WoW engine limit?

[Eurhetemec]

There are days I hate google. I know I heard it from an interview this year, but all my google attempts get me is a single PCGamer interview and talk about.

I'm sure you're going to keep not believing me, don't blame you, but I know I heard it in an interview. I want to say it was Ion but I'm not sure.

At any rate, thanks for the answers about the engine limit guys.

The "engine limit" comment wasn't Ion, it was earlier - Rob Pardo, I think, or another then VERY senior Blizzard person, and it was in GamaSutra or a similar "serious gaming press" interview, in either 2008 or 2010, I suspect the former.

Ion and others have continued to maintain that Blizzard are always looking at whether to do "WoW 2", though.

Re: engine limit, it seems like a lot of people are focusing on graphics and sharding and so on, but I don't think that's actually the issue that will trigger WoW2. That sort of thing can more or less always be improved.

The real limits of the WoW engine can be seen in what hasn't changed in WoW in 13 years - which is how we interact with mobs and items in the world. That's what will eventually become too retro. Still, it hasn't happened yet, and I suspect won't unless some new form of control in PC games becomes popular.

[Cracked]

The real limits of the WoW engine can be seen in what hasn't changed in WoW in 13 years - which is how we interact with mobs and items in the world. That's what will eventually become too retro. Still, it hasn't happened yet, and I suspect won't unless some new form of control in PC games becomes popular.

Eh, it's not that these things would be hard or impossible to change, the real question is how do you change them to still have it feel like wow? That's why they choose to add new things instead (auto-accept quests, world quests, bonus objectives - all of these are, strictly speaking, just quests with no npc interaction) - you can suddenly make a patch and say that now we collect things not by clicking on them but by stopping on them for 1 second, it just doesn't work.

[Pum]

It wouldn't need to work with WoW. It would be new game.

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They' have dropped support for outdated OSes.

I don't think they should be worried about some idiot running Win 7 in 32 bit mode (is that even possible?)

Haha yes me, I'm running on a 10 year old comp, only upgraded graphics card, hard drive and OS from when I got it.

[Eurhetemec]

Eh, it's not that these things would be hard or impossible to change, the real question is how do you change them to still have it feel like wow? That's why they choose to add new things instead (auto-accept quests, world quests, bonus objectives - all of these are, strictly speaking, just quests with no npc interaction) - you can suddenly make a patch and say that now we collect things not by clicking on them but by stopping on them for 1 second, it just doesn't work.

Oh sure, but I'm talking more extreme changes than that. As you say, those are all basically the same as old-fashioned quests, just with auto-accept/auto-progress. We'd be talking something like wanting to move beyond hotbar-style combat, or to use model collision detection, or to incorporate VR controls in more than a totally basic fashion. You can say "That wouldn't be WoW!", but yeah, that's the point - if they want to go there, they'd want to go to WoW2.

[Sierra85]

A friend and I were talking and I'm curious. How close do you think we are to the limits of WoW's engine?

compare vanilla to retail and you will notice that they have been slowly building upon the engine. they tweak, and upgrade. it is noticeable.

so the limit is to the extent of resources blizz wants to throw at the team in charge of the engine.

[thilicen]

The only real limit is where you'd draw the line and call it a whole new engine. Theoretically they can modify and restructure it as much as they want.

[Deleted]

A friend and I were talking and I'm curious. How close do you think we are to the limits of WoW's engine? Blizzard has said throughout the years that WoW 2 is always on their mind, but it won't happen until they reach the very limits of the current engine. I barely know enough to understand what they mean by that. It makes me curious though, how close are we to that limit? Is there some way for us to tell?

Closer than we might think IMO, the last few months several major city hubs have started to get insane server lag. But its only limited to very high population servers so far, if I go to one of my alts on a less populated server, it goes away. And it's really wierd lag as well, skills, mounts etc works flawlessly, but any mail or auction house transaction takes forever to complete.

[adamzz]

This part right here shows just how much you don't understand about the subject.

You can keep backwards compatibility while including the newest features for all time (e.g. Windows), but you will constantly be burdened by it. Crappy APIs that you have to work around, adding things get harder and harder due to asset and namespace pollutions unless you want to wrap everything old in a thin new wrapper.

There reason there are unreal engines 1, 2, 3 and 4 is that every time Epic made a new engine, they realized their mistakes and realized what could have been done better, but expanding the old engine properly was either too time consuming or too resource consuming. When these things compounded, they would rather not be burdened by legacy code base and legacy components, so they "started over".

Reason why started over is in quotes is that they didn't really start over, UE4 still probably kept 50-70% of UE3 codebase as far as e.g. rendering pipeline was concerned, but due to the new in-house insight, they made it extensible from the get go, whereas making it extensible in UE3 would have required hacking.

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Honestly, I think they would do well to include Vulkan over DX12. It's portable between Win and Mac and it has the same capabilities, sometimes Vulkan can even be a godsend compared to DX12 (I haven't used it first hand, but I believe the fact that DX12 is heavily developed for Xbox is pretty annoying). It would save them money and headache - so we will see.

How would using vulkan save them money? Going from DX11 to DX12 is a lot easier than going from DX11 to Vulkan. Besides, if they wanted to save money they would drop OSX support. The game runs shitty on OSX anyway, bad FPS compared to running it in Windows, constant freezes etc etc.

