I for one love the way ultra looks on classic wow. Need an example? Go walk around duskwood with ultra on. It looks incredible.
NOW. Knowing this. Let’s apply this to my wow view.
Immersiveness!
There is a night… it is darker than day. It rains sometimes. It’s foggy some days. It snows in some areas.
Not to mention they added the edit mode where i can reduce the icons on my screen to practically nothing. Great… more screen = more immersiveness.
More environmental textures and sight distance… shadows… water textures great!
However there’s the elephant in the room here. I like classic wow “i wack you with a stick”. Retail seems overly flashy. They seem to have went over the top with like “the magical feel”, and less “the raw, medieval feel”. Which is where it loses me.
In Vanilla nights were darker. They “upgraded” something along the way, and lost much of the immersiveness.
REMOVE this, it messes up bags, tooltips ect overlapping my Action bars, and if you make a macro to offset them to a practical place, it makes the action bars inresponsive - sometimes crashing the game.
Same. Also the fireplaces and campfires no longer give the cozy fire +4 spirit buff i am deeply annoyed by that one . It stopped working after some anniversary update day and never got switched back. Ive told them probably 10 times through bug reports too
oddly enough it’s the sound of the spells that get me.
(e.g. tbc’s seed of corruption explosion is so satisfyingly visceral to hear, compared to retail’s puff of smoke that sounds little more than passing gas… that or how lava burst sounds like a damn cannon ball in tbc and in retail it’s like a wet towel being tossed at ur ears)
Is retail really that different outside of fidelity and resolution? Personally I much prefer classic mechanically but art is the one thing I think blizzard and thus retail has always done fairly well. Keeping with wow’s traditional stylized cartoony visuals instead of realism. Its what makes wow, even classic still look visually appealing to this day.
There’s more to it than the static visuals. Yea it’s not just the models it’s the animation. I can’t confidently explain the cause I just see players complaining about the symptoms. We have classic so… there’s no need for me to complain about it.
TBH I think there’s a demographic target issue and that’s where i think the separation is.
I’m old school i like plain armor, a normal sword. Ya know i like the role of traditional rpgs - think baldur’s gate 1, pillars of eternity 1, Warcraft 1 and 2. I’m sure many here (not all) would feel the same.
Now visualize what i am not interested in - NEW Call of Duty, Diablo, Avowed, Overwatch, Fortnite,
It’s like this:
World of warcraft Classic - slow paced, Trad rpg feels, start with nothing but normal.
World of warcraft retail - MARVEL VS CAPCOM ARCADE GAME
