Hello,
to start off I’d like to say I greatly appreciate the work you guys in ArenaNet put into our beloved game.
The business model is great for a western mmo, the combat mechanics is great. I don’t want to touch on the balance and skill decisions cause I hate them – pvp became quite “flashy” instead of being thoughtful but that’s just me and that’s not the topic about that.
The support is great, the organisation of “e-sport” events and so on. Living story, bringing anual fesitvals, achievement system and so on – I loove alll of it.
But we have to face a big problem.
I guess bringing a new renderer to modify the engine takes a lot of work and money and time.
I know the problem of low FPS in world vs world or overpopulated maps is not the issue of renderer only but also the problem for servers to handle and to count that many actions with this beautiful combat system.
Thing is server can be upgraded with new products from intel amd and nvidia that count thingies – I’m not an expert at this even tho I study electronics – this kitten is quite complicated to write about in some general discussion topic.
But even with that the CPUs that are designed for us players that are available at the market will probably not give us 60 or even stable 30 FPS in some instances like WVW.
Simply said gamers consume too much energy so the clocks will not be rised above 4/5 GHz (and that’s already too high probably), even with the upgrades to architecture of the CPUs we are not going to see much more improvements – that’s because of the limitations of our beloved x86-32/64 .
Intel, Samsung and other leaders in foundry industry are nearing the wall that’s not gonna be easily crossed in terms of the ’’process’’ – assuming we’ll stay within the current architecture.
Metalisation processes are far behind for sure – but one could talk about it all day long.
Anywho, there are many challenges that need to be beaten.
Still having in mind that the game is a business – being the passion of developers and the players is one thing but the company needs to bring profit.
From what I understand you guys want the game to be a really long term investment, to bring joy and to share passion with us, for that to work decisions will need to be made – I know you are already working on that we could see many improvements in HOT, but these were “high abstraction layer” changes and what the game needs – maybe not as a first priority is some low abstraction, mechanical, maybe “metal”, touch.
I don’t really know if what I’ve written made any sense and I guess there’s someone among the developers that’s having wet dreams about new API usage, still I just needed to share this scribble of mine.
TL;DR – even tho it is one of the lowest priorities in running and maintaining the game, GW2 needs some engine/renderer modifications – this is not going to fix all of the problems but it will be a big quality of code change