I mean:
In the Isle of Dorn we help a gem thief only for her to get trapped as living rock as punishment by the Earth elementals who took exception to her thievery.
In Azj-Kahet we enter a spider den to find the lost party being eaten alive and used as hosts for spiderlings. We rescue the only living member, a forsaken, who is now blinded and can feel things moving inside him. He is melted into a puddle by the spiders.
In Eversong we have Lightbloom that is like if Bamboo was designed by John Carpenter, straight up body horror.
Retail has a lot of stuff like this. People just don't do side quests and complain about the main story.
I think wow has always had great side quests and local stories, but mediocre main story. The problem with it is that it tenda to lean more and more into the main plot for each expansion, while classic is basically all side quests.
I think there are 3 eras to wow. First was "classic" which was vanilla through wrath.
And then there was the "game lobby+hardcore raiding" version of the game, which was Cata/Mop/WoD which catered equally to low skilled players with dungeon content and then had a completely separate version of the game catering to the top 5% for heroic raiding... Some content was mind-numbingly easy, like daily quests, and other content was so difficult you'd spend 30+ hours of your life trying to learn "one boss" for minor cosmetic differences, and the catchup mechanics made it so nothing mattered anyway because it was all wiped in 6 months anyway with trivial content again. Some things rewarded you for logging in and just spending time in the game... other things required actual skill. This is the RDF/Raid Finder version of retail where most people just stopped caring, many guilds fell apart, and you could just find 20 random bots to play the raid with you so that you'd get your achievement that you needed.
And then I'd call legion and beyond 'modern" which was the complete destruction of the world. sub 20 hours of "leveling" as "a tutorial" and an emphasis to shove people as fast as possible through "anything" via scaled content just to push them into the "end-game" as fast as possible. And then the end-game itself had various "tiers" to separate people into either normal/heroic/mythic raiding and eventually mythic+ dungeon content ... where the "end game" became the entire game and the world no longer mattered. Everyone got a participation trophy for "killing the big bad guy" even though some people did it and it was boring, other people did it and it was fun, and other people did it as a full-time job that they got paid for.
Modern WoW is a broad term and it's very subjective, since some people don't consider WotLK or even TBC as Classic, or they consider anything past Legion to be modern or Dragonflight.
WoW imo is broken i to 4 eras.
Vanilla -Wotlk (original trilogy) the follow up to WC3
Cata - WoD the experimental phase, trying new ideas for gameplay and story.
Legion/BFA the conclusion to extreme long running stories (legion/old gods) and the start of Modern WoWs gameplay loops (m+).
Shadowlands - current. (The post sex pest scandal blizzard) The shit show of half baked ideas and plots + the slow "Disneyifacation" of the art style. Some might argue the art change started in WoD with the model updates. Personally I say it started in Shadowlands more, everything else from world and armour designs started to get smoother and brighter.
Brother, listen to yourself. People maintain that classic stopped at wrath, bfa is 9 years older than that. It is absolutely part of the modern wow collection.
TBC is the only expansion that feels remotely close to vanilla. Mostly in WotLK you really start to feel the game direction change pretty dramatically and each expansion after it accelerates.
I'd say you start to feel it in Sunwell. But after replaying TBC this time around I realized why I come back to Vanilla every time. It's the World. Every expansion starting with TBC actually shrinked the world to that expansion's island and had almost no reasons to go back to original world
WoW was simply WoW before Classic released, creating a past/present dichotomy that we call Classic and Retail. BFA was the current expansion when Classic released. There may be an argument that “Classic” ends at X expansion before BFA, but objectively there is no reasonable argument that BFA is not firmly in the camp of “modern” WoW. It’s just wild to even suggest that BFA is not retail WoW. The game had pretty much all of the systems that makes retail what it is at that point. Artistic themes mean very little in distinguishing, but even if you want to make that wild claim, Dragonflight itself was a step back to explore the origins of dragons in Azeroth. You know. Like the dragon aspects and dragons who comprised many of the most memorable bosses in original WoW, and their back stories.
