WoW on the Unreal 5 engine

[Zorachus]

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

This video of Org in the Unreal 5 engine is mindblowingly awesome. I dream of WoW moving to this. I think my RTX-3080 and 64GB DDR4 could run this.

Will Blizzard or soon Microsoft ever truly update the game engine for WoW?

[arkanon]

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

This video of Org in the Unreal 5 engine is mindblowingly awesome. I dream of WoW moving to this. I think my RTX-3080 and 64GB DDR4 could run this.

Will Blizzard or soon Microsoft ever truly update the game engine for WoW?

Unlikely, purely because their goal has always been to have the game accessible to as many users as possible, including low end pcs. It does look great though, for sure.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I personally prefer the cartoony artstyle of current WoW to the high fidelity look of this video and other games like Black Desert or the Witcher, but this mockup did look quite good. If I had to nitpick, it's that I'd imagine that the canyon walls would be taller and more imposing. The Orgrimmar depicted ingame and in art really feels like it is tucked away within the crevices of a canyon.

[Djaye]

its a shame. if WoW could pull off graphics like this, id resub in a heart beat. alas this engine in 25 or 40 man content would just melt most computers and no way it could break 30fps on its best day.
can still hope though
maybe in 10-15 years community comps will be juiced enough to tackle this with ease.

[Relapses]

This is cool, obviously a lot of work went into it but I didn't really like the aesthetic. I prefer WoW's current aesthetic to the hyper-realistic, count-the-number-of-skin-pores-in-the-Orc's-left-nostril approach of the Unreal 5 engine. Also, really weird to see that zeppelin frozen in time and space, completely unmoving.

edit: One of them has flapping wings I guess. Still looks weird that it's totally immobile.

[arkanon]

If Blizzard were to do warcraft with these graphics I'd very much prefer it to be a single player game. I actually really admire WoWs stylized graphics, and I, along with most others prefer WoW to be accessible.

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You wont want these graphics in 10-15 years, you'll want the newer cutting edge ones.

You arent asking for 15 year old graphics right now in WoW, are you? Modern WoW looks way better than most 15 year old 'realistic' styled games.

You are not wrong, however the way unreal works you could quite easily swap to 6, and then 7, etc etc.

[huth]

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

This video of Org in the Unreal 5 engine is mindblowingly awesome. I dream of WoW moving to this. I think my RTX-3080 and 64GB DDR4 could run this.

Will Blizzard or soon Microsoft ever truly update the game engine for WoW?

That's a different style, not an upgrade in fidelity.

[Santti]

Looks cool, but it's not really feasible to switch engines like that. It's such a massive undertaking (if it's possible at all), that you might as well start from scratch, and make WoW 2.

[Clone]

We'll probably see another graphic update if WoW lives long enough.

[Schizoide]

Framerate's not great even with UE5 nanite, but it certainly is gorgeous!

I agree that I'd like to see WoW's stylized graphics in UE5, with high LoD from nanite and lumen for full global illumination and emissive materials. So it looks like WoW, just vastly better, as opposed to a photorealistic rendering of WoW.

[Kaleredar]

As a 3D artist, I can tell you a lot of what's going on there that's selling the thing as impressive is the lighting, megascans and normal maps. The problem with using megascans is that, once you have photorealistic rocks in your scene, you gotta have photorealistic everything. To wit, a lot of those assets need a texture polish-up to bring them in line with the photoreal assets. (especially inside the hallway.) And WoW doesn't use normal maps.

Now, I'm not slagging on the artist or undercutting their work. It's definitely a neat and ambitious exercise, especially adapting something cartoony into something more realisitc. You see things like this pop up every now and again where someone takes a WoW town and sticks it in Unreal Engine or Unity or what have you.

