WoD was a big visual leap and it made an aging stylized game look objectively good in terms of graphical fidelity (for the game’s art style). The alpha effects, the fog, poly count for most objects and especially foliage etc, saw a big improvement during WoD, which coupled with the new character models, really modernized the game visually.
However, I would say that all the following expansions have kept the graphical complexity at the same level that’s now 9 years old, with the only difference being the increasing of draw distance first in Legion, and now in DF again.
The game still looks very good for its art style and is imo, the best looking MMO that blows stuff like ESO and FF14 out the water as those games strive for semi-realism while still keeping the requirements low, which makes them look very dated. The problem is that Blizzard is now constantly going up close with ingame cinematics like we’re playing a single player RPG, and the graphics fall apart when viewed from that perspective.
The textures on so many characters and environments are VERY low for 2023, and while it doesn’t matter when farming storms in a 69 man raid zoomed out like you’re playing Diablo, it’s pretty obvious and distracting when you’re trying to focus closely on the world or have serious story moments while your characters janky and blurry.
Textures also aren’t expensive on modern hardware, and there’s so much that can be done with lighting to transform the visuals. Fortnite with UE5 features maxed out looks legitimately fantastic and still keeps the same art style. Blizz implemented useless RT shadows but not major stuff like RT global illumination which does wonders for open world games with a day/night cycle. There’s also DLSS to offset the performance cost of such techniques and even improve aliasing as it’s the best AA solution on the market.
The TLDR is, please either modernize the graphics, or stop zooming in for cutscenes because the game does not look good up close. Yes the lipsync and facial animations are better, but that’s about it.
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My laptop cost like 700 euros and it is struggling anything above 7/10 on the graphics slider, we don’t wanna start costing people out of WoW, it’s fine as it is imo.
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the graphics is more than fine, im more worried in the decline of performance in this expansion, for seemingly no increase in quality.
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Seems fine to me. Blizzard cleverly went with a cartoony art style so it stays fresher for longer, while maintaining their older player base who can play without having to fork out for a brand new PC that costs upwards of £1000-2000 just to run the game.
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Most performance problems I’ve seen were in raid fights or with large groups of people in open world. They’re caused by tons of unoptimized events firing and overloading your CPU.
They’re slowly fixing them though. For example First raidboss used to give me sub 10 FPS and now it’s around 30 without me having changed anything.
Might be an unpopular opinion but I think they should go backwards and regress the graphics. I love the old school look and feel of games like EQ. Sadly games nowadays try very hard to make their graphics modern.
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Start?? It happens every expansion, and some patches. Check the support forums. I’ve lost several in-game friends to increased graphics requirements.
Also, as a matter of my personal taste:
I much prefer the feel of graphics of Classic. Retail has a very computationally expensive set of high details that are completely wasted because you never look at them, but it all adds to the clutter.
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Your entry level LAPTOP can’t crank graphics?
I’m shocked.
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We both know you’ve seen Valdrakken, and we both know it’s the best looking city technically an a maybe even artistically in the game’s history.
I think they could do a lot more in terms of lighting and LoD - I would agree the graphics subsystem guys need a kick in the rear, or whatever they’re doing is so amazing and we’ll see it soon, and that’s definitely letting WoW down. The lighting is kinda junk in particular.
But overall… I’ve seen worse. WoW definitely looks the best of all the contemporary MMO’s in my opinion.
Why shouldn’t he be able to run WoW on a 700 Euro device? For people that don’t live with their mammy and daddy still, and actually work for their money as well as paying bills, 700 Euros is a decent amount of money and WoW is nowhere near as demanding as some other games out there.
Who said shouldn’t? It is perfectly viable even on modern games, just not while cranking up settings. It’s gonna cuck you on literally any game.
Really hilarious that this makes you go into some pseudo rant making things up to try and prove your point to yourself but go ahead lmao. You could have just said “I’m broke and jealous”
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I actually earn a good wage. I can tell that you earn minimum wage though by your garbage comments on here.
Also, pseud-rant…care to elaborate because that makes 0 sense in relation to my comment.
I was defending the other guy after your gay comment about him having an entry-level computer.
Probably why Classic exists 
Technically, no, it’s on the exact same level as Boralus, Dazar’Alor, and any WoD settlement with the only difference being art design and scale since WoD didn’t have any big cities. Artistically though, I agree but that is irrelevant for a discussion about graphical fidelity. Valdrakken doesn’t run atrociously because it’s graphically above what we’ve seen so far, it’s just an onoptimized stuttery mess like the rest of the expansion.
You can tell because objects, NPCs and volumetric effects aren’t any more complex than any of the last 4 expansions, GPU usage is roughly the same but the CPU is dying and dropping the fps by like 50% compared to the open world. The stuttering is also a mystery because it’s not shader compilation since it never gets better over time, it’s not even traversal stutter because disabling sound reduces the problem and that should have no effect (barely any help in Valdrakken tho), so I have no clue what it is and why they never even addressed it 2 months in. It’s unacceptably bad.
The hell do you mean? Go look at Shadowmoon Valley in WoD and then look at any vanilla zone with trees. SMV trees have more individual leaves and polygons than the entire Elwyn Forest and it’s absolutely not wasted because the difference is huge. Look how much more believable and dense Boralus looks compared to Stormwind because of low poly models and simpler lighting, SW looks like a joke at this point.
700€ is really bad for a gaming laptop man, you shouldn’t ever use them as a price to performance measure because every single laptop sucks in that regard. A 700€ PC would be performing probably twice as well if not more depending on what hardware was prioritized in the laptop.
Still, the game has to increase in complexity and hardware requirements over time because it has to keep expanding its audience. I don’t think it’s reasonable to cater to lowest common denominator of people who don’t upgrade their PCs for 10 years and they can’t even a boot any modern games made after 2014.
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It absolutely does. It is high up, which means occlusion is difficult and that makes a big difference, and the players are strongly concentrated in a place that is outside. By contrast, Boralus is near the ground but concentrated, and Dazar’Alor has its largest concentration of players indoors.
Valdrakken is both high up and the players are gathered in a small space.
In addition Valdrakken also has higher resolution textures and models.
Look, it’s perfectly simple: It’s the same engine and the same code rendering both. If one lags and the other doesn’t then either there’s a severe local optimisation issue or the graphics are better. To me it’s very clear that it’s the latter.
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M8, optimization of this game and graphics quality to requirements ratio is rly bad, so ur comment was invalid. WoW is not Cyberpunk, lol.
I don’t think people are making a good point here. Fortnite shows that a game can look great and still be optimized to run on lower cost devices. This is a problem with optimization, not one of graphics demanding too much hardware. WoW’s art style already makes sure of that.
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So you work for a per hour wage then lmao.
Literal brokie
I get paid a lot for what I do 
You sound like a little basement dweller though. Enjoy the cost of living crisis skint lad.