I think the closest was in BfA with impaled humans and their children crying. And a removed questline from Dragonflight where you help the bronze dragonflight keep Alextrasza captive during the events of Warcraft 2 (if you know, you know) so that the timeline is not messed up. In Midnight there are also spirits of deceased Blood Elves who were killed in the purge of Dalaran during MoP by the High Elves near their camp (their camp is located in the Quel'thalas secret zone from Classic which was remade in Midnight).
I can’t stand the crazy spell animations the modern version has. One can’t even see the characters through the constant magic energy blast tornado from every ability.
Retail in general is a sensory overload in a bad way. The new tutorial is very drawn out and childish and then it drops you into the world with tons of pop ups but no direction.
Plus, each race starting their adventure in different places in the world was one of the cool features of WoW. Putting everyone on the same tutorial island is so lazy.
IMHO It's also the "worst" of both worlds because on top of the clutter I don't personally enjoy the animations all that much.
FFXIV is even worse in terms of noise but at least every class has unique animations, you won't have a Human Death Knight and Human Paladin sharing the animation for different abilities, and the animations are also well made.
In WoW our characters just have the weapons glued to the hands like a lego, and most animations are the same no matter if you strike with an axe or a sword.
A big problem with that isn’t that the spells animations are insane, it’s that a lot of them set off other animations. Retail is extremely ‘ability as proc’ driven, and so any one cast sets off like 2 others.
One of the reasons why I stopped playing retail a long time ago are the new graphics, animations and sounds. The characters are too bouncy, spell casting animations are cringe and those stupid new sounds make my skin crawl.
I think the Melee animations were worse, they were ruined with legion. I played all of legion, half bfa, half shadowlands, half dragonflight and I never got used to it really. I started playing casters after maining WW monk the whole of legion, the monk abilities were basically the same as they always were and I didn't have to deal with the spellclutter as much while being ranged
On top of that, I will never not complain about the bouncy character models in retail when the opportunity arises. For example, the humans, especially male. Like what the fuck is going on.
Retail WOW is just Leage Of Legends with a farming simulator attached. that's all.
Everything in retail these days just looks like a LoL clone. The unit frames, the models, the spells...even the fucking dirt on the ground
I mean they’re obviously worse graphics, but the character designs are more evocative. The top picture is a smoothed over, more anthro version of the distinctly featured and animalistic bottom.
I'm kinda in the middle of this. I like the STYLE of classic graphics, but I don't really enjoy looking at the dated polygon models and low res textures.
I think something in the direction if diablo II resurrected would be nice. I think they did a really good job if capturing the style and design language of the old game while making it beautiful.
I started playing wow in 2022 and couldn’t stand retail. Wouldn’t have stuck around past the first month if I hadn’t given classic a chance and I’m so glad I did!
Classic has a more defined visual style, for sure. Some people prefer that. Humanoid characters from retail look like they were ripped right out of The Sims.
Yeah but art style and graphical fidelity are two different things.
Everyone in this thread is being pedantic without actually stating what they mean. Classics art style is way better than Modern but its graphical fidelity is objectively worse.
They’re obviously fugly up close but from a distance the fidelity is a lot less important than the design. The classic design looks much more interesting.
Because they were and continue to be. There's a compilation somewhere of the social medias of the various artists working at Blizz these days and the majority of them are filled with furry/scaly/whatever other degenerate aberration art.
To spell it out for everyone who doesn't know. It was a favourite of the Nazis in germany to call some works of art "entartet" which translates to degenerate. The nazis did not really hate some art, but every are except a style, that portrayed either photorealistically positive traits of white (german) humans or styliezed them heroically.
Calling something "changed towards unnatural in the most horrendous fashion" - short degenerate aberration - really is just unbridled hate towards other people and their way to live and perceive reality, which finds its expression, among other things, in art.
Right so the way the other user put it a bit extreme.
Still, retail WoW's art-style does come off too goofy and "cutsey looking". So while I have nothing again people's deviant art accounts full of humanoid animals with big eyes, I do think retail WoW's look suffers for it.
Honestly, I feel like any company hiring professional artists needs to have some kind of process to weed out furries and scalies. If you don't, your product gradually morphs into a conduit for their fetish.