But that's just the thing, WoW is cartoony. That, frankly, has helped the game survive as long as it has. Honestly, I think modern WoW's graphics, from about WOD onward, are pretty top-notch. To warrant some huge engine or art shift You have to ask yourself if the medium is holding them back, and I don't feel that it is. There are a lot of little under-the-hood type things that might be graphically restricting them, but they're not things most players would really be aware of as a restriction, especially if all people are looking for are just really little more than pretty lighting.

[Schizoide]

There should be very few normal maps used in UE5, that's the point of nanite. Only needed on materials and models that move, like banners in the wind and vegetation. UE5 is really a sea change in 3D rendering.

The current engine is holding WoW back, but like I said above, primarily in lighting. Higher LoD on certain textures could work without destroying its stylized look, but it's really the UE5 global illumination and emissive materials that would be relevant to WoW.

Think about the Quake RTX demo, or the RTX Minecraft. Very simple geometry but modern lighting tech completely transforms the visuals, makes them feel so much more real.

[Khaza-R]

We'll probably see another graphic update if WoW lives long enough.

If we ever get a graphics update its almost certainly going to look more like this than the OPs video :

[Zergin8r]

You are not wrong, however the way unreal works you could quite easily swap to 6, and then 7, etc etc.

But then you run into the same problem of only a small % of players being able to run it. Steam still shoes that the majority of people are using 1060 to 1660 cards (I'm still on a 970 lol but that's because I can't play much anymore for IRL reasons so no reason to spend money on a new pc currently), and they would not run UE5 well at all.

[Schizoide]

Not at all. It's Unreal Engine. It has to run on everything from old Android phones to the most RGB'd out PCMR rig with a $2k GPU. It'll scale down to a baked potato.

Nanite in UE5 is pretty amazing. You get essentially infinite level of detail, to the eye. No pop-in as you get closer, no blurry textures, none of that. And it scales way down too.

If you're interested in 3D graphics or what games will look like in 2-3 years, check it out. And if you have a XBX|S or PS5, get the Matrix UE5 demo. It'll knock your socks off. Games can look like the OP's video, insane detail, and run at locked 60fps. His work just wasn't optimized very well.

[thilicen]

A witcher 3 style game set on Azeroth with that kind of scale and visual fidelity would be so damn awesome..

[Zergin8r]

Not at all. It's Unreal Engine. It has to run on everything from old Android phones to the most RGB'd out PCMR rig with a $2k GPU. It'll scale down to a baked potato.

Nanite in UE5 is pretty amazing. You get essentially infinite level of detail, to the eye. No pop-in as you get closer, no blurry textures, none of that. And it scales way down too.

If you're interested in 3D graphics or what games will look like in 2-3 years, check it out. And if you have a XBX|S or PS5, get the Matrix UE5 demo. It'll knock your socks off. Games can look like the OP's video, insane detail, and run at locked 60fps. His work just wasn't optimized very well.

I can see an older pc running UE5, but not with the amount of stuff going on in WoW, if you only have 8 GB RAM and 1.5-2 GB VRAM it's just not feasible to have 20+ characters, mounts, spells ect on the screen at once. Maybe with severely reduced graphics.

[Schizoide]

Sure, of course it'll look worse on a slower computer, but it'll still run well and the geometry, texture detail, and lack of pop-in will look better than any other engine I've seen. Nanite is like magic.

[LordVargK]

I don't like this look at all. WoW's Comic look has its charms and the one in the video is way too desaturated and realistic for my taste. Warcraft has a somewhat unique style in all its games and while the OG of the video certainly looks nice, I'm not looking for a realistic looking game at all. We have tons of asia MMOs doing that.
Also WoWs style is rather timeless, wheres Unreal engine 5 will look old once UE6 kicks off.

[Fion Silberpfeil]

Way to many of you are having this weird though that just because the UE is used, it HAS to be realistic and 4k+ Textures and whatnot.
And thats just plain wrong. You could build WoW in UE and it could still look like now, just with more options and possibilitys.

What most of you are talking about is the ARTSTYLE of WoW. And the engine in itself has nothing to do with that.