Player Housing is basically just all about customising a certain private space/house to look how you like it, similar to transmog. Garrisons were only really player housing in the most basic way, like you could select a few buildings and place them around as you liked, but that's about it. Overall, the garrison was something very different.
A good portion of the code base is likely to be worlds apart from the original release.
@Louz I'm all for adding cloth and hair physics to models and improving the graphical fidelity, especially for older content, but WoW leans more toward arcadey game design than realistic, and if you start building in collision detection, physics based animations, momentum, etc., it'll fundamentally change the way the game feels to play, generally making it feel less responsive than it does now.
And frankly, it sounds like your issue is that you don't want to play WoW, but rather something more "realistic," like Shenmue or RDR2.
I'm not sure what your focus on physics is. What parts of the game do you think would benefit from improved physics? I don't see a bunch of debris that could get blown around realistically and I don't see any other parts of the game that would obviously benefit from it. Further, you seem to forget that, as an MMO, this game is already overloaded on calculations. Adding realistic physics calculations would have a very bad impact on our ability to play the game smoothly. Do you really want to deal with collision on players and NPCs? Because, if you say yes, I've got a secret for you: No, you really don't. It would break the game from a gameplay standpoint.
Beyond that, why do I give a shit if they reuse animations? Are you really playing so zoomed in that you can see that a character's hands aren't connected to the object they're holding? Does it really bother you that items just disappear from your hands and reappear on the ground? I've literally never seen anyone else complain about these things, which is why I'm so flabbergasted that it's such a sticking point for you.
I suggest reading the room, so to speak. You're complaining about a lack of realistic details in a game that is intentionally unrealistic.
Grand Crusader Belloc <-- 6608 Endless Tank Proving Grounds score! (
Dragonslayer Kooqu
Multi-Casting: What's better than casting one spell? Several! Imagine to either cast the same spell several times at once or a few abilities at the same time. A Mage can open Portals to several places. A Priest can cast Resurrection or 2 or more party/raid Members. Hunter's Mark can be applied to several targets at once. Just a few ideas.
Dark Age of Camelot has a Warlock class like this. Cast a Nuke AND a heal at the same time. Cast 2 nukes at the same time. Basically you had 4ish choice of a main spell with 4ish choices of a secondary spell to cast with it. It's been a LONG time since I played DAOC but I do remember it was new and different and worked surprisingly well
...and the memories come flooding back.
This was so utterly mesmerizing to watch back in the day, after experiencing Warcraft 3. God, it still gives me chills, thinking just how much of an impression this made. And looking back at it now, it's so simple! Ambient sounds and human/orc/tauren models!
And that human footman(?) used purge(?) somehow(!?).
Man oh man. :')
Looking marvelous in velvet.
Remaking the source code of a game is no easy task.
Because, if you make big changes to a game's source code, you'll have to also change almost everything else about the game, if just outright everything, to fit the new code. It's like changing a car's chassis. You'll have to change a lot more about the car, because the new chassis won't fit the rest of the car.
That said, Blizzard has been making improvements to the game's engine. But remaking the source code is almost like designing a whole new game.
"Arcadey game design"? You mean stylized art style? Or you mean that it literally has - like I said - only """gravity""" when it comes to physics? And that most of the time, you're slashing empty air as a melee spec and all that?
Either way, that doesn't have any influence on whether certain parts of character model have soft body physics or not.
Ever played Dark Souls/Bloodborne/any other of these games? They have responsiveness WoW can only dream about, yet they have soft body physics quite alright.
Also having ragdolls and momentum would add whole new layer to the gameplay - be it player vs player, player vs npc, or player vs environment.
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Yeah I sure love being told what I would like or not, because you so see inside my head and know what I do and what games I've played, yaddy yadda...
My "focus on physics" is that it's the most common thing in current year, and I'm not talking about some precise calculation of particles where each and every one of them has physical presence.
I mean more common stuff, like I said above.
Yeah, you play "zoomed out, don't care, blah blah". But you're so great at telling me what I'd like or wouldn't like to have, huh?
Tell you what, I play games for more than "challenge" or autistic spread sheets. I like to enjoy the visuals too, and when I see these beautiful designs ruined by the jury rigged animations, I can only be amazed how can they get away with this and some (like being this big company that anyone working in games industry wants to have on their resumé).
Which was kinda the main point of my first post - that they could absolutely add the stuff OP wanted. But - again, like I said - it would look like shit. Again - like I said - not because of the ART STYLE, but because of the shitty old engine.