[Kokolums]

in terms of raid mechanics, they have pretty much reached the limits on what the engine can do, even if they won't come out publicly and say it, the only new mechanic they have introduced since wrath is the darkness fog on kil'jaeden/portal keeper hasabel, all current mechanics are just reskins of older mechanics that have been around for years, as an example, aggramar in antorus can be summed up as ragnaros heroic 2.0 from firelands mechanically he works in almost the exact same way, there's so many old mechanics being reused it's hard to really pay attention to stuff anymore because it's already known how it will play out.

Actually in terms of mechanics, they are opening up a HUGE new field of boss mechanics in BfA with smart AI. For example, blizz designed a zone where this AI rogue runs around sapping and trying to gank people. If you fight back it might vanish and flee to come back later. This AI is coming to raids. I expect a quantum leap in raid mechanics in BfA.

[LanToaster]

The real limits of the WoW engine can be seen in what hasn't changed in WoW in 13 years - which is how we interact with mobs and items in the world. That's what will eventually become too retro. Still, it hasn't happened yet, and I suspect won't unless some new form of control in PC games becomes popular.

Agreed.

Eh, it's not that these things would be hard or impossible to change, the real question is how do you change them to still have it feel like wow?

And again. If they decide for example to change the Combat, can you imagine the workload they have to put in to make sure they dont break Everything they did before?

Just take a look how Glitchy sometimes the Spells/Abilites are that you dont really target at something. (Like for example the Little Battle Toys)

There is no limit to an engine, you can always rewrite and replace parts of it. Call of Duty never had a complete engine change and it came out before WoW, looking like this

Yea, but can you load up the Old Call of Duty games with the newer Engine?
Probably not.

At some point (certain) changes to the Engine will break the whole game, or enough so it doesnt make sense fix it, but rather make a new game. Thats the Limitation


Edit.

Actually in terms of mechanics, they are opening up a HUGE new field of boss mechanics in BfA with smart AI. For example, blizz designed a zone where this AI rogue runs around sapping and trying to gank people. If you fight back it might vanish and flee to come back later. This AI is coming to raids. I expect a quantum leap in raid mechanics in BfA.

And I really cant wait to see how this Bugs out so many things.
But I dont think Boss AI will improve/change much on what the Bosses can do.

If you think about it, you have tankswaps, voidzones, Cleaves, stuff you have to soak, and Position mechanics, and debuffs.
(There is nothing I would know what could improve on the Mechanics, but I´m no game designer) But what he meant is, that the last few expansions, there were not really new mechanics. And AI, would just change how these Mechanics are used.

Truthfully, it can make the Encounter significantly Harder and more interesting, because you probably cant have an Addon that tells you when to do stuff. But new mechanics. Nope

[Cracked]

How would using vulkan save them money? Going from DX11 to DX12 is a lot easier than going from DX11 to Vulkan. Besides, if they wanted to save money they would drop OSX support. The game runs shitty on OSX anyway, bad FPS compared to running it in Windows, constant freezes etc etc.

With Vulkan you can drop implementing new features in DX (for as long as DX9 is supported), once you drop DX9 support, you can use Vulkan exclusively, reducing the number of build configs you need to test on, unifying it with Mac graphical development (even though you still need to test it, you don't need to develop twice). Time saved developing feature X reduces the overall cost of feature X. Dropping OSX support would probably cost them a sizeable portion of customers.

[Eurhetemec]

Actually in terms of mechanics, they are opening up a HUGE new field of boss mechanics in BfA with smart AI. For example, blizz designed a zone where this AI rogue runs around sapping and trying to gank people. If you fight back it might vanish and flee to come back later. This AI is coming to raids. I expect a quantum leap in raid mechanics in BfA.

So, do you remember a little raid in Wrath, Trial of the Crusader? Do you remember the level of weeping this caused? A staggering, unprecedented level of weeping (at least then).

A lot of the issues revolved around the fact that the encounter was unpredictable, and players had to be adaptive. One day, it could be trivial, another, extremely tough (unless you, like my guild, had mostly experienced PvPers raiding - in that case it was always pretty easy). This made it unlike all other raid encounters.

If they put AI of this kind in actual, progression, raids, as anything but an optional encounter, the weeping and wailing will be so deafening that we will be able to hear nothing else, because one time, it'll be smart, and another time, it'll be dumb, and the difficulty of the encounter will vary wildly on this basis. Plus, someone will find a way to "break" the AI, a bunch of guilds will use it and make progress, and Blizzard won't roll it back because it won't be an actual exploit, just a flaw in their AI, and then Blizzard will fix it, and then there will be even more complaining, from all the people who didn't get to cheese it.

Anyway, yeah, if you expect this being introduced to raids to go well, I suspect you are in for a surprise. I'm sure it'll be fine in Islands and probably Warfronts, but raids? Progression raids? Hahahaha good luck with that. Even dungeons which feature it are likely to be looked upon negatively.

[Soon-TM]

Yes, the work that Blizz SEs have done in order to adapt and update the old engine is worth of the highest praise. No, the engine cannot get "facelifts" ad infinitum, if only because of diminishing returns.

[Deleted]

Oh really? You have me completely convinced -.-

I don't care -.-