What would your opinion be if Blizzard decided to use AI to increase the resolution of many old-world textures, such as landscapes, buildings, gear pieces, and foliage? This would only be an optional aspect on the user side of things, and if your rig couldn’t handle the higher textures you could turn them back down, or Blizzard could go with the route some other games have and make it an optional download, saving hard drive space for many people.
One argument I could hear is that this might conflict with WoW’s unique art style, although I don’t imagine it would have a very severe impact. All this technology does is increase texture resolution, nothing more, nothing less.
Here are a few examples (If you’re on mobile, a low-resolution monitor, or YouTube’s quality setting is turned down, you probably won’t tell a difference):
From my understanding, the biggest issue at current is that the machine-learning poorly handles certain textures, such as fluid and moss; however, Blizzard’s art team could easily revisit upscaled textures after the AI does its work and do a final pass to ensure that everything is up to par with what they would like. One other issue is the addition of some visual artifacts and sharpening, which, again, could easily be fixed by Blizzard’s skilled artists.
I would argue it’s not a question of competence, but a question of will.
Can they do it right? Absolutely. Of course they could do it right and, if it mattered enough to them, they could fix sharding, phasing, backpack, and everything else. They could hire more developers, dedicate more time to those objectives, the works. But it won’t get them much return, so they’d rather spend those resources elsewhere.
Meanwhile, one of the larger complaints many people have with WoW (ignoring some of the larger current design flaws) is how “ugly” and dated the game looks. A facelift, especially one that preserves the look of the style, would bring in people who care more about visual fidelity.
(Speaking of the backpack, they’ve already shown that they can increase the slots on the bag itself, if you’d look at the reward for adding an Authenticator to your account. Why not just let us buy “backpack upgrades” with gold that increase the size of your backpack instead of replacing it?)