Well, I was going to make a comment but Crepe beat me to it and did a much better job.
To add my two copper though… Honestly I prefer modern WoW to those Unreal demos. Modern WoW’s art style is much more vibrant and colorful, it ages well, and it does not destroy computers so WoW can be played by a broad group of players. Heck, if WoW looked anything close to that video I would probably have to quick, just doing large scale raid/pvp content causes me to get pretty bad lag.
Not to mention because of WoW’s more “cartoonish” aesthetic, characters are far more expressive than in other games. Take ESO for example and compare just how expressive characters in WoW can be to characters in that game. And again, those “realistic” graphics always age poorly.
Ever Quest 2 went for Realistic graphics and if you compare baseline EQ2 to Vanilla WoW the age is far more visible and jarring than WoW which still looks pretty good.
A lot of older areas definitely show their age but I wouldn’t want anything to change, personally.
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You can have realisitc, without going overboard. If I was in control i’d blend it somewhere in the middle. So it ages well and has the charm, but can also compete with the newer franchises currently kicking its butt.
I would use Unity for that purpose among others on the new rendition. The other reason Is unreal tends to not like massive numbers of players in areas. Unity has no problems with it. Unity is also more friendly to older codes, requiring less rewriting and has a really nice interface for development thats very intuitive.
Omg yes it is… I probably forgot. Jeez that’s really big
Lets be real though. Blizzard spends 5 years on an expansion… They could easily remake the entire game in 3 and make it loads better. It’s about maintaining profit margins, not about providing a good game or product.
The general rule of thumb for a gamer is:
You want something “Good” invest in an independent studio. You want something designed to take your money. Invest in an AAA studio.
A prime example of this from blizzard is the new Diablo 4. Whch is infinitely worse, and has less content then Diablo 3. I mean 3 classes? Seriously? a shorter story, and smaller zones? Released as a “New” game? It’s barely an expansion. Reaper of souls was larger.
The “graphics” have been updated several times, though.
Try to play today’s Wow on the computer you played it on in 2004. You will be playing at 1 FPS, if it runs at all.
They’ve updated some textures and meshes some of the artwork (Background). Not the actual graphics as a whole. They’ve basically band aided it. When they could have simply put off one of their expansions and fixed and updated the entirety of the game itself and its myriad of problems.
The Unreal Engine demos (of which there are a lot now) look neat but ultimately would destroy the style of WoW which has always been somewhat cartoonish and colorful.
Graphics-wise, the dev team prioritizes things like performance and view distance. I mean, look at Tiragarde Sound at night. With a much heavier graphics requirement you would have a much smaller-feeling world.
One thing that you may not be aware of is how the game weaves its size scaling out of necessity. Trees larger than mountains, entire regions that can be crossed on foot in a few minutes etc.
I feel like the WoW team came out in a good place overall with the graphics and art of the game. In fact the graphics and art get less negative feedback than almost any other aspect of the game
The game looks fine as is, they don’t need to change the engine. Changing the engine won’t do what people think it will. Plus it would require them to recode the entire game.
Changing the engine will however allow them to do a lot of new and cool stuff they can’t do currently but new games can.
If you think for a second in the next 10 years a studio isnt going to go… You know what %$&* it… And dump all of their money into a game that compared to what we have currently make them all look like trash…
Youd be very wrong. Gamers are getting together, their fed up with the industry. eventually enough of them will form their own AAA studio. And Sony, EA, Activision etc, refusing to adapt will go out of business (in the gaming industry) for good.
I am not allowed to tell you specifics of some of the stuff Ive worked on in the last 2 years, but trust me, when they get announced. People will leave these older games in droves and never look back. Blizzard, Sony, EA all of them need to get serious if they want to even be a factor competitive wise.
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Most of those games made by ‘gamers’ suck and look like garbage.
The engine wow uses is going just fine and they can modify to fit the games needs.
They shouldn’t do anything like what is shown in the video
it needs to be updated in a way that keeps todays charm and not switch to some over realistic, generic and honestly bland fantasy art style
I’m proud to see it an intelligent response so close to the top of the post. Apparently many people don’t understand the difference between graphics and art style. Glad to see you do.
It’s certainly possible, but I prefer WoW’s stylized and cartoony art style over ultra realism for one simple reason: games that go for realistic graphics tend to look dated MUCH faster than games with stylized graphics. EverQuest 2 came out around the same time as WoW and Lord of the Rings Online came out a few years later, both of which went for a more realistic art style. Compare them to WoW Classic and tell me which one you think looks less dated now.
EDIT: Didn’t realize this thread had been necroed or I wouldn’t have responded …
It could be a thing, but man, the aesthetic would be way off…
Even if we had the horsepower, imagine ashran with 80 people and all the spell effects rendered in 4k? CPU would melt
Indeed. WoW and Everquest 2 release very close to eachother. At the time, EQ2 was thought to be the game with better, more realistic graphics. Go look at it now and its hideous, even compared to WoW classic for exactly the reason you said.
Also the Warcraft style has never tried to be flashy. I love the cartoonish aesthetics
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