Oh my god, actual light rays, shadows, and ambient lighting. Efficient frames per second due to modern streamlining. Far more immersive professions such as rod casting, reeling mechanics and more.
What about the gliders? Such a beautiful thing being baked into the space bar (like DH and Evoker but you have custom gliders for flare). Fully modular building elements with a seriously impressive gameplay loop that doesn’t hand everything to you on a plate and makes you want to go into the world.
NPC design is low key kinda cool too… They roam around, check in on you and you can build rep with them through conversations.
What does it lack? Not much other than threats in the world – if WoW updates their engine after The Last Titan they can solidify the game for the next 20 years.
We need modular elements, a better engine, and more focus on an immersive world. Fingers crossed. P.s. give Palia a go it’s kinda cool for inspiration.
I mean, if you are playing Blizzard games, you are playing something that’s old.
The moment you step outside of the Blizzard bubble and try any of the new games that have recently come out, you realize just how old Blizzard’s games are.
Even if they don’t appear that old, like Diablo IV, Blizzard spends so much time on development that by the time they come out, they are slightly old. And you realize that the moment you pick up any newer game in the same genre.
Blizzard just needs to develop and release new games faster. Doesn’t have to be WoW 2, but it has to be something.
I mean, when Blizzard held their 30th Warcraft Anniversary Direct months ago, all they showcased for all their games, were patches and more patches. For old games. And remasters. Of old games.
I have step out of the Blizzard bubble. And this is what I see:
Studios make games that loose players so fast that they are forced to do a #2, #3, #4… And that way they hope to justify sales. And keep the business going.
Wow on the other-hand, like it or not… has lasted for 20 years. With out needing a 2.0 remake. Yet.
And that means something. It means this:
So inspite all the criticism you have for retail wow. The reality is that it has resisted the test of time. For now. So its doing something right. Including graphics.
WoW 2 is already in the works , it’s just going to look like World of Wacraft
What makes it a 2 ? It’s all the systems underneath and coding will be far better.
Remember in 2018 they said housing was impossible on the engine ? Remember when Dragonriding was impossible on the old engine. Remember they said they couldn’t increase the default backpack space because of the engine.
IT’s slowly being upgraded behind the scenes.
That’s the future of WoW. We will have alot more nice things without losing the touch , look and feel of World of Warcraft.
First, they’d have to develop an entirely new engine. This is already a massive cost factor, especially as engines for MMOs tend to have very specific requirements that might not translate well into other genres, so cross-game/genre usability is potentially low.
Then, we are talking about a 20 year old game. You cannot just expect people to jumps hip from WoW 1 to WoW 2 just because it’s prettier than the first. People that are playing a severely outdated game are doing so for reasons other than technical brilliance. What is the incentive for a community that has a certain emotional attachments to their characters, achievements, mounts, pets, etc to jump ship? Nostalgia is a huge pull factor, as is the social aspect. Introducing a successor would potentially split a community that Blizzard are trying to hold together.
So the only option would be to make it an optional engine upgrade rather than an entirely new game, with the option to play with WoW1 people that either cannot run the new engine for technical reasons or prefer the style/feel of the old engine. Which would not only mean porting all content over to the new engine, but also making sure the new engine can “talk” to the old one, and continuing to work on the old engine version until its population has decreased enough for you to sunset it.
On the other hand, I can’t imagine what type of game Blizzard actually might release. Releasing an MMO would be in-house competition for WoW. They already have a hero shooter that crashed and burned with their forced glorified cash shop upgrade from OW1 to 2. They have an ARPG with D4, which at this moment has 600 viewers on Twitch, so might not be doing swimmingly either. RTS games are basically dead, classic CRPGs can be popular, but are often not seen as financially viable to big publishers without seasonal models and live service monetisation. In this corporate MS-ActiBlizz world I honestly don’t see Blizzard releasing anything particularly inspiring anymore.
It’s basically an online live service Stardew Valley clone from what I’ve seen. I’ve installed it, played for half an hour and it didn’t really grab me like other games in that category do.
WoW biggest crutch is an engine that started it’s programming in 1999 and it’s been running this game far longer than it’s intended lifespan.
When wow was launched in 2004 they never thought it was going to be around in 2025. That’s just not how MMO’s lifespan were back then.
WoW is clearly going to be around for another 20 years. So Blizz are having to overhaul the engine behind the scenes.
I know some people say I want a unreal 5 wow etc but you wouldn’t really. WoW’s look is what makes it WoW. The cartoony look is what stops it from looking terribly aged.
When games go for super realism , they somehow age faster.
First of all, requiring a heavy-duty GPU for a new AAA-game is not really uncommon. That’s no issue.
Second, IF (big if) any WoW follow up (2.0) would happen…it would most likely not even look, feel, or refer to many WoW 1.0 elements. It would just be a completely new game, for potentially a new audience, and so forth.
That’s why I really don’t get the “WoW 2.0 has to happen”-fanatics. They have no idea what they ask for…
Yeah in the Xbox Games family of development studios that Blizzard are now part of, it’s actually a bit hard to see where they fit in.
They had the announced survival game that was cancelled.
They had a WoW mobile MMORPG for China that was cancelled.
Evidently they are working on a StarCraft FPS game, but that’s been in development for years since Dustin Browder spearheaded it. But apparently Phil Spencer likes StarCraft, so that’s probably Blizzard’s next game.
Blizzard also formed their incubation team years ago, under Allen Adham, and pursued a lot of mobile game projects, of which only one has come out - Warcraft Rumble. And that was hardly a success.
Blizzard have teamed up with King though, in order to make mobile games using Blizzard’s IPs. So mobile games will definitely happen, and the mobile market has also been one of Microsoft’s goals to expand their presence on.
I think what’s also likely is that Microsoft will distribute Blizzard’s IPs to other development studios, so we might see Bethesda make a Diablo game, or something like that. And then Blizzard mostly gets relegated to managing its live service operations and being the brand name behind its IP projects.
But Blizzard’s game development capability doesn’t seem very necessary for Microsoft in the long term. The IPs and the branding is valuable, but otherwise not much else is. Microsoft arguably has too many game developers as is. So managed decline? Maybe.
I don’t see a WoW 2 happening though. I struggle to even imagine a future Warcraft game, because the franchise seems so uninviting to uninitiated people. How do you even get into this monstrosity these days? I think that’s also why Hearthstone ditched the “Heroes of Warcraft” subtitle and went for a more generic fantasy gameplay design, and why Warcraft Rumble hasn’t been very successful - there’s just no appetite for Warcraft, except for us who already indulge in it.
