My daughter walked by the computer the other day while I was playing classic and promptly asked me why it looked so much better than retail. One reason was that I have all the settings cranked to ultra and she usually doesn’t but still.
Well Classic has more weather effects simply put. I do agree it looks way better then in Retail, just wish both of them have the weather stay around much much longer.
Preeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeettty much.
The fact he just only posted the OP and doesn’t reply back to any of the comments here is quite telling that he’s not going to explain himself.
I think 8 bit zelda is objectively better than 16 bit zelda, but if they’d remade the game in 16 bit I’d have played that too. Anything worth anything looks good in its time.
If all one cares about are pixel and polygon counts, then retail should win. But I agree that classic looks better. It’s not trying to be hyper realistic. It’s got a certain aesthetic style to it, that I (and many others apparently) find more pleasing.
quick story because I thought about this the other day…
I remember one day back in 2008, for the first time ever i got a cool new graphics card. i think it was like a gtx 9800 or something like that. the first thing I did was try WoW on it, but I will never, ever, ever forget what I saw… how beautiful everything was, just standing there at goldshire at night with a bunch of night elves near me. the moonlight reflecting off the beautiful stone floor outside of the inn, and just how absolutely amazing it looked. unfortunately, we had to bring back the graphics card the next day so i never got to keep it, but it was truly something magical.
the game now, Yeah it looks next gen, Yeah it’s got all the latest graphics and whatnot on my 4k monitor and gtx 1070. Yeah it’s got normal maps and all the rest of it… but there’s something about the graphics now- thatin all of its glory- couldn’t even compare to that day I remember…
Classic had more different terrain, I think. It wasn’t as sharp and detailed but it also wasn’t as repetitive. I bought a new graphics card for ray tracing and it took me a while to get used to it, it just looked off for a while.
Actually, that’s still a rare thing to see in this game.
The normal maps are reserved for water and spell effects (Which are called bump according to the files. No _N or Normal affixes), but everything else doesn’t have normal maps.
I also think the utilitarian nature of modern WoW zones is to its detriment.
Classic (really, all through to MoP), zones have areas that serve no purpose to the larger story. These areas are usually just for farming or for travel time. This contributes to zones looking and feeling better - they visually have better scale and feel less claustrophobic and more like a world.
Modern WoW takes us through to every corner of the zone that is made to serve a purpose be it a WQ, quest. It feels too staged, like being in Disney World.