WoW engine limit?

[Miatog]

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?

[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?

You have to keep in mind the WoW engine development was started somewhere around the year 2000 (it is a custom engine, not a modification of the wc3 engine, that is a common misconception).
Ofcourse it has been altered and improved over the years, but at some point you will hit a cap on what an engine can do with lightning, asset loading, tooling, memory mangement, etc. etc. At that point you have to make a decision if you are gonna mostly rewrite the engine cores to bring it up to par or create a full new engine.

The first has the downside that you likely can't use all of nowadays technologies because it will have to be compliant with all the old code you created from 2000-ish onwards. The latter has the downside that you likely won't be able to run the current game on it and have to create a new one.

If you look closely at the difference between vanilla and mop, and then mop and legion, you can already see that Blizzard has long ago decided they will go with the first route. Just a quick glance at an old zone like silithus and comparing it to a zone like Aszuna and you will see that most of the engine has in fact already been rewritten.
It wouldn't surprise me if they brushed up the coding of the old zones etc also a bit when they changed them up for leveling scaling for BoA, allowing them to brush up the engine even further.
So at this point you can expect the current engine to stick around for at least a few more expansions, and keep receiving recodes/upgrades along the way. I find it highly doubtful that they will invest the time and money into building a new custom MMO engine.
At this point in time i doubt any company will want to take that risk, as the gaming market is slowly shifting a way from the "oldschool" MMO concept; Nowadays gamers want quick gameplay for quick rewards, always with a carrot on a stick to keep them going.
Us oldschool gamers that like long, involving gameplay with lots of emchanics and deep story, are now far and few between and our ranks are thinning rapidly, sadly.

Hence to answer your question: Expect the current wow engine to last for a few more expansions, maybe somewhat longer until WoW dries out. I wouldn't ever expect a WoW 2 and more so expect Blizzard to keep heading into the direction of games with simplified gameplay and lots of lootboxes to buy. Low cost development, high reward, games like HS and OW.

[Sinzaram]

There are no limits to the current engine, they are always extending the game engine every expansion pack.

Launch wow didn't have:
Current view distance, which has been extended at least twice.
Current water details, the reflections and the waves were added to the engine in Catacylsm.
Current dynamic shadows, the shadows from characters and from terrian was added to the engine in Wrath.
Current streaming downloading, this was added in MoP when a new launcher was made so you could log in with the bear minimum of game downloaded.
Current game files, the game launched using MPQ files from warcraft 3 to store all the game data, it was changed to the new CASC system in Warlords: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/13645405

Every expansion expands the game engine if there is something the developers want to add or expand on.
The only limit is what the devs want to do, I don't think they've ever mentioned limits or "WoW 2". Except from people expecting a "WoW 2".

Lets be honest. The Burning Crusade was WoW 2.0 like Battle for Azeroth will be WoW 8.0.

[Lochton]

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?

The fact that we're seeing more updates in BFA, I don't think we're at the edge yet.

And no, every time WoW2 ends up being a talk, people want more real looking, or reboot, and so on.

[Deleted]

WoW2 will never happen, and the current engine will keep being updated and refined just like in the last decade.
It's impossible to make a new engine and make it work on WoW without an immense amount of work and risks. It's just not worth it.

[Elfezen]

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?

Blizzard never said that WoW 2 is on their mind, they said that they are never going to make another mmorpg again that's why they scrapped Titan which was a many years project and turned it to Overwatch

[Decrepitate]

The biggest issue I have with the engine is that it only use 1,5 CPU cores (1 for gfx and one for sound ). Cant run the game on best settings cause the game is bottlenecked by one core being at 100%, resulting in subpar GPU usage and fps even on the best CPUs out there.

[Deleted]

The biggest issue I have with the engine is that it only use 1,5 cores.( 1 for gfx and one for sound ) Cant run the game on best settings cause the game is bottlenecked by one core being at 100%, resulting in subpar GPU usage and fps even on the best CPUs out there.

