoW launched and those games are all long forgotten. The cartoony look of WoW is iconic and if you changed it to some other look it would lose a lot of it's uniqueness, it would become generic *dead* MMO number 214.

[Severance]

Most of the current engine isn't that old at all there is a hell of a lot of legacy code plugging into it but the core engine was revamped completely in Cata and has been upgraded for multiple systems since then.

The absolute last thing WoW needs is better graphics, those better graphics were available when WoW launched and those games are all long forgotten. The cartoony look of WoW is iconic and if you changed it to some other look it would lose a lot of it's uniqueness, it would become generic *dead* MMO number 214.

The current WOW engine is a lot more limited than you'd think. Even concept art like this is very difficult to implement in the game: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...-maybe-Tier-21



Even in Legion armor doesn't approach this level of detail or clarity of resolution. Most of the new "3D" parts are just tacked on to existing armor models. Here's another Paladin set he did: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XOGAn

And keep in mind, this guy is a Senior 3D Artist for Blizzard. Not just some fan putting models into Unreal Engine. Imagine if a guy like him had a modern engine where he could really cut loose.

[Katie45]

did you see npcs in legion of course they can give armor like but the amount of work would be crazy. If you even think they will do you really haven't been paying attention to Ion at all, he said multiple times, why does there have to be a wow2 New engine? they could do that in a xpac, graphics xpac as well, there is iterally no reason why they should make a whole new game for wow2 unless they wanted to just reset everyone back to level 1, and the uproar for that would be crazy, they would lose one of the greatest advantages they have over other mmos.

[Vutar]

Wish WoW 2 would happen.

[Deleted]

Everquest is older than WoW and still releases expansions. We aren't going to be getting a WoW 2 anytime soon. Not within the next two decades.

What an argument. But wait... Everquest 2 does exist.

[Tic Tacs]

As an active and informed player you no doubt remember the maintenance day when they greatly increased realm population caps prior to Legion launch. An event which pushed nearly all realms down the pole with respect to the full-medium-low scale. If you don't remember that perhaps you should question how well informed you are.

And no, no one at all outside of Blizzard has any idea whatsoever what subscription numbers are. Not you, not me, not anyone that's posting here.

Your post made me question a few things about realm population indicator in realm list so I did census for Area 52 just now. At the moment of scanning realm pop indicator is clearly states "Full":



Here is Alliance Population which is at 84, Area 52 is horde dominated realm:



Here is Horde Population which is at 1442:




Now I'm no expert but 84 Alliance + 1442 Horde = 1526 Players total for Area 52 realm which seems to be very low for the realm to have Full population status. You can run Census yourself for Full realms and give me your numbers. I'm a bit confused how they measure Full because 1526 is definitely very low population for a realm considering some private servers have around 8-10k players. Can you explain?

[Pilat]

That addon is hot garbage.

https://realmpop.com/us-area-52.html

[Tic Tacs]

That addon is hot garbage.

https://realmpop.com/us-area-52.html

I don't think Census addon is garbage because I can scroll through all players I scanned, for Alliance since it is only 84 players I went through /who by level myself to double check. You can do it yourself right now. Realmpop doesn't give you currently playing characters but full list of characters who ever logged on during their scans which could be years since they have no dates.

[Daedius]

Wouldn't say a WoW 2 from scratch... but I would love for the current engine to be given an overhaul with still the scale-ability for lower end computers... but far more optimised for today's computers... naturally bringing in proper physics and better graphics... transferring all current assets and progress over.

Something like this would be awesome, sure everyone's seen it

https://sketchfab.com/models/f3eb318...50737b956d5d07

[God Save The King]

That census addon is limited by a lot of different issues with the /who function. Basically, the addon will attempt a bunch of different /who's, and if the /who has full results, it will attempt to refine the query. I.e. check a /who for each level. For levels that return full results, break those out into classes, for full class results, break them out into race, and so on. But there is only so deep you can go, until there is no more refinement and the who still returns full stats.

Second, it is only a snapshot at the time of the specific /who query. It is entirely possible to have people missed or double counted due to them moving around, leveling, logging, etc. It's also highly dependent on the time of day.

Third, there are a load of issues with the /who and CRZ, Sharding, etc.

Fourth, there are even more issues when doing instances with people outside of your realm. There are issues /who'ing people in an instance on your realm as well, i.e. if you try to /who Tomb of Sargeras on a common raid night, you'll like run into the issue I mentioned before with maxing out the /who results, same with Dalaran.

The census is a cool little addon, but they even say it requires loads of people running it to get any semblance of realm population, and even then it's prone to discrepancy, double/missed countings, running at poor times, etc.

[LaserChild9]

What?

I had the same theory as you, though I'm doubtful it will happen. Another reason I think it could work is because it could deal with the Artifacts we currently have. I can't think of any way, that would satisfy me personally, on how or why we lose the artifacts, but if they made a sequel, then it would promote our characters to champions of the past that wielded these amazing weapons to defeat the burning legion.