Wrapping things up tonight, the guys over at EuroGamer have posted a quick Q&A with Blizzard Entertainment regarding their upcoming World of WarCraft: Wrath of the Lich King expansion pack. One of the more interesting questions asked was about the possibility of doing a major graphics engine update. Their response?
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.
Sounds like a definite possibility! Let's hope it happens. ;)
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