How Hard Would This Be?

CeeKay · Post by **CeeKay** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 2:09 am

I was playing WoW earlier and this occured to me:

Blizzard has this pretty decent game engine, so how hard would it be to make a single player game with it? I'm sure they would have to tweak the AI, but all of the content is already there and all they would need to do (I think) is created a plot for SP. With all of those warcraft fans out there it would probably sell like crazy. Or what if they changed it and made Diablo 3 with it? And imagine the possiblities of a superheroes game using the City of Heroes engine.

It's just a thought.

Turtle · Post by **Turtle** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 2:17 am

Well they can easily use the rendering engine from Wow for other projects.

However, the other parts I'm not so sure about. You see, engines aren't just one solid block of code these days. It's all segmented and various sections like network code, sound code, etc...

Heck, some licensed parts are supplied already compiled into a dynamic linked library (DLL) or something similar (real programmers would know the real names). So programmers might be using something they haven't even seen the code for.

Who knows whether the Starcraft Ghost rendering engine isn't the same one as WoW?

EddieA · Post by **EddieA** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 6:38 am

If they just took WoW and made a single-player offline version of it, I'd buy it in a second, even if it were twice the price of a regular game.

Spike · Post by **Spike** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 9:28 am

EddieA wrote:If they just took WoW and made a single-player offline version of it, I'd buy it in a second, even if it were twice the price of a regular game.

Trouble is, they'd have to build in the server logic part, which would make the online version terribly susceptible to hacking, I would suspect.

I agree, though: an offline MMORPG world would be pretty cool (cf. Morrowind...).

Bertran · Post by **Bertran** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 12:36 pm

I, too, would love to see this - I've been pretty intrigued by WOW, but really don't want to get sucked into a MMORPG. Plus, I have a philosophical objection to paying for a game more than once.

I just don't see this happening, however. I'm sure that it's technically possible (disclaimer: I have absolutely no programming knowedge whatsoever), but I can't see Blizzard sinking a bunch of additional effort (above and beyond the effort of maintaining WOW for the paying subscribers) into such a project just so people can buy it once and be done with it (in other words, to recoup less money). I'm sure that one person who subscribes for a few months (or longer; I have no idea how long the "average" person subscribes to a MMORPG, and WOW is too new to have any real data on this point) is worth a bunch of people who would just buy it once as a standalone, single player game.

Pity, though. I love the style of the game, and would love to explore the world as a single-player experience without all of the MMORPG aspects that I don't like.

Ramoz · Post by **Ramoz** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 3:24 pm

They'd have to change a ton of missions to be accesible for a SP experience unless they made the player a lot more powerful. A lot of elite missions can't be soloed at the recommended level.

ignar · Post by **ignar** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 4:18 pm

Spike wrote:
EddieA wrote:If they just took WoW and made a single-player offline version of it, I'd buy it in a second, even if it were twice the price of a regular game.
Trouble is, they'd have to build in the server logic part, which would make the online version terribly susceptible to hacking, I would suspect.

I agree, though: an offline MMORPG world would be pretty cool (cf. Morrowind...).

I played WOW for a couple weeks and really liked the game. I agree offline WOW would be very nice. In fact, playing WOW got me interested in Morrowind which I never could get into before. Is there any other single player game like WOW other than Morrowind?