They probably don’t do this for BfA because the primary focus for development is new content. There is a constant train of new stuff to push the story forward. Also, my thought is that the “live” servers are aimed at a new gamer audience that requires updates to the aesthetics to compete with new games.
Doing this for Classic would a different situation, and propose a different strategy. Development assets don’t have an endless backlog of work to account for, so it could more easily be prioritized. Also, there is a strategic benefit to make new high rez graphics and models available in the Classic client so that it’s not only the age 30-40 somethings playing the game. It’s an easy way to introduce a new generation of WOW gamers to a new WOW experience, if the appearance is more in line with the other games they are exposed to.
To each it’s own, but I don’t think the new art assets, and animations are that far thrown that it introduces a completely different gaming experience. If it were a switch to something like you see in the Unreal Engine videos, from cartoonish to ultra realistic…yes, I’m totally with you. To go from low rez cartoons to slightly higher rez cartoons seems minor to me, from a game play aspect.
There is an argument to be made if, whether or not, the small nuances added with the updated graphics were value adding…but does it really ruin the game play to the point that it’s not worth playing?
Agreed here. The older models were changed later on because they could be - an admission that, hey, they looked pretty dopey after a few years. If they had been able to make them look better within the time constraints and technological ability during Vanilla, they would have. Players should have the option of cosmetic satisfaction. It won’t affect gameplay at all.
They don’t do it in BfA because that is applying the old models to the new rigging. The old models do not have the structure to handle the new rigging and animations well and so do not play nice. Visual polish is also a major goal of the live version of the game, so they don’t want to give players the option to make models look shoddy.
This is the exact opposite. You are applying the new models to old, very simple rigging. Many of the non-player models (mobs, mounts, etc) still use the exact same rigging and animations they did when they were low-polygon. So to begin with you are talking about significantly fewer issues. But then you have to add in that visual polish is not at all a focus of Classic. It doesn’t matter if players have an option that makes models clip or act weird or look shoddy, because many of the regular Vanilla models already have that shoddiness.
If you apply the new models to the old skeletons and rigging, the animations stay the exact same as the Vanilla version. i.e. people who don’t toggle it on are completely unaffected and have their game unchanged, and people that would like to play with the higher res models can do so.