Eurogamer has a great interview with the two World of Warcraft lead designers, Jeff Kaplan and Tom Chilton, and producer J. Allen Brack delving into the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. The interview is very detailed and probing, and it is worth a full read for any WoW aficionados, but what really stood out for me was the discussion of a possible graphical update to WoW.
I was recently discussing with one of my friends how Blizzard was going to handle World of Warcraft 2. Clearly, Blizzard wouldn’t alienate its current fan base by doing an entirely separate game, so any new edition is likely to come in the form of some sort of engine revision down the road. Eurogamer asked that very question:
Eurogamer: Do you think WOW is ever going to need a complete overhaul of the engine?
J. Allen Brack: That’s actually something we talk about every expansion. It’s interesting, two games have really tried that before, Ultima Online tried it and EverQuest tried it as well, and in each case it was only somewhat successful. In each case a lot of people continued to play with the original client, because it was faster, or they preferred it, or were just used to it or whatever. And so for me as a game developer, the idea that we would spend so much time and energy on something and have people go, “meh, that’s not really for me,” that’s not very exciting.
So I don’t think there’s really a clear model as to how to do that successfully. The model we have with Wrath of the Lich King allows people with high-end machines some additional graphical effects, and then we’ll have some kind of fallback for the people who don’t. Will we need a graphical update from the ground up at some point? Yep, probably. And I’m positive we’ll talk about it next expansion.
There it is. It will probably get a graphical update at some point. Whether that’s the next expansion after Wrath of the Lich King or not remains to be seen. I’m not someone who is desperate for new graphics, but I could imagine an engine streamlining the experience some, and that’s something I would enjoy. Also, I want to buy houses. Is that too much to ask? I mined ore for many weeks to get my house in Ultima Online. I want a nice little cottage to raise little Draenei children. Their hoofbeats on the floor would fill my heart with joy.
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