That is not a WoW engine limitation, the WoW engine does extend to multiple cores if one core is on 100% load. This limitation comes from Dx11, Dx11 supports partial multithreading only. With Dx12 you can properly multithread your graphics stack on OS level, but they can't fully implement Dx12 yet cause like 90%+ of the playerbase has a GPU that does not support Dx12 on feature hardware level.
To allow full multithreading without Dx12 would require rewriting the entire game engine, something that isn't going to happen.

If you are this bothered about it you can solve it yourself though, just get a CPU with high Single threading performance (e.g. no AMD CPU, but an Intel Kaby Lake CPU).

[Decrepitate]

That is the thing. Im running the 7700k and still have issues with higher settings.

[Deleted]

@rda shared some insight about "the engine" somewhere in the last days, but I cannot find it. Let's hope he reads this.

But afaik: Engine is not a problem and will never become a problem.

[Gaidax]

There are no limits to the current engine, they are always extending the game engine every expansion pack.

Launch wow didn't have:
Current view distance, which has been extended at least twice.
Current water details, the reflections and the waves were added to the engine in Catacylsm.
Current dynamic shadows, the shadows from characters and from terrian was added to the engine in Wrath.
Current streaming downloading, this was added in MoP when a new launcher was made so you could log in with the bear minimum of game downloaded.
Current game files, the game launched using MPQ files from warcraft 3 to store all the game data, it was changed to the new CASC system in Warlords: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/13645405

Every expansion expands the game engine if there is something the developers want to add or expand on.
The only limit is what the devs want to do, I don't think they've ever mentioned limits or "WoW 2". Except from people expecting a "WoW 2".

Lets be honest. The Burning Crusade was WoW 2.0 like Battle for Azeroth will be WoW 8.0.

This is nonsense.

Engine limit? Sure - go to Suramar and see FPS tanking even on high end machines. That is your engine limit. Same with raiding when more than 20 people present and other spell effects suppressed and still it drops FPS fast that is another limit.

The engine is old and it does not utilize modern hardware properly, it is a miracle they even brought it this far, but this horse is on its last legs there and I am more than sure that many of the things they envision go to engineering and they tell them "nope, can't do this" or "let's do that, but remove x, y, z".

[Narveid]

This is nonsense.

Engine limit? Sure - go to Suramar and see FPS tanking even on high end machines. That is your engine limit. Same with raiding when more than 20 people present and other spell effects suppressed and still it drops FPS fast that is another limit.

The engine is old and it does not utilize modern hardware properly, it is a miracle they even brought it this far, but this horse is on its last legs there and I am more than sure that many of the things they envision go to engineering and they tell them "nope, can't do this" or "let's do that, but remove x, y, z".

Suramar fps drops? I can't remember that happening to me once, and I play with everything maxed out.

[Deleted]

That is the thing. Im running the 7700k and still have issues with higher settings.

Could be the rest of your hardware then, likely.
I'm running a 7700k and a 1060 and have no issues whatsoever in WoW, anywhere. This is on HD (1920x1080) resolution with everything maxed in a dual monitor setup, usually even with another game running on the 2nd monitor.
The only time i ever see the engine limitations is on the big invasion points, when theres like 200 people in one invaison point killing the boss. Then it starts to stutter a bit, otherwise it runs very solid.

In fact the core running WoW on my 7700k rarely goes above 50% load, even in 30man raids.

[artam]

Suramar fps drops? I can't remember that happening to me once, and I play with everything maxed out.

What is maxed out for you?

What resolution?

[Heavens Night]

That is not a WoW engine limitation, the WoW engine does extend to multiple cores if one core is on 100% load. This limitation comes from Dx11, Dx11 supports partial multithreading only. With Dx12 you can properly multithread your graphics stack on OS level, but they can't fully implement Dx12 yet cause like 90%+ of the playerbase has a GPU that does not support Dx12 on feature hardware level.
To allow full multithreading without Dx12 would require rewriting the entire game engine, something that isn't going to happen.

