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[WOW] Patch 8.2.5, shorter version: J. Allen Brack is a big Meanie

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Posts

  • reVersereVerse Attack and Dethrone God Registered User regular
    edited September 2019
    Oh sure, graphically FF14 is much more advanced. It's cool how when your character emerges from water or there's rain they add a little wet sheen effect on them, or how if you're just standing about and it's getting windy your character's clothes and hair flap about. Not in any sort of realistic manner, but just enough to establish that they are a part of the world.

    In WoW, I guess your cape and hair sometimes flap around as part of spell casting animations, but as far as I know never as a passive reaction to how the world is acting.

    WoW characters are like the small GI Joe toys from the 90s, and FF14 are Barbies. They're both perfectly fine toys, but Barbies got real toy hair and real toy clothes instead of being a static mold that you can attach weapons and back items to.

    Also, and maybe this is just a personal grievance, I aint ever really seen anyone talk about this, but to me it feels like the WoW character models are tiny. I guess it's because the WoW engine started out as a heavily modified Warcraft 3 engine and RTS characters are small for gameplay reasons. Not a huge issue most of the time, but I personally feel that most WoW characters look pretty bad up close, whereas in most MMOs what game after WoW it's usually not as big of an issue.

    So uh, yeah. WoW 2 please. Let's upgrade them graphics at least to Heroes of the Storm level.

    reVerse on
  • DhalphirDhalphir don't you open that trapdoor you're a fool if you dareRegistered User regular
    reVerse wrote: »
    to me it feels like the WoW character models are tiny.

    whatever gave you that feeling certainly not these realistically sized doorways

    r4dl59hsh2u9.png

  • CaedwyrCaedwyr Registered User regular
    FFXIV's netcode isn't great. WoW's has been pretty smooth up to when I stopped playing in WoD. I'd be fine with the FFXIV longer GCD because of how the game is designed around the extra time, but I'd love it if they would change things so the game was as responsive as WoW for character movement, position snapshotting, and latency compensation mechanisms.

    Also, there's some brilliant engineering behind the ability to play while the game is downloading in the background that WoW has working for it.

  • BahamutZEROBahamutZERO Registered User regular
    yeah I agree that wow's netcode feels better, and blizzard's streaming install tech is pretty cool

    BahamutZERO.gif
  • I needed anime to post.I needed anime to post. boom Registered User regular
    in conclusion, ff14 and wow are a land of contrasts

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  • LucascraftLucascraft Registered User regular
    edited September 2019
    The biggest technical limitation to XIV is that it was designed originally to work on PS3. I realize that now they have dropped PS3 support. But the underlying game engine and technical specs upon which the game is built are all designed with the PS3 hardware in mind.

    That's why the game world has zones instead of one big seamless world. That's why the game has these weird little things like not being able to talk to NPCs while mounted. That all roots from the fact that the game was designed to be run on machines that, by today's hardware standards, are potatoes.


    Anyway, I dunno if they'd be able to salvage WoW's engine at this point. There's no "good" option for aging MMOs.

    They could end WoW 1, relaunch as WoW 2, and hope that their playerbase stays with them.

    They could try to simultaneously run WoW 1 and WoW 2, with the understanding that new content support for WoW 1 is done, and if you want new content you have to switch to WoW 2.

    They could attempt to do a major tech upgrade on WoW 1 and just keep that game going for eternity, but I think you can only tech upgrade so far. The problem isn't just tech. The problem is the spaghetti code.


    Like, anything they do is gonna have negative repercussions. There's not a good solution. Each of those options I listed has major downsides. Even "maintain the status quo" comes with a pretty strong list of negatives.

    Lucascraft on
  • kaidkaid Registered User regular
    reVerse wrote: »
    Oh sure, graphically FF14 is much more advanced. It's cool how when your character emerges from water or there's rain they add a little wet sheen effect on them, or how if you're just standing about and it's getting windy your character's clothes and hair flap about. Not in any sort of realistic manner, but just enough to establish that they are a part of the world.

    In WoW, I guess your cape and hair sometimes flap around as part of spell casting animations, but as far as I know never as a passive reaction to how the world is acting.

