New game engine

[Drecien.4508]

I know it's been talked about before. What if Anet set aside some resources to rebuild/rework the game engine so it would not be such a pain to patch and debug for them? It certainly would take some time, but I would be willing to wait on some significant story till it was done. They could give us filler until it's ready and migrate the data over. Thoughts on this? Would you be willing to wait say 1 year if they could pull it off?

[Rhyse.8179]

They can't pull off a balance patch more often then twice a year. What makes you think this is possible?

[Drecien.4508]

@Rhyse.8179 said:They can't pull off a balance patch more often then twice a year. What makes you think this is possible?

If the resources needed were pulled away from less critical elements of the game and perhaps the story stalled for a bit, I'm sure it could done.

[Randulf.7614]

And where would they earn the money during this 1 year hiatus?

Players already comlain loudly when a chapter is potentially 1 week overdue on a 3 month schedule, a year wait would likely do irreparable population damage, with little guarantee the problems would be solved anyway.

[Drecien.4508]

@Randulf.7614 said:And where would they earn the money during this 1 year hiatus?

Players already comlain loudly when a chapter is potentially 1 week overdue on a 3 month schedule, a year wait would likely do irreparable population damage, with little guarantee the problems would be solved anyway.

This is very true. So if they pulled a team aside and took more time with less people the area the team came from would suffer instead of the entire population. Not sure where the funds would come from.

[zealex.9410]

@Rhyse.8179 said:They can't pull off a balance patch more often then twice a year. What makes you think this is possible?

But like we got 5 or so since the exoac launched...

[Lord Kreegan.8123]

They don't really need a new game engine; they need to quit making stupid design decisions like having a camera that arbitrarily decides where the FOV is going to be as you move adjacent to anything; spawning mobs behind you outside of the FOV of the camera such that you're being attacked without even knowing you're being attacked; re-spawning mobs you've just killed before you can even recover from killing them the first time, not letting you plan out your fight; spawning mobs out of the ether that weren't in a location when you started a fight such that you can't plan out your fight; using invisible walls and "slippery slopes" [terrain at less of an incline than you just climbed, but designed to make you slip off] rather than doing good terrain design; having stupid jumping mechanics, especially for jumping puzzles, which are so inconsistent in behavior in terms of how far you jump, how high you jump, and whether or not you are even going to jump when you hit the space bar; having VFX so severe that it can be absolutely impossible to see who you're targeting or who is targeting you; allowing "stacking" of players, especially in WvW, such that it's impossible to selectively target others; having a tab-targeting system which does not work; having auto-targeting that targets trees, deer, wagons, and anything not worth targeting; having auto-targeting that doesn't stop auto-targeting even when turned off; having a total lack of anything even vaguely resembling class balance; having "insta-death" mechanics -- no player of any class should ever be one-shot by a mob, by another player, or even by a zerg -- all players should have the opportunity to defend themselves and AT LEAST REACT to a situation before instantly dying; and having ugly character graphics with armor that doesn't scale properly.

Fix all that and players will think they've got a brand new engine.

[Drecien.4508]

Those are not point related to the issue at hand. Crashes, bugs, glitches in the system that prevent new mechanics because the code is "So old" from the devs. This is meant as a constructive discussion, not an internet triad towards the game.

[Randulf.7614]

An engine rework is likely to take more than a year anyway. I remember when Anarchy Online tried to do it for the same reason years ago. I think it took 5 years to get into a beta state, was in an even glitchier state, content had been abandoned, players had left in frustration and the game went into maintenance mode.

I doubt they could just pull a team off to work on it without utter disruption to all teams and the longer term plans for the game.

That isnt to say in a few years they wont revisit, but realistically, an overhaul wont be on the cards in any forseeable future if ever

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

How many engine programming teams do they have, anyway? It's not like they could just pull anybody off a team to do an engine overhaul.

[Ok I Did It.2854]

This wont happen honestly, the time and resources needed to preform this would not be worth it for them,

I could see them completely re-doing the game engine to really take advantage of newer hardware etc in another game ( GW3 ) but that is likely years away if ever, id rather like to see them push the boundaries of what hardware can do, I think when they made GW2, trying to make it so user friendly to machines that where already x years ago and outdated really held them back development wise.

[Astralporing.1957]

@Drecien.4508 said:

@Rhyse.8179 said:They can't pull off a balance patch more often then twice a year. What makes you think this is possible?

If the resources needed were pulled away from less critical elements of the game and perhaps the story stalled for a bit, I'm sure it could done.That's the point: they're already so stretched thin that they lack resources for the

critical

elements, and you want them to stretch their workforce even further.

Besides, people working on less critical parts, like story, are different people than would be needed for engine rework. You can't assign to it artists and storytellers (for example) and hope they will be able to do anything. There's likely only a few people they could use for it (those that are working on streamlining the engine even now).

So, basically, you're talking about them firing half of the dev staff, hiring a team for a rework, working for few years (remember, work on current engine took several years, and they weren't even doing it from scratch but just reworking old gw1 code - you can't really expect the new rework to be done much faster) while the game wastes away due to most areas getting no dev attention whatsoever (and no updates either), and then trying to persuade players to come back to a new engine that might be better, but might also end up even more bugged and faulty than this one. While at the same time hiring the new devs to replace those they fired before (which will likely need to be taught first, as they'd have no prior experience on GW2, and there would be no preexisting teams they might get merged into to get that experience in)

I don't see it.

[mtpelion.4562]

Rebuilding/Reworking a game engine post launch is like deciding you need to add an extra foot of height to the 1st floor of a skyscraper. You can redecorate the 1st floor all you want, but raising the physical height is impractical due to the costs involved. It would be far, far cheaper to simply build a new skyscraper than to even attempt to make such a change.

It is for this reason that games come out with sequels.

[ReaverKane.7598]

Atm, i don't think this will be a priority. If the game keeps going, i'm pretty sure that in 2 expansions from now (game will be ~10 years old then) they'll probably want to do an overhaul to keep the game fresh and keep up in terms of tech.For now, the game is still pretty current for it's genre.

And while i argue there's stuff worth "sacrificing" a development team for, a Engine overhaul, for now, isn't one. IMO it would be more important to update a lot of the old content to new tech.A good example is Champions. All champions in-game got slapped with a generic break bar with HoT release, which in some cases completely breaks the original intent of that champion encounter, or just makes them unwieldy to face, and forces players to use "exploitative" tactics like LOS stacking, or simply having to forcefully use the power creep to just plough through the encounter and face-tanking.Old style defiance allowed your ccs to work normally when you broke all stacks of defiance, allowing you to knock back enemies to reposition them, or whatever. Nowadays break bar stuns them for a second or two (when it does even that), and that's pretty much it. This pretty much renders down all cc's worth to simply which one will break more of the bar, it doesn't matter the actual effect, just how much of the break bar gets lowered. Which kinda makes fights entirely interchangeable.

Other stuff would be a big, comprehensive and thorough pass on rewards to revise and update them (for example replace all gear drops with unidentified pieces?, and reduce the difference between cost and reward from playing different expansion/core maps), a crafting revision would also be great, and a cost revision for a lot of vendors (for example the disparity between PoF heart vendors and LW3 and 4 vendors in terms of Ascended gear, also a change to Ascended gear vendors, getting rid of GrandMaster Marks - makes no sense to involve crafting on what should be the alternative to crafting).Etc, etc.There's a lot of backlogged changes and reworks that would greatly benefit the game as whole, as much or even more (due to their ubiquitous nature) than any new LW chapter.