Bored Druid Thread: The Next GenerationFollow

A side affect of their need for stats to increase by stupid amounts each expansion. Because if the best players in the world can beat the first normal mode with the previous expansions gear the game is too easy.

Rift.

Well at least we know there's an upper limit to the madness.

Yup. It's because of the way computers work. The max limit for health is 2^31, or ~2.15 billion health. They can work around it and let it go higher if they wanted to, but that would require a LOT of recoding of some of the most core systems of the game.



They agree with this too. I just wish they were going back farther than they are. Blizzcon suggests they're rolling back to about late WotLK at level 90, and with another expansion or two of growth they'll have to look at doing it all over again.

Don't they still have something crazy like over 7 million subscriptions? Part of me wonders when they just stop dealing with the old program and just rewrite the whole thing from scratch. WoW2 or something built from the ground up, just importing character data from the previous game or what not.

Edited, Apr 3rd 2014 11:56am by someproteinguy

That depends on if they make WoW 2.0 or a different MMO, it would be a bit pointless to launch WoW 2.0 and then have it compete directly with WoW 1.x when they could offer all the people still playing WoW 1.x to buy WoW 2.0 for half price or something.

I think that what you are saying is largely unnecessary. I've touched on this before, but I'm consistently amazed at how future proof they made the game. When they were first creating WoW, they made a lot of incredibly smart decisions that allowed them to continue with what is essentially a ten year old engine at this point.

A good example is projectile effects. Back in Vanilla, a spell like a Hunter's Glaive Toss wouldn't be possible to code. If you threw a fireball at someone, it wouldn't do damage to all targets it passed through. The server recognized that your character cast it, would calculate if it hit or not based on a %chance determined by hit rating, then would deal damage to the target. What was in the way was irrelevant as long as your character had line of sight.

But because the original engine was, I believe, designed to be easy to modify and add on to when the time came, they were able to add hit detection in. Now you can have spells like Glaive Toss too. If you asked me if that kind of thing was possible back in Vanilla, I would have said no. But time and time again they have surprised me with just how well they can push the engine.

I really do think that Blizzard has some incredibly brilliant engineers on their team. Some of the **** they pull, from a programmer's perspective, seems like absolute witchcraft to me. I still think there's some kind of faustian deal involved.

I don't think a remake is due yet. WoW might be running on an ancient engine at this point, but they have so many brilliant people working for them they have already been able to do way more than I thought they would, and I don't really see that changing any time soon.

I'd say that's less a symptom of the game and more of computing in general, though. The reason the cap exists isn't because they coded it that way, it's because in every language everywhere, that's the max for 32-bit systems (what everyone has). There are workarounds, but they're expensive for resources and would slow the game down immensely. I don't really count the number cap against WoW's engine.

Just taking out the exponential growth of the expansions should cut down numbers immensely.

If they rework burning crusade content and all old raids to make them 5 mans and squish stats so a blue item is equal to a green item 5 levels higher, epic equal to green 10 levels higher and legebdary equal to 15 levels higher it should work out. It would be cool to do a lvl 75 instance of Sunwell plateau and be able to get the same loot as you could back then with the legendary bow equal to lvl 90 greens (post squish). If lvl 90 top end epics and legendaries are then equal to basic level whatever blues then sure the top guilds can skip right to raids but they're going to anyway and it all works out.

Edit: old raids as sort of mid level heroics/extra difficult instances (as in CC and follow tactics or wipe non stop) for better loot while leveling would be pretty damn cool. It might even pull me back in if they give some serious discounts to pandaland since I won't be paying €70 to get back into WoW.

Edited, Apr 4th 2014 1:29am by Aethien

Speak of the devil and such.

Hey that's kinda neat (the file thing, not the fact Aethien can't sleep).

Maybe we should discuss WoW going F2P next...

Do it in one of the Final Fantasy general forums. That's always an instant firestorm.

I thought you were a pervert, or are you more on the sadistic side?