I am a returning player and was wondering what the community is thinking about the in-game graphics. I also understand that some prefer cartoonish type graphics and others want a more realistic type. While reading some older posts I ran across a new type of engine WoW Unreal engine 4 and I like it.
I know it is a lot of work for Blizz to change to it and the system requirements for the rest of us will change also but how many of you do you would like them changing to a new engine?
What if Blizz would come out with one zone on a test server for us to play around with and see if we like it and how laggy and unstable would it be?
Honestly WoW’s engine holds up incredibly well. I don’t see any reason for changing it. Other MMO’s on the market don’t even get close to WoW’s fluidity.
Graphically, it’s a little jarring to see those older zones with trees that have 3 pixel canopy. That’s about it though. Everything from MoP and onwards still looks great.
I can’t understand why anyone would play WoW if they wanted realistic graphics. It’s not that type of game. If you want that kind of realism in your games there are others to choose from. I think WoW would lose part of it’s charm.
The cartoon graphics are part of wow and I like it. I also like how lightweight the game runs in terms of runtime resource usage. Compared to WoW, most modern game engines are unoptimized bloatware.
I most definitely agree with you all, there is something in the game that we are used to and drawn to. I do however hope Blizz is going to continue to improve. The cartoon look can most certainly stay by the pixelization i believe needs to change. I was so happy when NVIDIA came out with the in-game shaders yey
Make WoW look realistic and it no longer will look like WoW. Cartoonish style was in Warcraft since the beginning. It can’t be changed. In fact Blizzard tried to make WoW more realistic when they developed it. That idea was scrapped becasue it didn’t look like Warcraft anymore.
Another thing is changing just the engine wouldn’t change how the game looks. Graphics engine is just a piece of software that draws stuff on the screen. That’s it. All of those “WoW in Unreal” things could be done in wow without changing the engine to Unreal. All you need is to is to stop wow’s development for few years and redo all the grapchic assets. In fact that would be cheaper becasue if they would go to Unreal then they would also need to redo every script and mechanic to work with Unreal. You don’t need to change the engine for that. Blizzard can do whatever they want in their wow engine becasue they made so they can change any piece of code, add any new function they want. On top of that I don’t think Blizzard would want to put on themselves additional cost of unreal licencing.
The reason why many people redo some parts of WoW in Unreal engine is becasue Unreal is just easy to get and easy to work with. You can get Unreal engine for free and make something. And they can’t realy do that on WoW’s engine because it’s not available outside of Blizzard.
I like the pastel picture wow has , that’s how it’s meant to be ,i doubt that they will ever move to unreal engine it’s just not the type of game for that .
No argument there. I have been coming and going when it comes to WoW but i think the only real reasons why I leave other than being burned out are the graphics. Like i previously stated, I do not mind the cartoon look but older gear has no layers and I could not find any updates from Blizz to suggest that they will change the old zones and armor to the newer versions. Even for the sake of transmogrifying.
Improving graphics is easily possible without changing the engine. I honestly don’t get why people are so obsessed with Unreal Engine, from my experience it’s very performance intensive. You need a strong Pc to make Fortnite run smooth (smooth in a shooter means 150+ FPS for me) and Fortnite has a cartoon style as well.
Don’t get me wrong, I really like the idea of improving graphics (they are actually doing it but very slowly) but they should also stick to this cartoon style in my opinion. Making the graphics as good as in Overwatch would be perfect for example. What they shouldn’t do is trying to make WoW look like a Far Cry game.
A; the cartoon’y was a conscious decision so the game didn’t look old & busted a year later & so the 80% of the player base who run wow on a potato could actually play the game
& B; the game is 15 years old, with 13 years of stuff layer’d ontop of that engine, the reason half the game breaks from time to time is all the spaghetti code, its all linked, one patch will buff a hunter spell & for some unknown reason a paladin spell breaks
improving graphics is one thing, it happens every x-pac & looks good, a new engine would be like trying to replace the foundations of a skyscraper without the thing falling down, it would take half as much effort to make a whole new game
I bet OP knows it. What he’s and the rest of the community wants is WoW 2 or remake with UE4 or any other engine that makes WoW beautiful and popular like back in 2004 when it was initially released.
Blizzard could make WOW beautiful too without changing engine, since shaders really are just ONE small part of whole thing. And they keep altering and improving parts on the go. If people really think that engine is ‘same thing as 15 years ago’ they really need a bit of updating to do.
Also fact is that UE is not as good as it looks on pictures. Have people even worked with it. heck even ugliest of looking engines can dish out photorealism (notoriously Creation Engine that Bethesda uses which actually has good LUT support and shaders and the wash out visuals their games have is just design choice) and yet actually ugly looking Creation is in many aspects more versatile than UE. Just UE is freely available engine that has become popular to tinker with.
And each game works best on engine made for it. So if Blizzard would want to update wow to wow 2, they’d need to invest millions upon millions for development of something that may not even be worth it.
