In early beta, waves of water actually lapped up into the shores of Stranglethorn.
A few others have mentioned it and I’ll just echo them: WoW’s not really going for realism with its graphics, so in that context I think the water looks fine.
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Have you tried putting your graphic settings above low?
What you posted is something ugly.
And for water go to Boralus and turn settings on.
https://imgur.com/a/wYgjeT9
And in my opinoin Dragonflight zones are uglier compared to BFA and Shadowlands and even Legion.
Nothing outstand in zones nothing what takes your breat just rare sights like I have made and thats it.
Have you read any of the thread? I do play on Ultra. Water still looks bad. Doesn’t look wet.
I haven’t said the name of the game the example is in as I don’t want to advertise another game on the WoW forums. I just want rippling, flowing water that reflects Azeroth’s cosmic sky. That doesn’t feel like swimming in an ink packet.
Wasn’t the water in Zerith Mortis super cool or something?
“You’ve never seen water like this. You can WALK on it!”
…Well that’s kind of important to give the name of the game, so we can accurately compare the two waters from the game. From ultra to ultra pretty much.
Judging by your screencap alone… the only thing water related i’ve seen in that is the shoreline fading. Everything else, either it’s basic in it’s form, or it’s the location and time of day you’ve set this pic in that makes comparison kind of hard.
WoW’s water isn’t great, but it’s not exactly terrible either. I will say, it’s reflections and how it handles it are basic at best, and i would imagine Blizzard would find a way to have better reflections in the future, that would be most likely a ray tracing feature tbh.
Time stamp of the water. Complaints about the lag are mostly being fixed (later in the video). The devs are, this year, stream-lining the old coding that’s been a problem.
Well, at least i can see the reflections much more clearly. They seem to be reflecting anything in realtime. Still water, shouldn’t be not exactly a full mirror, but it does look nice.
Still no distortions other then the wake of the water the PC leaves behind while swimming (should also a lot more foam and… also splashing), but i guess this is a calm lake.
I was so happy to find out that you can get under that water in some places because of how that god damn meme blew up lol
Watch carefully where he changes directions, the wake actually clashes with the other.
I see, but it still looks like i’m looking at a mirror rather then water. What happened to the transparency? I mean, isn’t water supposed to be transparent too?.. Translucent as well?..
Idk, but looking at Lord of the Ring’s water, and the examples Ashurk (Battlefront (2004) and TES: Oblivion, has better looking water for it’s age, despite both not having little to no proper reflections.
Now, i know you’ve said you set the water on high (There’s no ultra water) on WoW. But i have mine set on high as well. And to be honest, i’m not seeing what makes this water, not water.
It has a little foam to whatever (including characters) that are colliding with the water plane, as it should, the underwater stuff is distorted because of the normal map that is on the water’s waves, and it reflects (not everything, just the world), while keeping it’s color and being transparent enough to see what’s down there. Even have some underwater image distortion, both on the surface, and everywhere else with it’s subtle waviness.
I guess, your problem is, it could’ve gone further, which sure, i do agree with. But i also think what they have, as simple it is, is enough to convince anybody that it’s water.
Attempts my best effort at what I imagine skittering to be and throws my back out… 
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That looks like a hole to space.
It doesn’t make me think of water.
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You’re also from Moon Guard. Holes that can reach to space are quite common here.
The biggest problems with WoW’s water:
- Lack of “shimmering” on the surface to simulate incident light reflection, making the water appear invisible from directly above
- Transparent screen space reflections that are tinted to match the water’s color, making the water look like Kool-Aid
- Lack of rapid motion of ripples and waves, making the water look like a slow-moving gel or paste
- Muted sunlight and moonlight directional light reflection (the brightest color reflected is a midtone grey instead of white), making the water look “dry” (like the way skin reflects less light when dry than wet)
- Lack of light refraction distortion, or bending of objects beneath water
- Lack of proper light diffusion when underwater, where light does not get brighter closer to the surface, making the water look muddy
- Lack of splash or wave effects that distort the height of the water, making it look perfectly flat (like a sheet of ice)
- Lack of character and dynamic object reflections (only static objects and light sources are reflected)
These problems combine to give the subjective “effect” of the water being colored slime (like the kind next to Undercity) instead of water.
As mentioned above, there is also a bug (hopefully not a design choice) with “High” Liquid Detail that hides the reflections from static objects and does not allow reflections to be distorted by surface ripples. This is corrected by setting Liquid Detail to “Good” instead. I personally set it to “Low” because it is the only setting where you can see the surface of the water. If you look up from below (or straight down from above) with any setting other than “Low”, it just looks like there is distorted fog there. This is the only setting where I think the lowest setting looks better than the highest setting.
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Can you make that picture a little lower rez?
Screen shots never go in full resolution for me for some reason. Even in WoW.
Anyway, scroll up a bit. I linked a Youtube video at a time-stamp with an example of the water.
Yup.
That’s water alright.
Also, that is there. If you’re zoomed in, you can see your character’s feet, the bottom of the shallow water, etc, as well as the surface things. It actually functions off your camera distance - based off how close your camera is to the water. It’s pretty neat.
The game would need an new engine to do stuff like this. Water especially is a tricky one. But they obviously have no plans for this as they’ve continued to keep the engine together with Elmer’s glue.
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