WoW graphic engine is too old?

[SirBeef]

I dunno man, I think the more realistic a game looks the more it looks like ass. I think WoD looks gorgeous and frankly a good art direction is better than high quality realistic graphics. Most of those games that looked realistic back in 2004 looked like garbage by 2006 while WoW still looks great, albeit, some of the older skins in older zones are a bit rough becasue they were not built using the more modern techniques used fro MoP/WoD. If you are going purely on graphics then of course WoW is behind the times and will never look as good as the new stuff, but with the style and art direction they chose for WoW, it will look good for ever.

Also, to appeal to as many people as possible it needs to run on a wide range of PCs. If you take any of the games you linked and applied it to WoW, you would easily lose 1/2 to 2/3s of its players based on PC specs along.

[Deleted]

There may be some aspects in WoW that could use graphical updates.

WoW's aesthetics and art direction on the other hand are in my opinion one of the best in the industry. I find all these realistic looking games really bland and unoriginal. If I wanna look at ugly "realistic" faces I can just go to the nearby mall...

[vrsick]

I would love if whatever blizz does after wow goes towards more realistic, high end graphics. Helps me feel more connected to the world and I think it would get people out in the world finally, not seeing the same, copy pasted square with a bush painted on it. It would be fun to explore and see all the scenery, would do it all the time in skyrim.

[fixx]

I would love if whatever blizz does after wow goes towards more realistic, high end graphics. Helps me feel more connected to the world

It's a fantasy game with dragons, elves and hoggers... Aiming for photorealism will only make it look stupider when you have creatures with unrealistic physical proportions.

[zubaja]

There may be some aspects in WoW that could use graphical updates.

WoW's aesthetics and art direction on the other hand are in my opinion one of the best in the industry. I find all these realistic looking games really bland and unoriginal. If I wanna look at ugly "realistic" faces I can just go to the nearby mall...

Thanks for the sig!
I also agree with you: I've played many 'realistic' fantasy MMO's and it was just off-putting looking at the blurry textures. (semi-)cartoony MMO's can get away with it if done decently.

[Deleted]

Question is would it be possible to move current WoW onto Stracraft 2 based engine?

[Xilurm]

Yes it's old, but tell me, what other (maybe FF XIV) engine has such fluid animations of it's characters? Every other MMO I've played has stiff movements and the models feel like they are sliding on the ground instead of actually walking.

Graphics aside I'd say WoW's engine is pretty damn good.

[Deleted]

Question is would it be possible to move current WoW onto Stracraft 2 based engine?

Possible, but they'd have to take each and every part of WoW and re-code it to work with the new engine, would take a lot of time, effort and money to do that.
You can't just copy and paste the entire thing into a new engine when it is written to work with a heavily modified old engine.

[Deleted]

I say developing WoW again with a better engine won't pay off.
Building everything from scratch again even if you know where you want to go is a huge undertaking with immense costs.

[Pull My Finger]

They are good examples of HQ graphics.

Maybe. In which case it means that games with "HQ graphics" look like crap.

[Raven]

99.9% of wow players play wow on a computer with same power as a toaster, good luck runing wow with those graphics

[MMKing]

Well for starters, their current engine is a mishmash of features added, features removed and potential features in development that was discontinues since the days they started developing Warcraft 3. Simply improving the graphic is practically impossible over a reasonable amount of time. Which is why they do it in minor increments, they also rarely backtrack their changes. So assets added in TBC stay at TBC levels of detail, some minor exceptions apply. Like for example the blood elf models used for NPC in classic was changed in TBC when they added blood elves as a playable race. And the huge changes in cataclysm, added, removed and changed allot of the assets on Azeroth.

What they need to do is create a ''wow 2'' without reusing anything of current wow. However, the cash cow that wow currently is we won't see this happening for at least another 5 years if not longer. This would also fix the issue of very poor optimization in current wow. Next time (if it even is a next time) they would probably see the value of making the engine run better with more cores. So ''wow 2'' could even run better as well.

