Aint nothing realistic about either of em
Aint nothing realistic about either of em
Its hard to decide which is better. Both had their own aesthetic to define each zone. I lean more towards older because i spent so much time in my younger years looking at the old world that ill never forget it. Shadowlands did do a good job with the aesthetics of each zone representing that circle of afterlife though.
you're trippingin contrast to the more realistic style vanilla
Amazing sig, done by mighty Lokann
The "new" character models are definitely more cartoonish, especially for gnomes, goblins and humans.
There's always the apologists' excuse that "you don't understand, it's the skeletonz, it's the polygonz, arhmarghed", but of course that always gets shut down by independent artists who clearly show how you can preserve the feel of the old models on newer ones.
I mean, a lot has changed in the past 2 decades. We're talking server capability to handle bigger loads, graphics card updates, internet connection speeds, and Blizzard just getting access to enough capital to make all these updates in the first place.
My own thoughts is that smaller things barely matter. It's pretty dang rare that I'm zooming in close enough to see the details of a frog or the new wrinkles on someone's face. Many of the ground aoe effects actually make things way harder to see, and we are still missing some sort of update to change the opacity of other peoples ground effects or to increase the visibility and edges of enemy effects. I still see people get gibbed all the time because they can't see an Uhr slam underneath the consecrate, death and decay, and rain of fire all going off at once. Heck, we still haven't gotten a good unit frame update that prevents enemy health bars from stacking on top of each other making it almost impossible to target a certain mob for interrupts, and tab targeting is as broken as ever.
In any case, it's dumb to say that the old graphics are more "realistic" (whatever the fuck that means). The newer graphics are definitely higher quality, but the art style has definitely changed to feel less like Everquest. It's harder than people think to perfectly emulate the style of another artist, so this just comes with the times. This is also true of asking someone to emulate how they did something 10-20 years ago.
If we want to talk about specific design choices, we have 3 things that are happening. First is that established popular characters are being greatly changed in design, which is always going to cause problems. Second is that it seems more things are being designed to be "cool" and not to "make sense", this is highly relevant to the Zereth Mortis patch and raid. Third is that the game isn't being designed towards gamer nerds who like dirty jokes and cleavage anymore, which seems to have an offset bell curve towards people who dislike the changed/find them stupid>those who don't care>>>SJW DEI types who want the changes. This should be expected with any game who has established a player base and then tries to change markets, and in a case of a game this old it just comes across as Steve Buscemi trying to fit in with the other kids.
A good example of where the new art style deviates from the old—somebody made a mockup of what a Tauren would look like with this art direction, though it also doesn't add the neoteny.
I like both for what they are, but the modern fidelity is better in most cases.