The Un'Goro Problem

[chrisnumbers]

If dated graphics are an issue for you, you don't really care about the game itself.

[bufferunderrun]

Recently I levelled a lowbie Gnome Hunter through the old world, he's in Northrend now but the experience got me thinking, particularly my time in Un'Goro crater.

First, watch this cinematic. It's from the Hearthstone expansion Journey to Un'Goro. It paints a picture of a savage, primal land infested by man eating plants, thunderous lizards and ferocious carnivorous Dinosaurs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG3nb7Oam4k

And then look at this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQIovXvSBfM

That's how Un'Goro currently looks in game, a fetid green swamp. If you were a Hearthstone player who had never tried WoW and then logged in, levelled and got to Un'Goro for the very first time, then the gap between expectation and reality is staggering.
Un'Goro crater, because of the cinematic, exemplifies a problem affecting WoW right now, a problem which gets worse and more expansive as the game gets older.

We used to say that WoW's game engine aged well. And it did, it aged very well. But it STILL aged. It's gotten to the point that trips to the old world mean enduring graphics so out of date that they seriously distract from the experience. The low res textures, blocking doodads and trees that look more like the stones of the Giant's causeway than actual trees, all of these show that perhaps something must be done to future proof WoW.

I believe WoW's engine is now a barrier to entry for any prospective new players. Why play WoW when you can play something that looks like FF14 or TESO? Because it's a good and fun game, yes, but if you can't get past the initial barrier of it's aging engine you'll never play enough to find that out. Wildstar, failure of a game though it is, shows what an MMO with WoW's cartoony graphic style could look like in the modern era.

At some point, Blizzard may have to grasp the nettle and just rip out the existing engine and replace it with something more modern. We know they have such an engine, WoW rendered using the Overwatch ending would look incredible.

The alternative is continuous degradation and falling behind. At some point, yes, graphics do matter and WoW is rapidly approaching that point. The scale of the task does not diminish it's increasing necessity.

imho the problem isn't technical, many games had done a complete rewrite of the client/server to boost graphic quality and blizzard as one of the biggest producer on the market can do it.

The real problem is why do it? Un'goro is a low level zone very few peoples visit it nowadays and the new player among them are even more rare most are just peoples like you who are levelling an alt.

The cost vs benefit for such an operation would be extremely retarded unless blizzard scale all the zones, put WQ on every of them actualizing them each xpack, then this huge overhaul not only would be nice but almost required.

[Thetruth1400]

Because if you weren't on time when the new tier came out, you were pretty much SOL. Take a break for a week or so? Guess you're behind TOO BAD. That's not good design.

It wasn't that way at all though. There were literally people of all different levels. You had people leveling, people doing dungeons, people doing every tier of raid all throughout the entire expansion. Guess what? There wasn't a problem with that. The only semblance of a problem is guild poaching happened as people from higher tier raids lost members and would grab a player from a guild that was on the previous tier to fill out there ranks. Frankly, that's much better than the current system where you can see it all and do it all by literally doing the absolute minimum and the only comeback to it is "Why haven't you done it on Mythic?" in other words, no argument because it's the exact same content, just slightly inflated difficulty.

[Deleted]

I even dare to say that the huge success of WoW in terms of graphics is the cartoony style and some "blurness" of it. Stylized design is less affected by the "uncanny valley" effect. The more realistic a game tries to be in its graphics, the more I feel that it's artificial. With WoW, I see from the start that the graphics don't aspire to be realistical, and my brain just fills the gaps. Of course, some things are just blatantly bad, like clipping and errors in proportions, and some trees and mountain tops looking outdated - but honestly, it does not matter that much. You don't stay long in these old areas anymore.