News

By: Joe Topolnisky May 17, 2008

World of WarCraft Graphics Overhaul Possible?

Wrapping things up tonight, the guys over at EuroGamer have posted a quick Q&A with Blizzard Entertainment regarding their upcoming World of WarCraft: Wrath of the Lich King expansion pack. One of the more interesting questions asked was about the possibility of doing a major graphics engine update. Their response?

Eurogamer: Do you think WOW is ever going to need a complete overhaul of the engine?

J. Allen Brack: That's actually something we talk about every expansion. It's interesting, two games have really tried that before, Ultima Online tried it and EverQuest tried it as well, and in each case it was only somewhat successful. In each case a lot of people continued to play with the original client, because it was faster, or they preferred it, or were just used to it or whatever. And so for me as a game developer, the idea that we would spend so much time and energy on something and have people go, "meh, that's not really for me," that's not very exciting.

So I don't think there's really a clear model as to how to do that successfully. The model we have with Wrath of the Lich King allows people with high-end machines some additional graphical effects, and then we'll have some kind of fallback for the people who don't. Will we need a graphical update from the ground up at some point? Yep, probably. And I'm positive we'll talk about it next expansion.

Sounds like a definite possibility! Let's hope it happens. ;)

Comments

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Madgoat	2008-05-17 #1
"OHHHH! But the artistic style of the graphics fits the game perfectly!" I HATE WOW

RubberTooshy	2008-05-17 #2
They can still have their "Artistic Style" and give us higher res. textures for the buildings and dungeons and little better sky and weather effects. WoW has done well with its style. Now lets give ppl with year 2007-2008 computers a higher setting to run.

snowcrash512	2008-05-17 #3
The engine itself is fine in my opinion, WoW has done great over the years it still looks nice. All they really need is a major texture upgrade, and i mean every texture at least doubled in rez, and possibly a few newer shader effects thrown in. The engine doesn't need a full overhaul in my opinion.

darkblade088	2008-05-17 #4
I doubt blizz will update the graphics, but its a welcome addition though.

Unregistered

2008-05-18 #5

Instead of making things graphically flashy, they should concentrate more on designing challenging encounters for small groups. 25 Man content is one thing, but not everyone has time to join a guild that thinks that progress only comes by raiding 4 days per week, 4-6 hours at a stretch. The 10 man content is great, but continual nerfs of ALL content to dumb it down is really hurting the game in my opinion. It gives casual gamers a carrot to go after, but some of us have lives, yet still want a big challenge to tackle... something that feels as epic, and difficult as a 25 man raid boss, in a 10 man setting, with equivalent loot... WoW deals in 2 extremes... the ultra casual, who thinks that everything is way too tough when it's initially released, and the hardcore, that conquer new, bug filled content every day. Hopefully we'll see some sort of middle ground with the release of WotLK...

Unregistered	2008-05-31 #6
To the guy who posted wall of text. What do you think kara was? 10 man epic instance. But yeah love to push my graphics card harder with a graphics overhaul.