IDrownFish of the Seven Seas wrote:
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 sh*t 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.
As someone who mained a Mage for a while, I have to strongly disagree with you here. The class is essentially defined by the inflexibility of the engine, even now. Their only real recourse is to make the class more and more basic as time goes on, because the engine issues just get magnified.
The base code of the game isn't really any more or less impressive than any other game. But the level of processing power that can be thrown at it now is quite large, and new features are added to take advantage of that. But we aren't really talking a really simple, clean upgrade here. More like a messy lump stacked on top of another really messy lump.
The real thing of importance is that they have a **** ton of money they can spend on engineers to work to get that messy lump looking like something really pretty on the outside. And even then, there are plenty of basic things (that have been big problems for a LONG time) that they just can't fix.
But when they aren't hitting points where the engine just gives them a flat "no," they have the money (and the strong business motive to actually use it) to ensure that the messy lump works well enough to be one of the more polished systems out there.
Most modern MMOs probably have code that's much more eloquent, modular, and upgradeable than WoW's is (having, you know, learned from WoW's mistakes, with access to upgraded engines). But they have a small fraction of WoW's budget. And that really, really matters.