    WoW characters are like the small GI Joe toys from the 90s, and FF14 are Barbies. They're both perfectly fine toys, but Barbies got real toy hair and real toy clothes instead of being a static mold that you can attach weapons and back items to.

    Also, and maybe this is just a personal grievance, I aint ever really seen anyone talk about this, but to me it feels like the WoW character models are tiny. I guess it's because the WoW engine started out as a heavily modified Warcraft 3 engine and RTS characters are small for gameplay reasons. Not a huge issue most of the time, but I personally feel that most WoW characters look pretty bad up close, whereas in most MMOs what game after WoW it's usually not as big of an issue.

    So uh, yeah. WoW 2 please. Let's upgrade them graphics at least to Heroes of the Storm level.

    Some of that is most people tend to play with the camera very pulled back. heroes of the storm won't let you pull the camera back past a certain point so its easier to make the "correct" sized model because you know exactly the viewing distance people will have. Wow character models are big enough but when most people have their cameras at max zoom out for situational awareness everything looks tiny. The real fix would likely wind up be binding the camera zoom out and that would enrage people.

  • LucascraftLucascraft Registered User regular
    WoW character models also feel small because they make lore characters enormous. So you put your character next to Thrall or Jaina, and you look tiny. Even tauren look tiny compared to lore characters.

  • ZekZek Registered User regular
    People often conflate game engine with game feel, they're totally different things. An engine is a very versatile thing - Unity and UE4 are game engines and they can do anything. Companies making their own engines may or may not be that versatile. We don't know what the capabilities of WoW's engine are, but just being able to run a game at this scale and complexity is a huge task. Creating an MMO from scratch is a hugely expensive undertaking - when you've got a battle-hardened engine that can do all this stuff, you don't just abandon it. If they did a sequel they'd probably fork the engine, and make changes to it that may have been too disruptive to be done to the base game, cutting away the cruft, etc.

  • ZekZek Registered User regular
    In any event I don't think they're making a major investment in re-inventing WoW any time soon, all the rumors point to Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 as being the next big things for the company which they've been re-aligning their resources behind. So WoW probably just has the usual team making another expansion at the usual scale - that doesn't preclude big changes, but it means no sequel.

  • LucascraftLucascraft Registered User regular
    I still think 9.0 will be bigger than normal. Because their art team surely isn't being utilized to it's fullest for BfA.

  • BahamutZEROBahamutZERO Registered User regular
    alternately and much more likely, they've either moved a lot of the WoW devs onto other projects or fired them

    BahamutZERO.gif
  • 3cl1ps33cl1ps3 I will build a labyrinth to house the cheese Registered User regular
    Supposedly 9.0 is a full revamp of the entire world, which is what the art team has mostly been working on.

  • BahamutZEROBahamutZERO Registered User regular
    3clipse wrote: »
    Supposedly 9.0 is a full revamp of the entire world, which is what the art team has mostly been working on.

    uhhhh source for this?

    BahamutZERO.gif
  • 3cl1ps33cl1ps3 I will build a labyrinth to house the cheese Registered User regular
    3clipse wrote: »
    Supposedly 9.0 is a full revamp of the entire world, which is what the art team has mostly been working on.

    uhhhh source for this?

    Scuttlebutt and rumors from friends who work in the industry. Conjecture based on how many Island Expeditions have tons of brand news assets that are suspiciously like tooled-up versions of existing assets elsewhere in the world. The disparity between the work being done on BfA and how many people we know for a fact are members of the WoW team.

  • 3cl1ps33cl1ps3 I will build a labyrinth to house the cheese Registered User regular
    Like either 60% of the WoW team spend their days playing Candy Crush or something huge is coming down the pipe, the dev team numbers are published periodically and the WoW team is the biggest it's ever been. Those folks have not been moved elsewhere.

  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    3clipse wrote: »
    Like either 60% of the WoW team spend their days playing Candy Crush or something huge is coming down the pipe, the dev team numbers are published periodically and the WoW team is the biggest it's ever been. Those folks have not been moved elsewhere.

