If there's a toggle (which I don't want myself), it should be default 2004 graphics/models tho, and only for player models imo at most.
And NPCs look out of place in Vanilla zones cause there sure isn't gonna be a "Remastered" Elwynn forest/Dun morogh etc.
The new yetis/troggs/kobolds look so out of place next to gnolls or the overall vanilla zones.
Vanilla armor looks like crap on new models anyway.
Last edited by Teri; 2018-01-14 at 02:46 AM.
I am all for them improving the game world on Legion/BfA and updating the player/npc/armor models over there. Meatball/Hogger really looks terrible :P
Classic just needs to be Classic, not a Remastered, that includes view distances, textures, spell graphics and whatnot.
Modern resolutions like 4k support shouldn't be restricted however, it's 2018.
Last edited by Teri; 2018-01-14 at 02:51 AM.
The raid tuning is the one thing I feel the strongest about needing to happen. Compared to todays raids and the knowledge/tools people have access to that no one ever cared about/had back then...the raids are going to fall over instantly. The servers progressions are going to end almost immediately. Hell, if people remember vanilla whenever a new server opened a few guilds "Clockwork comes to mind" would reroll on those servers and see how long it would take them to get to finish BWL and beyond...once they had a group at level 60 they just shitplowed MC/BWL down in a weeks time, it'll be even faster now especially with AQ and Naxx. Nostalgia will only last so long until people realize how easy the game is at the endgame compared to now. Hard leveling, tedious shit aside, the game will have no longevity at 60 outside of forced time gating if Blizzard goes that route.
Small Edit - Hell I even remember one of the "hardest" things raiding made you deal with back then was your own PC. Patchwerk? Vael? You stared at the wall most of the time so you didn't raid with 2 fps and could manage with 10-15 instead. Your own damn PC was your biggest enemy. Everyone will be playing flawlessly so most of the artificial difficulty will be gone. Heigan dance deaths to lag? Non existant. People not making it behind ice for Saphiron? Not a problem. C'thun pulling you inside and lagging in the stomach? Literally never gonna happen. I
Last edited by Boathouse; 2018-01-14 at 03:25 AM.
Bleh
heh.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...-big-questions
Anything jump out at you that you'd forgotten about old school World of Warcraft?
J. Allen Brack: Yeah, I'd forgotten that whenever you buffed one of your party members with Intellect, you had to actually sit down and drink after that. Then you stood up, buffed another party member with Intellect and then you had to drink again. It's a much slower pace. There's a lot of prep time.
It's an interesting part of human memories, right? I think we like to remember the good parts, but the bad parts sometimes go away over time.
Do you think there'll be a line to walk for the team, then? Somewhere between creating that authentic experience that people have asked for, while also figuring out what doesn't make sense anymore? For example, with the Intellect buff, is it important to you that players do need to drink after casting it?
J. Allen Brack: Yes. That's part of the level 60 experience. Our goal is to recreate that classic 1-60 gameplay. Some things changed as time went on, with different patches. How does that get manifested? That's one of the outstanding questions. But yeah, the goal is to recreate that exact experience, for better or for worse.
also,
https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming...sic-interview/
Digital Trends: During the BlizzCon Opening Ceremony you said you want WoW Classic to reproduce the classic WoW experience, but not the launch experience. How do you achieve that balance?
Allen Brack: The “launch experience” is sort of a joke. The launch experience is not a great experience, so we want the gameplay experience to be great, with those 2004-2005 WoW systems, but have it be very stable, server uptime, not have a lot of server queues, right? All the modern conveniences that we have in modern WoW.
So, content-wise, it will be the same?
Brack: Content-wise it will be identical. Now, “identical” has a lot of nuance, [though], because WoW changed a lot in the two years between launch and Burning Crusade. One of the reasons we are talking about this as early as we are is to get the community’s opinions on which way we should go for certain things.
thats what they are going for.
Yea, keep saying that to yourself.
The sheer amount of animations that they'd have to create for abilities that got removed throughout the expansions would - by itself - be a big nono on the update.
