That is not what I would consider “works fine”. The only game I play at 25 fps is Ocarina of time on the N64.
Well, yes. Businesses thrive on profit - that’s how they stay afloat. If you’re not making profit then you go bankrupt… that’s just how the real world works.
They aren’t about to abandon an already successful MMO to spend many years working on a new engine and developing content for it. People would leave the current version if they weren’t receiving content and they’d have no money to fund the development of the new engine.
Realistically what they could do is revamp the older zones. There’s no need for an entire new engine.
Alot of people here instantly correlate a new engine with better graphics, which isn’t generally wrong but it would be for wow’s case.
In the tiny chance that the devs do shift to a new engine, it wont be for graphics at all. More so for the overall, smoothness, reliability and versatility they can deploy.
Wow will probably not get a new engine but if they did, id imagine they would do it more so for more capability in creating new fun content.
But im sure somewhere down the line they have some sort of upgrade planned, cant say if its a new engine tho.
In terms of graphics capabilities, the WoW engine is actually at the bleeding edge. While it can’t yet do crazy things like auto generated lightmaps (to be fair, very few engines can do that), the devs have successfully made it so the game relies much more on the GPU than the CPU for chunk loading, which has dramatically improved performance on newer hardware and freed up CPU resources for stuff like Addons. It also has implemented some degree of ray tracing (shadows) and also does make use of Fidelity FX, which is very needed to eke out more performance on lower resolutions. Given the fact this game supports addons, has to do a ton of network syncing, and can efficiently render many more models in a single frame than most games are designed for, I think the engine is quite solid actually.
Also I cringe a little bit every time the latest “Unreal Engine” WoW-render video comes out. Yes this game is actually pretty capable of rendering graphics like that, but it would deviate too far away from the “Warcraft” style. Also, Blizzard would have to redo a million different assets to avoid issues with disconnecting styles from previous expansions.
Where the WoW engine probably falls short is in model morphing, which is likely where players get the idea from. i.e. being able to add more niche customizations to characters. I obviously don’t know the reason why this part of the game has been stubbornly slow to advance over time, but this is an area that can definitely be improved.
The real problematic stutter is caused by tons of events firing during some bosses or certain abilities. It overloads even the million dollar CPUs used by the streamers and all 20 people in my raid experience it at the exact same second, so this isn’t just a personal problem.
this topics comes up often. And honestly they should not change engine. Theres so many people playing this game from a potatoe pc, this way even non hardcore gamers can play the game.
and second it would cost so much money and time to make a game with a new engine. Especially if you dont want to leave stuff we already have in game out.
Remaking the game would mean leaving alot of players wich still play currently behind in the hope of getting new players in. That way wow would be reduced to the latest flavor of the month mmorpg wich dies after a few months