Because the game is ten years old. Not sure what you expect.
Not only is the engine old, WoW has to run on ancient machines/setups in order to not alienate longstanding subscribers who don't update their specs.
Because it's almost 10 years old! OOOOOOH /THREAD!!!!
You obviously haven't tried transmog'ing older sets. The graphics resolution on older expansion's armors are fucking terrible. They are in dire need of updating.
The graphical STYLE of WoW is fine, I like the cartoony looks. Some people don't. The graphical QUALITY of WoW is extremely outdated, and that mostly has to do with running the game on an almost 20 year old engine. Most modern MMOs have much higher quality graphics, but also use updated or modern engines to support them. For example, while the STYLE of TERA is different from WoW, the quality is mind-blowingly good. I can run that game at Ultra settings without a single hiccup at 60FPS solid. GW2 is the same way; smooth all the way around. WoW, on the other hand, as soon as things start happening, down come the FPS. It's just outdated, and there is absolutely no way possible to argue against that. While I would certainly love to see them update the QUALITY of the graphics in WoW, I just don't think the engine can take much more. It was made to run on hardware far, far outdated compared to what we're using today.
I'm not even talking about models, either. To up the poly count on the models that really need it would probably kill the game. I think bumping the count on the player races will be fine, but to do it to EVERYTHING (which arguably is needed, if they're going to make our models look good) would just be too much for the engine to tolerate.
I just wish they'd switch over to a proprietary engine, or fucking build a new one. The Unreal engine, which TERA runs on, would be perfect. Or the ID...5? Whatever iteration they're on. Gamebryo is just so beyond outdated, it drives me fucking NUTS that game companies still use it.
This dude just said the water was a plastic piece of crap. OP obviously hasn't seen water in real life. I have some info man not all water is crystal clear on white sand
beaches and clear ass swimming pool. Most water in nature looks muggy and like the water in Wow just like the picture that was posted earlier of the water and the lily
pads and how it looks exactly like the damn game water on ultra. Stop bitching about the water and find a way to upgrade your system cause everyone else's water is
shiny.
Sony's Forlight engine is pretty good from what i saw. it is used for Everquest Next and Planetside 2.
I played planetside 2, pretty smooth and from what i saw from everquest next, it look really good and include world destruction.
My dream is a seamless mass effect MMO with the frostbyte 3 engine.
WoW water really does look like plastic, google the word river and compare the images to the picture of a river posted earlier in the thread. I could cherry pick some water that looked like WoW water, that's true, however WoW water isn't terribly dynamic and looks the same at the center of a body as it does at the edges and disregards motion, depth, etc. Saying it looks plastic is totally fair.
Not that it needs to be amazing, but saying it looks great is silly.
Engine age has very little to do with WoW's current aesthetic or performance. Did you know most of the computers you guys have are running on technology over 30 years old? No wonder all your computers run poorly!!! x86 is old and bad!!!
But seriously, the age of WoW's engine means practically zilch. They make constant changes and updates to it. It doesn't matter if it started as the engine that powered WC3, because it isn't that engine anymore. It's development suicide to just scrap your existing codebase just to state that you have NEW code now! I can guarantee that WoW's programmers aren't just sitting around not improving the engine.
WoW's biggest issue is going to be maintaining support for legacy data. Despite Pandaria blowing the pants off of Outland in all technical aspects, the engine still needs to run Outland without you noticing any differences (other than the ones they want, like the newer shadows).
Blizz has started to give out interviews with their tech people in recent times, probably to help cast aside nonsense like ZOMG IT RUNS OFF THE SAME CODE WARCRAFT 3 DID NO WONDER IT IS BAD. They have also stated that they had a philosophy change a while back about letting more powerful hardware make the game look better. Hence the reason you are seeing the game started to rapidly advance in the shader and effect fronts.
The x86 today is practically a disguised RISC processor as it breaks instructions into microOp internally. The only similarity between something like the 386 and modern i7/5/3 processors is the instruction set - even that has changed somewhat over the years. The internals have been revamped almost every generation, adding stuff like branch prediction, OOO processing (the Pentium was I believe the first Superscalar x86 CPU) ... etc. They didn't just "modify" an existing design.
Would be much appreciated if they did. I'm curious as to their choice of water algorithm, why the specular highlights look so diffused and why water distortion is limited to high and ultra modes only when a Mario game from 10+ years ago can do distortion just fine on 10+ year old hardwareBlizz has started to give out interviews with their tech people in recent times, probably to help cast aside nonsense like ZOMG IT RUNS OFF THE SAME CODE WARCRAFT 3 DID NO WONDER IT IS BAD. They have also stated that they had a philosophy change a while back about letting more powerful hardware make the game look better. Hence the reason you are seeing the game started to rapidly advance in the shader and effect fronts.
Last edited by SodiumChloride; 2013-09-30 at 05:39 AM.
Not to mention that Blizzard design their games to be playable by almost everyone, trust me, there's tons of people out there with really really bad computers, i know a few my self that can barely run D3 / WoW on LOW settings.
Although the texture quality is crap, the "style" of the game is what matters to me.
And they do improve the engine every expansion, MoP content got pretty decent texture quality compared to old vanilla textures.
Sethraz - Havoc Demon Hunter - Draenor EU - Achievement Points: 22220+ - Mounts: 472+
what?? WoW is much more optimized i get on wow ultra settings 60 steady FPS with vsync
on GW i bearly get 35 sometime drop to 10 and on medium settings
and TBH i prefer wow graphics
i wont forgat the look of male human in GW2 looks like some kind of barby doll
gtx 650 ti boost 2g
intel e7500 2.9ghz
That's exactly my point. The WoW engine of today is nothing like it used to be, just as x86 isn't.
Also the evolution of x86 absolutely took existing designs. Best example being Intel switching back to the Pentium M's microarchitecture to update it for the first Core chips, dropping the NetBurst MA that was being used in P4s. And they keep evolving the same designs to the point that they are no longer that which they started with.
Just like WoW.
Has anyone noticed the AMAZING water detail on Immerserus? The channels of water feeding into him on Ultra look surreal (in a good way).
I like WoW's graphics (if it wasn't already obvious).
That's what they're doing with Titan, and you can already see since the time that we've known about the project until now, that game hasn't even seen the light of day nor is it anywhere close to it. What does it have to do with WoW? Everything. Blizzard takes their time with game dev, in all aspects of it. Just swapping the renderer would take a lot of time and resource for a minimal upgrade in actual gameplay. Sure, the water will look nicer, but I'm pretty sure players are more interested in more content instead of revamping the world.
I mean look at Cataclysm. It made huge changes to the world, including making the entire old-world flyable. Everyone now takes it for granted, and the clear lack of content in Cata caused the downfall that hasn't recovered, even as good as MoP has been.
And yes, there would be a lack of content whenever R&D or a graphical change is needed. You still need artists to work on making the shaders for water, or generating the right maps and effects to make water splashes and reflections look good.
Last edited by Thimagryn; 2013-09-30 at 04:22 PM.