I don’t play WoW, but WoW doesn’t need new graphics. Its graphics have aged just fine, and reworking the graphics could pose a problem.
There is a lot of content in WoW that would need to be completely redone. Like, the engine would need major work, models and textures, all of it. And if youre changing all of that, now the sound quality might sound low because it fit with the aged graphics but the new graphics bring the expectations up quite a bit. Before you know it, Blizzard would have to completely remake the entire game and all of its expansions. And we won’t even get into storage space increases.
Then there is the great divide. What do you do about people that play on hardware that the new graphics wouldn’t support? Split the playerbase? Load only players with the same graphic style into the same world? Program a new feature of the engine to overlay the new graphics over the old and keep everyone together?
Big cost for next to no financial gain. Not going to happen.
Describing the graphics/art style as broken or ugly is highly subjective. A lot of WoW players like the art style as it is. I would’ve preferred the graphics got updated when I played, but it is what it is.
Updating assets and textures takes art resources, which means taking designers off of working on new projects. Blizzard’s allocation of resources is another discussion entirely, though.
A lot of WoW players play WoW and nothing else, and a lot of them play on hardware that’s barely able to run the game. Check the forums whenever the system requirements get updated with new expansions and see all the people complaining about not being able to afford new hardware. Now, Blizzard definitely shouldn’t support everyone’s dinosaur PCs forever, but they risk cutting off portions of their playerbase whenever they raise the system requirements, so I’m sure that’s taken into account.
WoW’s engine is built in-house and OLD, and started as a heavily modded Warcraft 3 engine. They most likely face significant challenges whenever they want to add or update anything, including graphics.
Note: Take my post with a grain of salt, as I stopped playing in 2018 and haven’t been playing the closest attention since.
To be fair, the graphics had been improved at least twice when I still played back before the Panda race expansion was added. It hasn’t always looked the way it looks today.
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I don’t play WoW, but WoW doesn’t need new graphics. Its graphics have aged just fine, and reworking the graphics could pose a problem.
There is a lot of content in WoW that would need to be completely redone. Like, the engine would need major work, models and textures, all of it. And if youre changing all of that, now the sound quality might sound low because it fit with the aged graphics but the new graphics bring the expectations up quite a bit. Before you know it, Blizzard would have to completely remake the entire game and all of its expansions. And we won’t even get into storage space increases.
Then there is the great divide. What do you do about people that play on hardware that the new graphics wouldn’t support? Split the playerbase? Load only players with the same graphic style into the same world? Program a new feature of the engine to overlay the new graphics over the old and keep everyone together?
Big cost for next to no financial gain. Not going to happen.
Counterpoints:
Describing the graphics/art style as broken or ugly is highly subjective. A lot of WoW players like the art style as it is. I would’ve preferred the graphics got updated when I played, but it is what it is.
Updating assets and textures takes art resources, which means taking designers off of working on new projects. Blizzard’s allocation of resources is another discussion entirely, though.
A lot of WoW players play WoW and nothing else, and a lot of them play on hardware that’s barely able to run the game. Check the forums whenever the system requirements get updated with new expansions and see all the people complaining about not being able to afford new hardware. Now, Blizzard definitely shouldn’t support everyone’s dinosaur PCs forever, but they risk cutting off portions of their playerbase whenever they raise the system requirements, so I’m sure that’s taken into account.
WoW’s engine is built in-house and OLD, and started as a heavily modded Warcraft 3 engine. They most likely face significant challenges whenever they want to add or update anything, including graphics.
Note: Take my post with a grain of salt, as I stopped playing in 2018 and haven’t been playing the closest attention since.
I really like the artstyle in WoW and often use it as reference.
Have you tried actually comparing game assets from different versions side-by-side?
https://ibb.co/HgKkyRn
Give me bad graphics with endless gameplay over whatever the hell is being produced by AAAAAA studios these days.
Amazing looking shallow gameplay husks of crap they call games.
Graphics DO NOT make a game good. Infact, great graphics just gives studios a reason to not care about the game itself.
Im still playng Zelda and Super Mario 3 on my NES and Pokemon Red on my GBC
Graphics are only part of it
To be fair, the graphics had been improved at least twice when I still played back before the Panda race expansion was added. It hasn’t always looked the way it looks today.
Subjective AF