Vanilla definitely wasnt more realistic lol.
I think its more tone that your talking about. warcraft 3 was cartoonish due to graphical limitations, that carried over to wow which was similarly limited graphically as its scope was incredible and getting the most players into the world was important. the tone however was fairly dark as it was the old blizzard that made the game.
I think the modern updates that purposely make things cartoonish is as well intentioned as 3D anime that stutters frames to emulate 2D anime and it looks shit.
Look at wows concept art and cinematics, that should be the art direction, not kung fu panda.
warcraft and vanillas tone was darker in general, it was cartoonish due to graphical limits but it wasnt intended to look like a pixar film.
Wows art direction changed a lot with MoP, even the cinematic was cartoonish and goofy which was honestly quite a change. I think that change put a lot of players off, i was certainly one of them and helping racist pandas weed their gardens with silly 'jAdE mAgIc' was insufferable, even though i liked many of the gameplay changes and basically everything after the first patch.
I think things have gotten too fantastical. The tone is too silly, the cartoonishness has undermined the gravity of the world and even traveling to the shadowlands didnt feel threatening at all. Poor graphics actually helps a lot in masking certain things, when something is lo res your brain fills in the gaps and you kind of see things the way you want to, then when clarity is added you see things the way the artist intended and that can be a turn off.
Mucky color palettes creates a grungy tone that feels grounded, the more clear style they have moved into has helped a lot with clarity but that murkiness blended things together a bit better. Everything in wow feels like a disco now.
I think diablo 3 is a good example of the difference, it felt too clean, shiny and colorful, it was like an amusement park whereas diablo 2 with its poorer graphics felt much more grounded. Not realistic but grounded. I always had this uneasy feeling while playing D2 which was magical that i didnt get playing D3, it wasnt that the game was better (it wasnt) it wasnt that the graphics were better (they werent), it was the mood that was better. Not even strictly better, but it was the right mood for my interests at the time while d3 just flew away with the spectacle.
Wow needs to reel in some of the spectacle and keep things grounded. Players should have an idea how it would feel to come into contact with void, arcane or fel magic, but they are all just silly colorful things for spectacle.
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.