    Maybe that's why they think everyone plays smartphone games.

    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • BahamutZEROBahamutZERO Registered User regular
    well it'd be cool if this turned out to be true but I remember hearing they were staffing up hard literally back during WoD so they could produce content faster and boy has that not borne any fruit yet.

    BahamutZERO.gif
  • reVersereVerse Attack and Dethrone God Registered User regular
  • I needed anime to post.I needed anime to post. boom Registered User regular
    I mean, that means 8.3 is going to be the finale of the War Campaign. It's just that there won't be an organized series of quests called The War Campaign.

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  • PailryderPailryder Registered User regular
    whenever i hear a reference to getting rid of the old spaghetti code, i always retort with...so we can get new spaghetti code? all tongue in cheek

  • Kai_SanKai_San Commonly known as Klineshrike! Registered User regular
    well it'd be cool if this turned out to be true but I remember hearing they were staffing up hard literally back during WoD so they could produce content faster and boy has that not borne any fruit yet.

    IF they shored it up around WoD, that would have been people working on Legion. Which kind of does show honestly.

    The other hint toward the world revamp is that survey that clearly stated there was a level squish planned. That wasn't made up, it was a legit thing from Blizzard and it flat out said "did you know there is going to be a level squish".

    Not to mention I still think 9.0 is something huge if they didn't even drop a shred of a hint about it with any info on 8.3.

  • DhalphirDhalphir don't you open that trapdoor you're a fool if you dareRegistered User regular
    I feel like 8.2 was also a lot smaller than 7.2, so that dev work has to be going somewhere

  • DonnictonDonnicton Registered User regular
    Dhalphir wrote: »
    I feel like 8.2 was also a lot smaller than 7.2, so that dev work has to be going somewhere

    WoW2 confirmed


    :rotate:

  • fortyforty Registered User regular
    I thought every other expansion was "the good one."

  • BahamutZEROBahamutZERO Registered User regular
    forty wrote: »
    I thought every other expansion was "the good one."

    it kinda seems like it, huh? I wonder if it's pure coincidence, some sort of perception bias of getting tired of the game then being into it again on a 4 year cycle, or an actual barometer of the quality rising and falling.

    BahamutZERO.gif
  • DonnictonDonnicton Registered User regular
    forty wrote: »
    I thought every other expansion was "the good one."

    Every last expansion is "the good one". The current expansion is bad until the next one comes out and people hate it and oh man that last expansion we had was so good can we go back to that

  • LucascraftLucascraft Registered User regular
    Nobody will say that about BfA.

    BfA is the worst it has ever been. The game is grindier than ever, there's less reason to raid and farm gear than ever before, Azerite traits are still a pain in the ass, having to grind undesired play modes for essences is not great. And the war campaign story is still garbo. And of course they're totally phoning it in on armor this time. The Eternal Palace fish fin armor is some of the weakest visual design they've ever had (Normal and heroic, some of the Mythic is actually not the worst).

    At this point, even if they do somehow manage to come up with an acceptable conclusion to the war campaign story, the writing all along the way has still been so shitty that I don't think a good resolution will fix people's perception of it.

  • reVersereVerse Attack and Dethrone God Registered User regular
    Donnicton wrote: »
    forty wrote: »
    I thought every other expansion was "the good one."

    Every last expansion is "the good one". The current expansion is bad until the next one comes out and people hate it and oh man that last expansion we had was so good can we go back to that

    Very few people thought that Cataclysm or Warlords were "the good one" when Pandaria and Legion came out.

  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    BC and Wrath also kind of break the ordering

    BC improved on vanilla, was still good, wrath improved on bc, was still considered good

    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • SmrtnikSmrtnik job boli zub Registered User regular
    The pattern holds up

    Vanilla was great
    TBC to me was mediocre in retrospect, though i know many loved it (my guess they started vanilla late).
    WotLK was great
    Cataclysm was an expensive disappointment
    MoP is contender (with legion) for best, criminally underrated by many who went "kung fu panda dur dur dur" and didn't give it a proper chance
    WoD had the bones of something great but was seemingly abandoned by Blizz and phoned in soon after release
    Legion was fantastic
    BfA is a confused mess that doesn't know what it wants to be about

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  • FairchildFairchild Rabbit used short words that were easy to understand, like "Hello Pooh, how about Lunch ?" Registered User regular
    BfA is a confused mess that doesn't know what it wants to be about

    With BFA, we can clearly now see when upper management stepped in and told Ion and the developers to stop messing up and take seriously their job of running a fun game that players enjoy.