[looorg]

I like the blizzard cartoon type aesthetic, the engine works for what. I don't think having some super-realistic-graphics-engine would really improve the WOW experience in any way shape or form. If they rewrote the engine I think they should do it to fix things and optimize to make it more efficient, potentially even lowering the requirements to run WOW even smoother. Not so that I can see tiny little scratches on various hero-models. Do people even play in that kinda first person perspective? Don't most people play in some kinda of third person perspective? I rarely, if ever, look close enough on the models that I would even see details on the level posted in the first post.

That said I'm sure there is a limit for how long they can keep going without doing engine upgrades, that said tho the engine today is not the engine of 10 years ago. They probably survey our machines from time to time and they see what they can do and what the user base plays on. Having played since Vanilla I think my current machine is probably computer number four, could be number three. So I have updated -- I still see no reason what so ever to play on ultra with all the crap set to the highest setting etc. It just doesn't really add anything to my playing experience. I want it to be fast and responsive, I don't really care about insane levels of graphics detail I won't even notice or look at anyway. Is there even someone still playing WOW on the same machine they started playing WOW on, assuming they didn't start playing WOW this or last expansion? If there are I assume those people are in a dwindling minority of the player base.

[Vanaline]

Visuals are fine except for the armor, which is an embarrassment. Ten Years of World of Warcraft... one robe!

Yes it's old, but tell me, what other (maybe FF XIV) engine has such fluid animations of it's characters? Every other MMO I've played has stiff movements and the models feel like they are sliding on the ground instead of actually walking.

XIV has great models and armor, but since it's a glorified PS3 game up res'd on PC/PS4, it has massive limitations. Huge caps on displayed players, a whopping 300ms of baked in lag, zone lines and tons of loading, narrow and sparse environments (see it get even worse in the Heavensward trailer with it's PS2 esque empty, texture tiled backgrounds), etc.

That game would have looked a lot better if it wasn't hamstrung by a console with less than 500 megs of total available RAM.

[Kryos]

This is an example how WoW graphics could look like in the Future with a new engine - it's still a semi realistic comic style and this is running in realtime on a Titan X. So maybe in 10 years WoW will look like this:

[Deleted]

I love the GFX in WOW personally. If I want realistic graphics I'll play a game where its much needed. Can't imagine the slowdown in a large raid.

[Xilurm]

This is an example how WoW graphics could look like in the Future with a new engine - it's still a semi realistic comic style and this is running in realtime on a Titan X. So maybe in 10 years WoW will look like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-dzAdHHAA

Yeah it would be awesome to play WoW in this kind of quality. But as I said in my previous post it need to have the fluid animations and all otherwise it won't be worth it.

[Noctifer616]

This is an example how WoW graphics could look like in the Future with a new engine - it's still a semi realistic comic style and this is running in realtime on a Titan X. So maybe in 10 years WoW will look like this:

The technology required to make a good looking game like that is already in the engine, but that doesn't mean the game will ever look like that. Overwatch is build with a new engine Blizzard has made in house, but it still doesn't look like modern super detailed games. Why? It's not Blizzards aim. They have a certain artistic goal in mind that simply doesn't require extremely high polygon count or extremely high resolution textures.

[velde046]

Wouldn't want the realistic Crysis graphics at all. Game would lose its charm totally...

[Deleted]

Possible, but they'd have to take each and every part of WoW and re-code it to work with the new engine, would take a lot of time, effort and money to do that.
You can't just copy and paste the entire thing into a new engine when it is written to work with a heavily modified old engine.

SC2 engine bases a lot on the W3 engine philosophy I bet it would be much easier transfering game onto that engine than any other on the market. Unless it's already outdated since the game was in development since 2007. Maybe they would be able to incomporate pieces of SC2 engine bit by bit.