I’ve been playing the TBC BETA for a week now and reactivated my sub the other day, logged on my classic char to confirm my suspicion that the current live classic vanilla game looks way better than TBC (both Beta and PTR) since there are actual shadows on everything including units and gear, everything looks just darker and more realistic, there is a huge difference between the SSAO low setting comparred to ultra in Vanilla (live), but on TBC BETA and prepatch PTR there is no difference, everything looks bright and flat no matter what.
EDIT: Now that the prepatch is live I took some screenshots just a few minutes apart with both clients and identical video settings, and you can clearly see the huge difference on the characters and NPCs affected by lighting and shadows, Classic Vanilla has more realistic depth or “dynamic lighting”, also check out the individual stones on the ground which have a slightly darker outline in Vanilla Classic, in TBC everything looks “flat”. The color of the lighting (the red dirt or the structure in the moon well etc) also seems different, I don’t know if this is related, but something is definitely missing in TBC or just turned off.
I hope this gets resolved before release and that it’s not indended, why should a newer game look worse?
I was shocked when i saw the ugly retail water . Set “liquids” (or whatever the setting is called) back to low and there it was; my beautiful classic water.
Ofc we did, but Blizz already put something about SSAO in their known issues list.
You can just simply create a new lvl 1 character and test it in say valley of trials during daytime on the TBC client and another on the Classic client with the exact same settings and see for yourself, hence my screenshots to show how bad TBC actually looks (also notice the slight lighting color difference on the moon well structure):
imgurDOTcom/a/gOUOBcJ (replace the DOT with an actual dot)
TBC looks worse than the original 13 years ago imo (I checked some old screenshots too) because everything is simply too bright and “fully lit” all the time. Leveling my bloodelf in prepatch is atrocious right now! Everything looks washed out and flat.
I have noticed some weird lighting in the grass. Sometimes a patch of grass has more light than the rest like there was a light spotlight on that patch. The next time it happens I will check to change the settings because currently, I have everything at max possible, including raytracing.