  • KamarKamar Registered User regular
    edited September 2019
    I wasn't playing much during either of the previous low points, and Cat and WoD were fine for initial questing and alt stuff imo.

    Which makes BFA unambiguously the worst it's ever been for me.

    Kamar on
  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    BC was better than Vanilla because the hybrid tax was phased away for the most part, change my mind

    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • FairchildFairchild Rabbit used short words that were easy to understand, like "Hello Pooh, how about Lunch ?" Registered User regular
    I thought CATACLYSM was fine, which seems to put me in a distinct minority.

  • DonnictonDonnicton Registered User regular
    bowen wrote: »
    BC was better than Vanilla because the hybrid tax was phased away for the most part, change my mind

    Mages got the tax instead.

    jaw-dropping damage

  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    Fairchild wrote: »
    I thought CATACLYSM was fine, which seems to put me in a distinct minority.

    I think legion was garbage but apparently people fucking loved it. Cata sort of started the whole "instead of logging in once or twice a week once you're max level, you should really log in every day." They never really expanded it until legion hit. Legion's world quests being a daily thing and taking WoDs table and make it just worse in every way to further that world quest nonsense really put a sour taste in my mouth for the whole game.

    Like I like some of the ideas it had with the weapon and the class hall and all that but it really penalized people who couldn't be on every day.

    As much talk as there is about "respecting your time" modern wow definitely doesn't do that at all, and hasn't since wrath or BC.

    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • DonnictonDonnicton Registered User regular
    bowen wrote: »
    Fairchild wrote: »
    I thought CATACLYSM was fine, which seems to put me in a distinct minority.

    I think legion was garbage but apparently people fucking loved it. Cata sort of started the whole "instead of logging in once or twice a week once you're max level, you should really log in every day." They never really expanded it until legion hit. Legion's world quests being a daily thing and taking WoDs table and make it just worse in every way to further that world quest nonsense really put a sour taste in my mouth for the whole game.

    Like I like some of the ideas it had with the weapon and the class hall and all that but it really penalized people who couldn't be on every day.

    As much talk as there is about "respecting your time" modern wow definitely doesn't do that at all, and hasn't since wrath or BC.

    Legion was also the start of the shift in design philosophy to nearly outright hostility towards alts that they haven't really done much to remedy since.

  • LucascraftLucascraft Registered User regular
    There was only one aspect of Legion that I didn't like, and that was the zone of Suramar and all the quest chains involved therein. That zone is a miserable pile of filth and in my opinion is the worst outdoor zone they have ever made. Other than that, Legion was pretty much a perfect expansion for me.

    BC was good, but it was an experimental phase for them. They were trying new things to see what stuck. And some of those experiments were not great for the social side of the game. Starting the expansion with a 10 man raid, and then going to 25man, it caused serious problems for raid groups. In 10 man Kara, you needed 2 tanks. But in 25man content you did not need 4 tanks. There was just a lot of weird stuff that made guild management a nightmare.

  • fortyforty Registered User regular
    Smrtnik wrote: »
    The pattern holds up

    Vanilla was great
    TBC to me was mediocre in retrospect, though i know many loved it (my guess they started vanilla late).
    WotLK was great
    Cataclysm was an expensive disappointment
    MoP is contender (with legion) for best, criminally underrated by many who went "kung fu panda dur dur dur" and didn't give it a proper chance
    WoD had the bones of something great but was seemingly abandoned by Blizz and phoned in soon after release
    Legion was fantastic
    BfA is a confused mess that doesn't know what it wants to be about
    Blizzard picking up where the old Star Trek movies left off.

This discussion has been closed.