Personally I’ve grown addicted to levelling through old zones and enjoying my character looking ridiculous in a bunch of wildly different looking greens. I’m not a huge fan of Shadowlands but the ease of levelling is really pleasant and makes for a fun time bumbling through old content.
I must admit though I just don’t like the new graphics (especially player models…). I try my best to hold on to anything I can by keeping to Classic/BC areas for gear, and of course the Humble Flyer!
(Before anyone says “Then just go play Classic!” I don’t find classic very enjoyable as the class combos/races I enjoy are not in it.)
I like the new stuff content and graphics more, but the older UI elements look better.
Here’s an example:
The Dungeon Finder UI (most of it) comes from Wrath - everything on that frame looks like it has a place, is contained in some way - and role icons even have their own background flourishes to make sure they look like they’re apart of the frame.
The mission UI looks like a lot of floating buttons that are comparatively poorly pieced together, the buttons all look separate from the background like they don’t belong there. And for some reason the entire frame has a drop shadow that no other UI elements really have, and then there’s giant blank spaces. Just not a fan.
One looks like it has more love and care put into it. A lot of older stuff looks like someone’s labor of love.
Go play classic then. you criminal. i can’t believe blizzard gave you guys your own server after you were breaking TOS by playing illegal servers. and you still complain about the game. UNREAL.
I find WoW to be pretty jarring to go back to after playing other modern games, at some point i think Blizzard’s going to need to remake the game with a modern engine. This game is so horribly bogged down with old code that it takes a NASA supercomputer to maintain high FPS in raids/cities. If we were on a new engine, it would look so much better and run better too, even on budget hardware too.
Not at all. One of the reasons I didnt touch Classic, aside from have already played in 2006, was the old graphics, mainly character models. I still like the slow leveling style and gameplay of it, but cant stand the low res faces.
As someone who has spent hours in Photoshop painstakingly chopping up and remixing existing WoW UI graphics to make my personal addons fit with the stock UI, I appreciate this post. A lot of the new stuff does feel rather slapdash.
I do not miss the old character models at all. Even though a couple of the faces did seem to change from the true original imo it was still an improvement. The new zones are undeniably pretty too and the old ones are as well. The people that work on the zones are absolutely amazing I think I prefer the zones on Azeroth over the shadowlands ones but those are very neat in their own way.
Lol, there is something nice about having the option to be ugly. Unmodded Skyrim characters are just meh, but unmodded Oblivion characters are so ugly that they are memorable.
There are some visual aspects from older parts of the game that I find preferable, but as a whole it’s a wash.
For example, in Vanilla/TBC/WotLK/Classic, Elwynn Forest (among a few other zones) has this nice golden tint to its sunlight that looks and feels comfy and homey. For whatever reason, in Cataclysm these zones lost the warmth in their sunlight and took on a much colder look. I’m not sure why that was done but it’s been miffing me every time I fly through Elwynn for years now.
One nice upside of Classic specifically though is that it runs great on max settings on almost anything. On my iMac (which is more geared for work than games) I can run Classic at 5k (5120x2880) with all settings except AA (which isn’t necessary at this resolution) totally maxed out and get a consistent 60FPS everywhere without the computer’s fans even kicking in. It looks really good despite the age of the textures, models, etc.
old content? yes. MUCH preffer it to current stuff. current stuff just feels… i dunno, stifling to me.
like, when i do older content, the game says ‘your level x, you can do quests in this zone, this zone and this zone, and those ones later if you want’.
but when i get to shadowlands content it stops me and says ‘no, no, you can ONLY do these quests. and if your not x level by the time you finish’em, you can’t continue till you do these crappy side-quests.’.
worst part, it feels like the game slows WAY down. when your having fun going through the story at a steady pace (or… trudging through it as i do), it’s REALLY not fun when the game tells you to slow down and do side-crap (or in my case with my tons of level-50 characters, it tells me to do the maw-intro… again and again without a skip).
oh, and graphically? i preffer older zones too. lot less random npcs wandering around. new zones blizz just piles on the useless npcs in an attempt to make the game feel alive, but i find makes my WoW lag (only when there’s other players there too, but still).
Yeah, I can’t stand how rigid the levelling is in SL. It both forces a strict story down your throat and doesn’t allow progression unless you did the 900 little sidequests in each crook and nanny.
Also agree on the NPCS… I hate spending more than 30 seconds in the Heart of the Forest clicking on NPCS that all look identical to find the one I need. At least in older zones the NPCs are unique!
I relate this a lot. My favorite starting zones in the game are Eversong + Ghostlands because they’re so freeform (they don’t herd the player around or glue them to rails) and quiet — there’s no talking heads popping up, no NPCs popping out of nowhere to shuttle you to the next checkpoint, etc.
Similarly I like Outland and Northrend, despite some of its more tedious quests, because it ultimately leaves everything up to the player.
i just preffer all the older-zones in-general. their random npcs don’t wander, they don’t have massive lighting effects, their quests are about things i actually care about, they don’t limit me, and if i get bored of a zone, i can travel to another one and level there! just… older content is better to me… i guess that’s the one really-big upside to this whole expansion, they made leveling in older-zones more free-form (except for zandalar/kul’tiras, they for some reason made a level-restriction on their zones)
I think I prefer the zones on Azeroth over the shadowlands ones but those are very neat in their own way.