WoW Platinum? same game better graphics?

Jakdstripper

ok enogh of all these games that keep trying to be the new and improved WoW. WoW works, it's hugely popular so let's keep it and just make it  look better. call it WoW platinum or whatever. keep everything the same just upgrade those horrible cartoon 2002 graphics, animations, textures and bring it up to date with games like Aion.....or better. Blizz can do it, they certanly got the money. you know you would play it.

EvilGeek

Nope, look at Aion, great character graphics, questionable terrains and textures but at the end of the day it became a grind I didn't enjoy, no matter how you dress up a title if you didn't like the game play to start with the 'ooh look at that' feeling will only last so long until what you originally didn't like gets to you again.

Edit: There are those who didn't give WoW a chance simply because of its 'cartoon' graphic, maybe they would finally give it a chance.

Preponerance

That would make all the gold farmers have to upgrade their computers, like the slave drivers behind those operations would fork up the money.  So the server would be bot free.  Oh but wait, didn't Aion have a hard time with bots too =P

ChaosInc

This has always been the art style of the Warcraft series and always will be.  Picasso's style is old and dated, would you expect him to change it just because you don't like it?

If you don't like the visual style, then don't look at it.  Pure and simple.

Tarka

Aside from the obvious discussions about Warcraft style graphics taken from the previous games, a "realism" upgrade to the graphics is an interesting thought.  But, the big question is, how much of an impact on performance would such an "upgrade" be?

This is part of the advantage that WoW has over other games; the "stylised" graphics allow for lower performance requirements, thus less problems with such things as draw distances, raid encounters etc.

When you make graphics more realistic, you have to add more detail to EVERYTHING the player sees, from flowers to mobs.  Which in turn puts greater demand on the graphics card, cpu and ram.  Thus the system cannot process as much as it could if the demands were lower.  Unfortunately, this issue is all too evident in games like AOC.

In theory, this may partly explain why SWTOR went with a more "stylised" look to the graphics than a "realistic" look.

 

In short, even though it would be nice for WoW to have a more realistic graphics look to it (maybe as an optional download pack), the trade off may be too steep and actually turn out to be too detrimental to the overall game performance.

SnarlingWolf

WoW's graphics changing would not effect my non desire to play WoW.

 

Since WoW has 10 million players, or however many it is saying these days, there is clearly no need for them to spend million improving the graphics engine. If their numbers dropped by 25% or so in one year then they might have a reason to do something like that. But with steady numbers you don't spend millions revamping your entire graphics engine + making all new models/textures/animations/particles. Instead you work on new content to keep the people there.

Treekodar

The water in Cataclysm is a lot better and a lot more realistic. It's about the only thing in Cataclysm that doesn't look cartoony.

Tarka

Originally posted by Treekodar

The water in Cataclysm is a lot better and a lot more realistic. It's about the only thing in Cataclysm that doesn't look cartoony.

The water effects aren't the only things can will probably get a face lift in the update that is released prior/at the same time as the launch of the Cataclysm expansion.  For instance, the fire effects that we saw in WotLK will probably be seen throughout the game as part of the update.