Also, the amount of zones that don't exist anymore and npcs that also got removed (skipped the revamp) on the live game would have to be fixed and re-textured entirely to 'fit' the new graphics\quality, otherwise they'd have mismatched quality between stuff. Imagine a Cataclysm sort of endeavor to tweak graphics on classic. yea right.
Yea, forget about it.
Not even going into the whole "it's vanilla, it should have its original graphics" discussion which again, by itself, would be enough of a reason.
And before you suggest a 'toggle', it could and probably would create some mismatch on the skills and their animations between both graphic types, which again, uh oh.
The thing is blizzard will HAVE to implement sharding, and massive player caps for the first month and abit
heres why
when a game launches is when it sees THE MOST players.
so we may see 10k people fill a server in 2 seconds.
but a few months later, not so much, so the servers to have decent population and not split everyone up, will need to start with a massive, or no cap at all, then bring it in later.
And now why they will need sharding
10,000 people on a server, when the game has been out for awhile. is fine, when it is split over these areas (10,000/ 39 zones+instances)
but when you have 10,000 people split over THESE AREAS (10,000/12 zones)
yeah no, every single fucking mob will be farmed for WEEKS
btw some of thoswe areas will be filled with 5 man groups killing mobs, as they will be rthe only places people wont be able to do solo.
Who cares if that happens in the first days or weeks, it's minimal. After the initial release, even if it is 2 weeks, it will balance itself out. Just avoid the earlier days if it bothers you so much, geez. Asking for a completely shit feature that has a big impact on the community\realm aspect\immersion of the game just to avoid a few days inconvenience? Ugh, and people wonder why we keep asking for vanilla to escape from those things on live, but you dudes sure as hell want to bring all those crap features into classic, uh?
Fuck sharding, seriously.
Why bother? Let them have the buggy unbalanced mess vanilla was. Once the server is empty because players can't stand in 2018 the shit Vanilla was, I wonder who they will blame when Blizzard will shut down the server because it can't pay the bill for itself.
I think the guy talking about sharding population above is frankly probably correct.
I really think the initial burst of people into classic servers (depending on when they get released, I assume it will be after the last raid tier in BFA) could literally have 5+ million players that will only play classic for 1-2 months tops. You have to think that a significant goal for Blizz of even doing classic servers is to try and use them to rope old customers back in, but they have to know that 90+% of people who come back or even just pop over from Live won't make it to 60, let alone log many hours at max level.
Even with the rosiest of projections, maybe 150k people play Classic for more than a couple weeks or months. So starting at like 2 million+ but knowing that your final user base will be 10% of that withing 60 days means they will be between a rock and a hard place. If they put 200 servers up (with no server xfers, because Vanilla) and all of them have 500-1k players after 60 days the whole thing might fall apart. If they put up 20 servers, the game would likely be unplayable for a few weeks until literally everybody but the most hardcore quit out of frustration, and they likely would not capture any of that surge back into Live.
The only real possible answer to that issue is sharding. Probably only within any given server, but I think you can expect to see a small number of MASSIVE servers split into many shards up front, followed by a significant scale-down pretty quickly.
Thats probably the biggest hurdle to releasing classic, they will need to get the old build running on shardable new hardware so they can re-utilize those racks elsewhere after they arent needed.
100% agreed.
It's true that vanilla is easy pve-wise by today's standards (patch 1.12 and all that it entails + people's knowledge) but back then it FELT (not saying it was) very hard for several reasons. The goal should be to make it feel hard again, and if Blizzard needs to change a few things to give us back this feeling, so be it.
If they don't touch the pve scene, then it will feel bland as fuck.
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J. Allen Brack: "One of the things we do know is that by announcing this, we're in the WOW Classic business forever. Once that starts, there's a commitment on our end that we're going to continue maintaining those servers for as long as there is a World of Warcraft. "
You may fuck off now
Interesting. I killed Vael in classic several times in 2006 as a guest raider in the server's top guild, it was incredibly easy. Maybe your tanks sucked?
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I agree, the biggest challenge of classic release will be handling the massive influx of population, followed by a massive loss of interest. I'm sure 5-10 millions will try classic in the first week but just a fraction will stay for 1 week or longer. So they have to come up with something brilliant to avoid having to merge servers 2 weeks after release.