Ghostcrawler's Cataclysm Post Mortem

[Sam DeathWalker]

If they want a new engine they need to port the whole game over to the new engine, keeping existing zones, art and characters. EQ2 was not the sucess that new graphics and new engine was hoping for. Anything else is just a loss for them. Or just have the new engine in the new expansion zones only.... They are doing it right, they were able to learn from every error EQ made.

[kate]

If they want a new engine they need to port the whole game over to the new engine, keeping existing zones, art and characters. EQ2 was not the sucess that new graphics and new engine was hoping for. Anything else is just a loss for them. Or just have the new engine in the new expansion zones only.... They are doing it right, they were able to learn from every error EQ made.

Ualaa, this is what I was getting at when I said what would be the point of WoW 2 - Sam's got it exactly. They could completely re-write the code-base and do their best to import everything into the new engine without having to actually launch it as a separate game, allowing there to be at least some decent level of continuity while also getting the benefits of a "cleaner" codebase that doesn't need to support as much crazy legacy cruft.

I get the benefits from the back-end of things, but what I'm asking about is what would be the benefit of an entirely new game without any carryover from WoW 1 that *couldn't* be gained by just completely rebuilding the server & client applications and then modifying and importing everything into the new engine. How do you market it to people? I mean, starting entirely from scratch seems like it would have a very, very narrow appeal, and could just as easily be accomplished by making a few realms on the new system (if they even had discrete realms instead of a different way of handling things) that would only be for new characters and would never allow inbound transfers.

I guess it just seems to me like the way for them to have their cake and eat it to would be to make the new system and then make it a big old exciting launch to switch over to it (like Cataclysm, but uh, competently executed and obviously more extensive) - that way they get the new people for a "new" game, get to keep the old people who want to play the same characters, and they could even leave a few legacy realms around for people who want to continue playing the original engine, kind of like how EQ1 was handled, though without new content ever being added to the old system - just freeze it in place.