So I was flying around last night and I couldn’t see Stormwind from Blackrock Mountain. I checked my graphics settings and noticed that the game decided to change them without telling me. I cranked the view distance and maxed everything out again but sill my view distance isn’t what it used to be before the patch.
(Added link to show how bad it is. I can’t even see across the veil)
For comparison before the patch I could sit on Blackrock Mountain and see Bastion of Twilight. Now I can not. There is a level of fog that obscures the distance. I get it that game devs use this fog to improve performance in games, but what I don’t understand is why now are the devs adding in this fog when it was never an issue before? If your view distance exceeded your PC’s abilities you could simply turn down the view distance. Now with max view distance I can’t see half as far and my FPS isn’t being taxed at all. In fact I am now capped at 100 FPS when that wasn’t an issue before (No I don’t have V sync enabled).
Is anyone else noticing this or is it just me? If it’s something that’s happening to everyone, I would like to know why the change was made. It really wasn’t necessary. I don’t have an amazing PC and I can run the game on max settings just fine. You can turn down the settings and play this game on really low end hardware. So if this change is intentional, I wonder what’s the point.
Anyways hit me back if this is happening to you. The fog in game seems to be anywhere that I go.
(More testing done in Hellfire Peninsula because it has always been a very clear zone with great view distance. I can barely see the outline of the edge of Hellfire Citadel. from Falcon Watch.)
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It’s the same for me at max settings, but the patch reset to the default “7” level for anyone who had settings over that. I’d check to make sure you’ve raised yours back up.
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Yeah I maxed it all out again. It helped a bit. But it is not like it was before the patch.
It resets to whatever the game thinks your default is. My PC can handle max settings (minus RTX) with a smooth framerate anywhere but heavily populated areas, but it dumps me down to 5 every time a patch rolls around.
If you have dynamic setting on it will adjust based on frame rates.
Dynamic setting on Spell Density only impacts Spell Density. It is not a global setting.
Not sure what to tell you. If I fly up from the Alliance garrison I can still see the spire in Spires of Arak where Rukhmar spawns to auto-fly myself there at the exact same distance and moderately-fogged clarity that I recall from 8.3. 
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I don’t. And my frame rate is capped at 100 FPS now. Which is where it is at and I still don’t have the view distance that I did before the patch.
I dunno but view distance has always been a priority for the devs. I would be very surprised if they decided to make everything foggy.
Tiragarde Sound and Stormsong Valley scenery was pretty awesome because of view distance, particularly with the mountains. Made those areas feel a lot larger than the old zones with their cheesy looking mountains.
Go to Tirasgarde and check it out for yourself. I was just there and could barely see the outline of Boralus Harbor from the top of the mountain near the estate.
I want to hear if it’s happening to you.
~https://wow.gamepedia.com/CVar_cameraDistanceMaxZoomFactor
This is to zoom the camera that follows your character out. That’s not the issue. I’m talking about view distance for objects in the game. Not how closely my camera follows my character.
my settings are such that I cannot see Stormwind when I’m in Stormwind.
Dang toaster cannot handle the game
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Feels for you. My first WoW PC was a walmart Compaq with an integrated graphics chip. I remember the pain.
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Did you also adjust “environment detail?” Sometimes that affects whether far items are visible also.
I already stated that everything is maxed out. Not to be rude, but I’m not looking for troubleshooting. I’m not having a performance issue. I’m trying to find people who will test this out with me for themselves and let me know if they are having the same experience, or if it’s just me and I need to contact tech support.
I did read they were adding a feature on their end that dynamically adjusts according to how their servers are handling their load. They’ve been using the ‘fog’ feature to degrade graphics for awhile now.
I see it most notably when a swap characters logged say at the mission table in boralis, on character sees that fog and another doesn’t, probably in their sharding system.
They did something like this at WoD launch in order to counter the load issues they didn’t anticipate, although it didn’t impact the rendering of terrain. In fact, the rendering of terrain doesn’t have any server-side impact at all; the feature was used to reduce the render distance of non-static objects like NPCs and such.
Isn’t there a console command for loading into new place without loading all the models first to speed up zoning and loading. May be the view distance is trying to load models far in the distance. Let me try to find that console command.
/console worldPreloadNonCritical 0
but that didnt work but made my zone in times much faster.
Check out my first post. I used OBS to get a clip of how bad it is.
I think you are right, I used to be able to see blackrock mountain details from IF now it’s all foggy no matter what I set my graphics to.
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