If you are this bothered about it you can solve it yourself though, just get a CPU with high Single threading performance (e.g. no AMD CPU, but an Intel Kaby Lake CPU).

Of course they can implement it and make it to be toggle just like the current DX11 and DX9 toggle options.
They are usually good at keeping up with technology as I remember DX11 being added fairly early on when a lot of games were still using DX9, so I'm sure they are working on it as it would make sense.

[ls-]

W/o going too much into details, there's multiple issues, but I'll mention only two:

• 17yo codebase, they started developing WoW in early 00s, it's hard to work w/ such an ancient in many cases poorly written code. Poorly because it's gaming industry we're talking about and early 00s were even wilder.
• Hardware userbase has. Blizz have to be really careful about resource usage because significant chunk of players use toasters. For instance, there's people who run 64bit OSes on systems w/ way less than 4GB of RAM, there's guys who're still on 32bit systems.

It's hard to push forward w/ such restrictions. They do improve it though.

[Lahis]

WoW2 will never happen, and the current engine will keep being updated and refined just like in the last decade.
It's impossible to make a new engine and make it work on WoW without an immense amount of work and risks. It's just not worth it.

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

- - - Updated - - -

W/o going too much into details, there's multiple issues, but I'll mention only two:

• 17yo codebase, they started developing WoW in early 00s, it's hard to work w/ such an ancient in many cases poorly written code. Poorly because it's gaming industry we're talking about and early 00s were even wilder.
• Hardware userbase has. Blizz have to be really careful about resource usage because significant chunk of players use toasters. For instance, there's people who run 64bit OSes on systems w/ way less than 4GB of RAM, there's guys who're still on 32bit systems.

It's hard to push forward w/ such restrictions.

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?)

[makketota]

There are no limits to the current engine, they are always extending the game engine every expansion pack.

Launch wow didn't have:
Current view distance, which has been extended at least twice.
Current water details, the reflections and the waves were added to the engine in Catacylsm.
Current dynamic shadows, the shadows from characters and from terrian was added to the engine in Wrath.
Current streaming downloading, this was added in MoP when a new launcher was made so you could log in with the bear minimum of game downloaded.
Current game files, the game launched using MPQ files from warcraft 3 to store all the game data, it was changed to the new CASC system in Warlords: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/13645405

Every expansion expands the game engine if there is something the developers want to add or expand on.
The only limit is what the devs want to do, I don't think they've ever mentioned limits or "WoW 2". Except from people expecting a "WoW 2".

Lets be honest. The Burning Crusade was WoW 2.0 like Battle for Azeroth will be WoW 8.0.

This. A game engine isn't some static thing. WoW's engine is not a "17 year old engine". Its been in constant change since the games release. Bigger changes might take a lot of time, but in theory they can change anything they'd like if they feel its worth the cost.

[TriHard]

You have to keep in mind the WoW engine development was started somewhere around the year 2000 (it is a custom engine, not a modification of the wc3 engine, that is a common misconception).

Actually, you're wrong. It is a heavily modified WC3 engine. This has been common knowledge for years now.
What they did is that they used the WC3 engine, tore it completely apart and built it up with an MMO in mind.

Therefore it's still considered a heavily modified WC3 engine.


Had it not been a WC3 engine then we would've had body sliders by now.

[ls-]

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?)

So what? They dropped systems pretty much no one was actually using. Same thing can't be said about 32bit systems. Plenty of people use them, people even run win10 32bit. That's why 32bit clients aren't retired yet, and won't be retired in near future either.

Damn, it's 2017, pretty much all high-end smartphones have 4+GB of RAM and 64bit OSes, fucking phones are better (at least mem-wise) than a big chunk of people's "gaming" PCs.