Almost 10 years ago Blizzard desided to refresh their characters models in Warlords of Draenor released in late 2014. Characters of classic playable races back from 2004 plus draenai and blood elves had their models updated to up to date look, because pandaren introduced in 2012 open beta had way more polygons and better animations.
Some races won from rewamp very much, like Tauren and dwarves, while human and night elves lost their charm with first becoming of the same face and later having goofy walking animations, probably rushed for release.
Seeing new light forged humans being build on old outdated graphical design elements from 2014 I can not mark of how outdated this art direction is.
While Shadowlands pushed customisation a bit further in terms of adding some extra hair styles and skin and eye colors, nothing truly remarkable happened. Yes humans have slight diversity in they look, but the are the same face regardless. And all the jewelery feels pointless as there only 3-4 types of it to choose from.
Blizzard really could improve character models removing current clutter of customisation and moving it to transmog category. Items like jewelery and trinkets could be revers generated by AI into 3D objects and added to your character belts. Armors from previous expansions could be also recreated with neuronetworks to match texture quality of current expansion.
We could also use more body builds like character having different weight, be it thicker goblin or thiner pandaren, sligly higher gnome or shorter tauren, you name it.
It is time to change playable races for the better, just like Blizzard did it on 10th anniversary of WoW.
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Human males in particular just ended up with a completely different style than previously. Like the only option that feels close to the OG one is if you use the light beard option.
I don’t know why you reference ML, but I agree. It’s due.
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would be cool but blizzard can’t even add new allied race other than adding literally the same existing ones. lightforged draenei, mechagnomes, void elves, maghar orc and now earthen dwarves ( again missed opportunity because even in classic they were differing from basic dwarves with crystal beards and stone skin ) are all joke that tells you that you shouldn’t have much expectations…
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Night elves are fine.
Promoting Ai is where i draw the line though.
You should know better than to promote AI you cringy consumer.
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Well the new items and designs should be made by art team, however noone going to upscale old equipment manually and it should be handled to AI to experiment with.
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Blizzard are using AI sparingly already, just not in the fields you’d hope they were: soulless robots were writing all the stories and plot twists in WoW since Shadowlands or even BFA. It’s high time they started including AI workforce where it could actually provide some benefits that we all might be grateful for. Let the overworked interns finally go home, Blizzard, to their families, and employ AI! You can’t stop the machine, people!
That’s such an uninformed take. The art style is not oudated, the WoW engine is. They can make easily much better looking models, it’s just a matter of fact that the engine can only handle so much to run somewhat smoothly.
And that means cuts at Character models at the expense of mesh/texture detail.
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People said the same in 2014 yet new models were made and engine was updated to handle them.
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Yup. See how laggy Valdrakken was on launch even on top end PC’s. Took them ~6-9 months of optimization to get the place not to lag horribly.
The spaghetti code is more like a spaghetti jenga tower at this point. Really makes you wonder how long they can keep it standing before it all comes crashing down.
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Promoting Ai use is incredibly selfish and its gonna come back to bite us anyway.
Stop doing that.
Youre not fixing anything.
Ai steals from other artists, replaces them and demotes creativity.
Ai could be implimented in other areas, like npcs though and it would be nice but not im art, 3d and story writing.
Have some common sense before i bonk you with my stave.
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I think races would low key have more odds these days in the hand of AI rather than blizzard, I don’t wanna be mean.
But the gilneas mog was abysmal, they showed they were very quick to make changes when it was heavily disliked, but then they also go and release something super lazy like diaper gnomes and now dracthyr, dracthyr shouldn’t be locked to wearing 2 armor pieces.
I’d be more than happy to see AI take a shot at it, if Blizzard won’t anyway.
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Well, I never said they don’t update it from time to time.
I am just saying, the engine needs again an update. One that brings it on par with at least ESO capabilities for graphical fidelity (ESO uses a lot of LODs for Models too, not just environment). Most models of ESO have like 8.2k polygons minimum. And I am speaking here about default game models, not with Armor or clothes on.
See: https://esomodelviewer.com/characters/post/366-adonatus-varian
I have a WoW model of a Draenei on my PC (without a head) and it has 6.048 polygons. Also without armor on. But since Blizzard uses for chest pieces, legs, etc. mostly the body mesh with different textures loaded, instead of having actual geometry on a separate for those parts like ESO does, WoW doesn’t utilize it’s full potential.
And why? Because Blizzard is STILL clinging to the “low-end hardware” support of people too stubborn to invest into new hardware maybe once every 7 years (despite it for almost every western country being quite affordable, especially with dropping prices).
It’s the same issue with certain games on console, where the “last gen support” is holding the game back.
If Blizzard would drop that increasingly shrinking part of their target audiences, WoW could actually move forward visually. And that is going to happen anyways, since almost every 2nd expansion the specs required for the game get increased. It’s just time for the “hard cut” basically.
I don’t know much about AI, but I have read this from more sources and from the AI art I have seen, it’s quickly starts looking all the same or weird.
So yeah, I would be very carefull using AI for art. Honestly starting to get really tired of the concept. I read a forum post on a different forum just an hour ago too, which I concluded must have been an AI reply. The summaries in the newspapers from AI’s are also annoying. It just gets weird, once you start seeing their patterns. Not saying their patterns won’t change, but right now I’d rather not see AI’s in text and art/pictures.
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I mean dudes. its unethical. and will affect lives whom spent their entire time on Earth to master their craft and it will benefit only the big corpos while deminishing the soul of the game in general as well as the aesthetics.
Let AI run things we dont wonna do.
Art is not one of those things.
I always worry what people actually want when they talk about the graphical quality. I love the artstyle and bright colour contrast. I also see poor graphical qualities here and there, but I am most definetly not looking for a more RL look to the game. I am hoping you still want to keep the art style, just with better graphical quality?
Not sure what you mean with dropping prices on hardware either. All prices are sky rocketing here. I am even doubting my sub, because it’s so high.
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So do I. I just wish Blizzard would simply employ more geometry on their models.
Like, we know they can do that and keep their style. When we look at Overwatch 1 and 2, it’s clear as day.
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I can’t play Humans anymore they looks like sims 4 characters
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ok boomer, ai is not that great because it steals people’s work, I dont support that, however from year to year we get even less content so if people working there are busy with everything but on working ( like in past dramas explaining what people were doing instead of releasing content they should do ) I think AI should help them a bit …
For example ai would definitely put better allied races than already existing ones and even write an better story than we have rn…
Not to mention all of the cut content that wasnt released because someone got paid for slacking
Pretty sure the “GMs” responding to tickets are AI too with their copy/paste responses and blatantly obvious showing they didn’t check the issue.
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