World of Warcraft graphics overhaul 'probable,' says producer

World of Warcraft.... I'll never understand it.

I agree with Mr. Banks, WoW's style is not bleeding edge enough to need to keep up with competitors, but an overhaul will go a very long way for returning customers with WotLK who don't want to see the same old sights in a different pattern.

As for Co, you don't even understand how to use replies correctly. Its not a method to get your (inane) comments to the top, its for um. Replying.

Try typing
/console farClip 999

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/04/24/macro-for-a-prettier-wow/

I always thought WoW was fugly, and I'm an avid WoW player (2 accounts since launch, still playing). The stylized look of WoW has definitely helped it to not look so "aged" even though it had crappy polygon's and such compared to other MMO's. The one thing that it did do better than other MMO's was the animations. Very realistic and smooth. Poor performance was a problem I had with it from the start (not that it didn't perform OK on my machine, but for the way it looks it should be like 90 FPS), though they've definitely upped it since then. Still, it could use more performance tweaks. Old EQ (which the polygon counts are about the same as WoW), ran decently on a P1 200MHz for christ's sake, while WoW barely runs decently on a P4 3.4GHz.

Anyways, I'm up for an upgrade in graphics, but only if they either make it perform better so that it'll run at the same framerate or allow people to keep using the old graphics.

Lars... processor speed? Lol c'mon kid. Everybody knows ram + memory on ur graphics card + FSB is more important than the simple speed of ur cpu. And if your having troubles playing something like wow w/ a P4 3.4ghz... hahahahahaha holly crap you need to stop building your own pc's and buy from dell. B/c u clearly have no idea what you're doing. LOL. Cheers ^^

OK since PRo truth has about as much forsight as a goldfish has memory let me break it down for you...

First off im not a WoW fan. i AM an RTS fan. and if yo THINK that Blizzard NOT WOW.

Now then the root of ALL MMOs or MMORPGs is subscribers.
Most MMO or MMORPGs have failed because lack of followers not lack of prettiness... in short the mases cant play the games because htey ned to have a powerhouse system to actually make it look pretty so the majority of gaming dollars are left in reserve... enter WoW easy to play history of good games and most of all anything short of a toaster ( yes somoen ported it it onto a cell phone even ) can use the engine. thus it becomes wildly popular because anyone cay use it.

lets look at crysis... freaking ENORMOUSLY AWESOME look and no one can run it aside from your top end builds... hence the game did OK but not as brilliantly as a lesser intense first person shooter.. .
In short high end pretty is aa niche market. wide spread sales and popularity are based on accessibility and Blizzard knows this all too well... This is why they are so damned popular. Oh and Pro until i see your "Decent Art" id reserve bashing anyone... and uh... go look at SC2.

Well the development of these games is so long, by the time they are done, the "cutting edge graphics" they started with are at like 5 years old.

I've got to disagree. You may not LIKE the graphics in Warcraft, but it's not as if you've offered any actual proof other than personal prejudice.

No game on the market does what WoW does when it comes to color theory, and because of that alone a great number of us will always find it beautiful. The environmental design is also quite respectable and in many places still breathtaking. I do have quibbles with the character design and customization (or lack there of) but the animation is excellent.

Trying to argue with WoW fans about anything negative about WoW is like trying to tell a cat to get off the Table. IT JUST WON'T FRIGGIN' LISTEN!


Anywho... I'm talking about graphics. Not art. Graphics. GRAAAAPHICS. In which case, it, and about any other MMO, are fairly ugly. They have to be. It's a pitfall of MMOs. Else they'd have to limit the amount of folk on screen and such.


Anywho... What IS up with Blizzard and limited character creation? Any game that lets folk do that, from them.. always fails in that area. You'd think a company with such a gigantic fanbase would cater to that... moreover, you think the base would care.

Oh, well why didn't you say that you were just talking about GRAAAAPHICS?

Actualy, I'm not even sure what GRAAAAPHICS are. Can you show us a screenshot with just GRAAAAPHICS and no art?

You know damned well what I meant by the graphics, and not the art. There's no need to mock me.

There's plenty of reason to mock you. As a working CG artist, I can tell you professionally what a total dumbass you are. Cat on the table my ass, you aren't equipped to debate this.

At this point in WoW, I'm not actually even a big fan of it. I like exploring the world but a lot of the gameplay mechanics and endgame nonsense get in the way.

However, the art direction and style (STYYYYYYYYLLLLEEEEE) are fantastic. I even gave you good, quantifiable reasons (difficult to do in art) as to why the game looks good (color and design). Until you do the same on some level other than "I don't like the GRAPHYKS" then you can't debate this.

Art =/= graphics.

I never said the art looked bad. You're talking about something else entirely.
The TECHNICAL GRAPHICS are bad.

Graphics in WoW are perfect. The game and its graphics are clearly stylized and not intended to be a simulation of reality. If everything tried to look as real as possible, you end up with something that looks like its trying to look real but its failing miserably b/c its impossible to run a program like that on everyday computers. So Blizzard decided to stylize WoW they way they did. But shortsighted people like you are incapable of seeing that.

I was just gonna mention that.

NERD EYE CANDY FTW.

Freeballing patch inbound?

Just a steady income.

Probably because the resources spent on graphics are not the same resources spent on gameplay, you can have both good graphics, and good gameplay, you can have your cake, and eat it, too!

I understand that gameplay should trump graphics, and wholeheartedly agree with that point, but that's no reason the graphics need to suffer.

That being said, I like WoW's look, and I don't think it needs a complete graphical overhaul, just a streamlining of the core engine and then some work done to add layers of depth to the existing art. I saw some great concepts on this world of warcraft blog where someone simply converted a texture layer (specifically: the ambient color map) onto the normal map layer and specular light map layers, and the results were pretty incredible:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e42oPpkiys is a good example of what you could get without spending too much more effort on it, it would really require the engine at its core to be re-overhauled and made more efficient, that's the primary problem with making it look that good, is efficiency.

I should note that this would also be an option that could easily be enabled/disabled in graphics with a good engine, so a minimal performance hit to lower end rigs (and possibly if coded properly as little as an if-then switch, possibly even less.)

I do realize that other MMO's have had downloadable graphics packs, and you can choose which one you want to use.

But wow really doesn't need one..