World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
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Blood and Gore,Suggestive Themes,Use of Alcohol,Violence
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment Genre(s): MMORPG Home Page: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wra...
The New ShinyThe pre-Wrath of the Lich King patch also upgraded the game engine for everyone and the most obvious improvement is the inclusion of real shadows for characters and terrain objects. Earlier WoW had used pre-baked low resolution shadows for terrain and simple blob circles for characters. The old shadows are still an option and those still playing on old low-end systems pretty much have to stick to the old look.
Wrath of the Lich King also improves the overall visual level of the game in other, more subtle ways. The overall polygon count and texture resolution has gone up in the new areas of the game world. Not by much, but it's easily noticeable if you head to the old areas of the game after spending a few days in Northrend. Architecture has also improved greatly. In Burning Crusade many locations and dungeons looked cool, but felt like "game levels" or "movie sets" - made to look cool without any regard for realism. In Northrend, the open areas feel like classic WoW-style Azeroth everyone loved back when the game was new. The instances feel more complete - more like real places where you just happen to adventure in. Multiple routes are more common and even when some obvious routes are blocked off, they are blocked off for logical reasons. Temples, Keeps, Caves, Underground Cities... overall the new areas feel more like real (well, Azerothian) places and less like crappy movie sets that might look cool but implausible. New RequirementsThe improved visuals have also dictated some changes to the official minimum and recommended hardware. The minimum CPU requirement has been doubled from laughable 800Mhz Pentium 3 to a still-insignificant 1.5Ghz Pentium 4. The extra CPU power is needed mostly in Northrend, due to the increased polygon counts - if you insist, you can still play older content with that museum PC from the last century at minimum settings and low resolution. Minimum GPU requirement has actually not changed from the old "GeForce 2 or Radeon 7200" - you can still play on just about any video card, assuming you are happy to play without shader effects and new shadows. Raids and large scale PvP still ask for more, but effectively nothing has changed in this regard in the game.
The recommended system is a whole another matter. For the first time, Blizzard recommends a dual core CPU and the video card recommendation is now ATI Radeon X1600 series or NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT with 256MB memory. Still very low for a modern game, but quite a jump for World of Warcraft. With the new shadows, the GPU side suddenly started to matter in a game that used to be completely CPU bound unless you bumped up the resolution. Unfortunately the publisher's recommended spec is still a bit low - while it may be fine for playing the game with mid-level visual settings, you won't be playing with new terrain shadows on the setup Blizzard recommends. You may be able to use the new character shadows, but terrain shadows combined with a reasonable resolution (1680x1050 or 1920x1200) asks for a bit more serious piece of video hardware, especially if you want to raid. YouGamers minimum is still the same as with Burning Crusade - Fast single-core CPU and a low end gaming video card. We've replaced GeForce 6600 with GeForce 7300 GT, but the performance of these cards is nearly identical. With such a system you can play with shadows set to old style without other compromises. For the recommended setup, for smooth play at high resolutions even in the most demanding raid or mass PvP situations, you need a real gaming PC - a reasonably fast dual core CPU combined with ATI Radeon HD4850 512MB or NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT 512MB. Only with a system like this you can happily push the shadows to maximum without the framerate dipping to sub-30fps anywhere in the game.
Until the engine upgrade showed up, SLI and Crossfire were pretty much irrelevant. Now you could benefit from them on a really fast PC, but unfortunately neither SLI nor Crossfire is supported - as soon as you push the shadows high enough to enable the new terrain shadows, shadows start to flicker on all multi-GPU systems. Blizzard claims that this is a driver issue, so it remains to be seen when ATI and/or NVIDIA bothers to fix this. Only 11 million potential customers for their top-of-the-line video hardware - might be worth fixing...
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