Returning player here … and now a Game Developer mainly developing in Unreal Engine.
I used to play a lot of World of Warcraft back in the day (Wotlk and some TBC) and I remember finding myself totally immersed in the game world. I would play for days to an end and never get tired of looking at the game’s vistas and cities.
I got back into it a year or 2 ago for a week and got bored, returned again for good this time … and I just can’t get over how awful the graphics look. The game literally looks like a PS3 era cartoonish RPG remastered for mobiles by an indie team and that’s with everything maxed out in a brand new 4000€ PC and an ultrawide monitor.
With each expansion we pay almost the price of a brand new AAA game and yet we receive only a small DLC worth of content for a really old game. I just can not get over the fact that I paid less for both Alan Wake 2 and Control, than to get Dragonflight, a single addon for a game that requires a 130€ sub a year and provides a story with animations, VFX, AI, content, 3D assets that are vastly inferior to even what a modest indie team can produce in a modern engine with a modern pipeline.
World of Warcraft ends up costing 155€ a year (130 sub + 50/2 expansion), the equivalent of almost 3 AAA games at full price, and they can not be bothered to fund a remake of the game’s assets. This is INSANE. I can literally count the triangles in most assets in Stormwind!
How can I be immersed if i go into this after playing games like Cyberpunk 2077?! Even Palworld makes the game look like it came back from 2004. The trees look fake, the atmosphere is off, the water shaders look old, the VFX look 2010 at best …
This is literally the worst VFM you can get in gaming right now, and I’m really not feeling the game when it looks THIS ugly.
*By LoD I’m reffering to the actual models in the game, or the LoD used within the game atleast, because everything is really low triangle count. Maybe the OG models have a higher level of detail, who knows.
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Here’s your attention. You can go back to youtube comments now.
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Alternative viewpoint.
Graphics aren’t the only thing that makes for a good game or ones that win GOTY. I mean, look at the celshaded graphics of Zelda games.
WoW doesn’t need 4K HDR realistic graphics that only people with £/€3-5,000 can afford with top range CPU and GPU.
And neither does it need to look like CP2077 as well as the game world is far smaller and doesn’t need to accomodate at the server level hundreds of players at once.
No MMO has realistic graphics without some sort of other reductions be it load each zone one by one with loading screen to one or the other or smaller zones or in the end less players allowed in an area.
The hardware isn’t there yet, plus to maximise people playing, the specs need to be able to run as on as many machines as possible. Want better graphics, there’s other games for that. But again, graphics does not make a good game, can have the best graphics out there and still have a bad game.
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I like that the game’s playable on pretty much anything. There are plenty of options out there if Gucci graphics are your thing.
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It is a two decades old game
A minor miracle it is still around and kicking
Count your blessings and enjoy it
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I love the cartoony style of Warcraft. Games made with realistic graphics age quickly and poorly - they also seem to cause more simulation sickness and migraines. Not every game has to look hyper realistic and not every game should.
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Just by this part I was expecting what the rest would read like, and I didn’t fall far.
Gameplay > Graphics. If you can’t be immersed in the game because it’s not photorealistic, then you are not a gamer. We played video games in the Atari and C64 era and had no trouble “immersing” ourselves.
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Absolutely agreed.
That said… I love to see progress.
My other most played game is a simulator and people are taking skies, clouds, bush and tree models very seriously. Despite zooming by at speed, although half of the point of these sims is to look at the world.
So, about that progress. It’s clear that in some areas the designers made great strides, Cata was nicer than Classic, and the Legion zones are beautiful. However, those red webs in Val’sharah make me cringe.
I may care about less about certain things because I prefer ground mounts, so green hexagons roleplaying trees in Ashenvale aren’t really my concern.
Graphics alone do not make a good game.
Recently, there are many ‘AAA’ titles that look absolutely fantastic, but have the enjoyment factor of a brick and have fallen flat on their faces.
Also, as a game developer, you should be aware of the limitations in place, a multi player MMO, designed to be played on a variety of Computers at all levels, by thousands of people is vastly different entity to a single player game.
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I agree the graphics and mostly the textures look horrible. Some newer spell effects look good but the world looks horribly dated. Some like it, some don’t. I think the latter group is growing bigger each year and when you have so many (cheap) games that look infinitely better on a basic level, it’s hard accepting this garbage.
I also think that the graphics for WoW is extremely outdated. The graphics engine was acceptable in 2004-2010 when many games at the time were built upon cartoonish graphics engines, before improved and more realistic engines were developed such as Unreal Engine 3. Today I find it incredibly poor and a thing of the past.
Some people might say that the inferior graphics is there so that more people can play the game without having to pay for a new high-end computer, but that is a lie. For example I have a 9 year old computer and during many raid fights my graphics card gets fried and the CPU is working above its limits, giving unplayable lag.
To be honest I think it’s either due to the limits of the ancient source code the game is built upon, or due to pure laziness, that restricts how much Blizzard can do to improve the graphics engine. You’d think that a multi-billion company like Activision-Blizzard could find ways to modernize and improve the most popular MMORPG in history and arguably one of their most important products today, among titles such as Candy Crush and Call of Duty.
Something that’s irking me more and more is the clash of very detailed textures – like on a brand new mount – and the old dated ones.
Your character is decked out in the latest tier set and the newest store mount, and you’re standing between some Cataclysm-age trees with so few textures that you can almost count the polygons.
And the flipside of mixing some old armor appearances – that look so dated – with some of the newer ones… It really isn’t a pretty sight.
Like, WoW is becoming this:
The latest and newest looks fine, and then as you go back in time to the older stuff it becomes less fine.
They also have to consider that the more years pass, the harder it will be to attract a new audience with a world looking and acting like this. Other games have moving grass, moving branches on trees (from the wind), other dynamic elements for years. WoW: stale, just stale and dead. But a good start for me would be to get rid of those horrible textures and replace everything with high ress and more detailed textures.
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Build your own engine and add to it it every year for 20 years, then get back to us.
You’re painting by numbers with Unreal Engine.
Not saying it’s bad, just saying it’s chalk and cheese.
WoW is running off a modified WC3 engine iirc which has had many small updates over the course of 20+ years, of course its not going to look as graphically good as something from a modern engine that you’re developing with but that’s part of the charm of the game.
Not everything needs to be a graphical marvel, some games are being released with graphical details far greater than WoW will ever be and they’re releasing at a massive loss.
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I’d approve of a complete “HD™” update of the game to the current standard. IF they do it properly from the ground up with an understanding of the original meaning of what it was originally ment to be.
None of this ai-upscaling “quality remaster™” crap or soulless-money-machine unreal AAA lookin’ “game”.
I don’t want wow to look like this:
But the entire game brought up to this standard:
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Is that your standard? Each their own taste i guess but i find that even appalling. Those are Playstation 2 graphics, garbage. Valdrakken is no different, a 2022 game. Shameless.
They cannot do that without creating an entirely new game with a different engine. WoW is twenty years old at this point.
Edit: The only instance where updating old zones could work would be with a world revamp, possibly in Midnight since that takes place in Quel’thalas.
I think he’s asking for the old zones to get updated so that they’re more in line with the modern zones rather than recreating the game with a new engine.
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Yeah, I edited the post. Regardless I don’t see them doing it given the resources they’d need to allocate. The only exception would be a world revamp, but if we’re ever going to get one is pure conjecture.