So, again, you would like it if you had to deal with collision detection? You'd like to get cornered in a dungeon or out in the world and be stuck in the middle of 10s of mobs, just holding you in place and hitting you in the back? You'd like to be unable to move until you killed every last one of them (or until you died and respawned)? You'd like it if you had to wait your turn to get to the auctioneers (assuming, of course, that players actually behaved appropriately -- get a few AFKs and no one gets to use the auction house!).
Sure, if that's what you'd like, then that's what you'd like. It'd be terrible game design, but people ask for terrible changes all the time, so you do you.
You can want whatever you want and like whatever you like, but you clearly can't see the big picture when it comes to designing a game as big as WoW. You're asking for things (small, insignificant animations) that would cost way too many resources (which is why they aren't doing them in the first place) and for things (physics/collision detection) that would literally break the game (hundreds of players around you = you can't go anywhere, tons of NPCs around you = almost every encounter in the game is instantly broken), and you're not thinking of what the consequences and costs of these changes would be... just like every other MMO-Champion poster that has their own pet ideas and desires.
When I say that you wouldn't actually like such changes, I'm assuming you wouldn't enjoy a broken game. Clearly I was mistaken.
Nah. See, you're sitting here telling me about your pet issues of reused animations and physics. Those aren't engine limitations -- those are development-resource limitations (not enough dev-time to work on the animations) and PC/Server limitations (applying physics calculations in a calculation-heavy game = servers/PCs become too taxed and the game becomes unplayable).
You use Dark Souls as an example: Tell me, when was the last time you saw a full raid-group full of active enemies on your screen in Dark Souls? Trick question: Dark Souls is my favorite series -- that situation never happens (outside of maybe very specific situations with very plainly detailed enemies, like rats or skeletons). The reason it never happens is because it would drop your frames to single digits, rendering the game unplayable. Now, add in everything else that WoW has going on behind the scenes and it should be obvious why such physics would never be possible... and I'm talking specifically about player-limited situations, like dungeons and raids. Now picture Stormwind or Orgrimmar. Yeah, hundreds of players with soft-body physics? The fact that you didn't even consider the technical demands of such physics being applied to such large amounts of players confirms that you really aren't putting any thought into your post other than "I want this."
So, again, want what you want and like what you like, but don't talk shit about WoW not having these features when having those features is not feasible with current hardware. Oh, and don't take your examples from games with a max player count of 6 and a normal player count of 1 or 2 when we're talking about a game with 20 to hundreds on screen at once.
Last edited by Belloc; 2020-07-31 at 09:21 PM.
Grand Crusader Belloc <-- 6608 Endless Tank Proving Grounds score! (
Dragonslayer Kooqu
Amazing how much can you go on about something I didn't even mention, that is player v player/npc collision. Nor did I ever said I would want, but you somehow think I do, because you know best what I want
And yes, these janky animations ARE engine problem - they would need to adapt the engine to have contextual animations, but it would make the game look much more... AAA. They could start with proper feet placement.
The game already has soft body on some armor - so yeah, you can already get into situation where your shitbucket of a PC must calculate all that, but Blizz was smart in this and added the option to turn it off, you can see for yourself, it's a checkbox in the settings.
So again, your argument really boils down to textures and polycounts - which again, is nothing I said I wanted, that's just you reaching. I said DS games have nice soft body physics, yet they control beautifully - as an argument to the other poster's argument that physics = unresponsive gameplay.
WoW engine is severly outdated and cripples the game, simple as that.
It's not just on my end. I'm sure there's things I could do to mitigate it, and I might look into the stuff you suggested, but claiming the issues aren't real is dishonest.
Blink being broken is just a fact.
3D position detection being awful is also a fact.
Movement detection being awful is a fact. There's a reason you get hit by things you're not in on your screen, because the server hasn't updated your position yet, because it doesn't properly do so until you stop moving. That's why jumping out of mechanics is a bad idea, because your position isn't properly updated until you land. It's also why mechanics like the "control your movement" decree on Queen's Court or the hot foot vision affix are so bad at detecting when you actually move.
And yes, the world lag during Battle for Nazjatar/world bosses is pretty bad as well, but that's more an issue of hardware limitations(to some extent caused by poor software)
It's always been speculated that deep down in the guts of the WoW code the "kernel" is a modified WC3 engine. However there's a part in John Staats' book where he mentions that code being redone, so we don't know. I know at one point Blizzard did say the fact the deep internals is a modified WC3 engine is the reason why we couldn't have larger backpack slots (that it wasn't just a matter of changing a variable somewhere) but who knows.
It's clear that over the years they've redone more and more of the game's code. So it's possible that there is nothing left of the original engine.
Spoken like someone who clearly has zero understanding of programming.
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment