I understand Blizzard will have a terrain graphic toggle in Classic so that players can view terrain with current graphics.
I applaud this - it gives a way for people to experience Classic differently without impacting the community.
I would love to see a toggle for character generation: so you can see your toon and others, with the current graphics.
Done. Go to your Battle Net Launcher, adjust the toggle menu from “World of Warcaft Classic” to “World of Warcraft”. Hit Play. You will now see your toon and others with current graphics.
There is no modern terrain toggle. There’s a modern water toggle as well as a dynamic shadow toggle.
What’s wrong with my face?
That’s the “You think you do, but you don’t” face.
Classic models vs wod models have been discussed to death. It really boils down to two factors…
When we got the new models in retail, I thought “yeah my old model looks so out of place in these high texture worlds, these look terrible”. The new models looked great.
Then I played Classic and I was like “wow the undead actually look scary, man these models look better than the new ones”.
SOME PEOPLE CAN NEVER BE PLEASED.
In WoD, HD models were rigged onto the new skeletons, the old models used the old skeletons. The Legion pre-patch removed the old skeletons and the old models were rigged onto the new skeletons.
The water toggle is to modern water, the same can be said of the enhanced shadows. Increased foliage was always there, though you had to be clever to get it working. The movement of the foliage is from the new client though.
I’d say they struck a nice balance between old and new.
Some people are arguing that the bones (what makes animation work) are different, but that’s hardly a factor. The real issue is textures. Some items and elements were never re-textured. This means that for modern graphics toggles to work, a significant amount of time would have to be put into tracking down all these models (items, environmental artifacts, etc…) and then designing new textures to wrap them in. This is a huge undertaking considering how small the Classic team is.
I’d also argue that having varying animations would cause confusion in PvP (knowing when to react or counter) and the whole seeing someone’s character as intended thing.
All they have to do is apply a texture to the wire frame. All of the animations are tied to the wire frames. Probably not a lot of work TBH. Making upright orcs might take more time though.
It really depends on how the models are independently designed. If there’s any variation in the sizes, then you may end up with textures clipping, which creates a whole new list of graphical issues to fix. My guess is that it IS a problem. Notice that when they did the graphical overhaul, they used completely new models. If the models were exactly the same size, they wouldn’t have needed new models to facilitate the new textures. They could have saved a ton of work by just putting higher res textures on the old models. My guess is that texture clipping would have been an issue with what they were trying to accomplish.
Yeah, but they wanted to update the animations. So it sounds like it made sense for them to start from scratch. The old models might not have articulation points where they needed them to be or they needed to adjust the size.
Agree that they would need to clean up the texture and there would be some wonkiness from the proportions not being correct. But they do this all the time - applying textures to already finished models shouldn’t be too crazy.
I don’t think it’s “hard” work, just very time consuming. Again, the biggest issue is tracking the assets that were never updated and then designing textures for them. We have to remember that there’s a ton of models that are either no longer visible or in the modern game at all.
My primary, admittedly selfish, reason for not wanting new graphical components is not wanting to download them. I have an m.2 drive in my laptop with only 250gb of space. Part of that is the OS, then the rest is my favorite games. I have a 2TB SSD also, but that’s just my storage for (ahem) downloaded media stuffs… I prefer to keep the m.2 nvme optimized with less clutter.
Updating textures to old rigs can introduce a lot of problems, especially if you need to add poly’s to the rig to accommodate the new texture UV’s
You can get some major issues in joints. Not to mention you have to now deal with item clipping. And we know the forums LOVE to go on about hair sticking through things and such.
It took so long for us to get the newer models because it’s not a trivial task for character modelers and animators to do when it comes to all the items that have to be tweaked for each race and sex.
Also, want to blow your mind. Vanilla character textures where only 1024x1024. Look up that rez and realize how little pixel space that is. hehe.
A lot of current games are in the 2 to 4k res for character art.
Just some random 3d brain farts
I know it sucks to be forced to play with shi ![:latin_cross:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/latin_cross.png?v=6" ":latin_cross:")
y 2004 graphics only to be able to experience a proper RPG game and its systems… but at this point they won’t change their minds about this, sadly.
We always have the modding community backing us up though, so I wouldn’t stress too much about it!
Thanks for your comments guys.
On a related note - and it does not sound feasible for reasons mentioned above - I like the option of erect posture. If Classic is a success, maybe that will be possible for Horde players down the road.
Nah, play BfA for BfA models and Classic for Classic models. Just like any of the games’ features. Still don’t understand why people expect models from a different game would be shoved into Classic.
The problem with the posture is that it’s not client sided as models are. Like if you applied erect posture you would essentially force everyone to see your toon in erect posture.
Such is not the case with models, since it only affects the person toggling them on.
I still don’t understand why people refuse something that would not affect in any way their gameplay nor game enjoyment.
Don’t like LFR, LFG, Cross-realm zones, World revamp, content trivialization, dull talent systems, boring leveling… etc…etc etc?? And you’re just like “Eh, suck it because you don’t like 2004 pixelated graphics”
golfclap
On top of that, there’s this assumption that if you love the gameplay and all other aspects of the original WoW, but would like some graphical options available, that somehow means what you really want is BfA.