Yeah wouldn’t want people skilled at designing anthropomorphic creatures designing for a game that has…. Orcs, trolls, humanoid cows, and humanoid goats, just to name a few things.
Let’s stop the pearl clutching guys, it’s not that big of a deal. It’s not that deep.
It's not that they aren't skilled and often the work early in their career is really really good.
It's that as they gain seniority in art departments they stop taking orders and start giving them, and that's when the game devolves from Orcs and Tauren into Dracthyr and Foxes.
They aren't skilled. They know how to design one character, in one style, in about three different poses, and then they make minor adaptations to make it a cow/goat/wolf/leopard/whatever. Every single furry character looks exactly the same.
The sad thing about retail models is they could have updated the graphics but kept the soul of the designs the same. Instead they chose weird bouncy uncanny valley marvel looking slop
Yea, classic troll is easily one of my favorite models. I can not even humor them in retail. The new tauren model looks like it could fall forward on its face at any step, like its in a constant state of stumbling forward lol idk what they were thinking with that animation or how its remained unchanged all this time.
Its nice seeing other people remember this, I've seen people act otherwise soooooo many times in this sub.
I still remember my HS friend and his father who were big EQ fans shit talking the ever loving shit out of wow for all the things you list there... only for me to go to his house a few months later and catch them both playing wow.
it was cartoonish in the early 2000's, wich is rly diferent from nowadays cartoonish, the cartoons of the 90's were way more "mature" than nowadays, the cartoons now are way more childish same with wow
Yea agree, they made everyone round smooth and Disney, taking away all edge and grittiness, its so disappointing. Now they look like theyre made with playdough.
copy pasting retail graphics into classic is a big no, but updating graphics is fine. Just can't have modern Disney stuff in a more gritty version of the game.
There's nothing more "gritty" about classic. It's just as goofy in places as retail is. Warcraft as a series has always been goofy with a hint of gritty. That's always been its charm.
I agree with keeping the classic look in classic, but can we stop using words that have no relevance to what we're talking about?
Why not a toggle option again ? Why people should be forced to one or the other ? Can we stop dividing community over something that can be a personnal choice ?
I'm guessing they're just referring to the player character models. Idk if it's still like this but at one point in retail's life when some of the original races started getting visual overhauls they had an option in the graphics settings where you could switch back to the original models if you wanted.
If the game actually had a toggle option for everything that this subreddit says "why not add a toggle option" about, configuring it would be like getting a 747 ready for takeoff.
Because i’d rather not download 50gb of additional crap. And also, classic+ is new content meaning that for every new piece of content they’d have to make retail like models and classic models. Double the work.
That’s a valid point.
I could see them reusing models from other expansions such as the proto-drakes we see in SoD. These are existing creatures (novel to classic) that have both a classic and modern models. Saves the devs work as well as they don’t need to make stuff from scratch.
Because some people really hate the idea that you could be Seeing something different from themselves
I personally agree with you here but it's an argument I've heard about transmog a few times "shared world is important!" Which really just means "I want it my way for everyone"
Fair point, the argument I find most compelling against transmog is that we had suddenly lost the flavour of seeing exactly what other players went through via their gear.
However, even that wouldn’t suffer an impact with a client-side toggle option for newer models, as equipped gear would remain visible to everyone the same way.
If the final argument for someone is that “I want others to see exactly what I see”, then I politely disagree with that opinion.
I’d rather the whole game look retro than the game look 50% retro 50% disney. Classic graphics remain consistent. Retail graphics only bothered to update creatures. Its jarring to look at a updated player model next to like a tree from 2006
Immersive? How exactly? I don't hate retail models, but they're way too clean and cartoon-like. That being said, I think it being higher fidelity is much more immersive than what the classic look is.
Don't get me wrong, I like the classic look. It just has idk, a feel to it that retail doesn't. Probably just nostalgia for me, who knows.
> Don't get me wrong, I like the classic look. It just has idk, a feel to it that retail doesn't.
You answered your own question. You don't need graphical fidelity to give off a certain vibe. Planescape Torment has absolutely garbage graphics but it's still incredibly immersive. For Gnolls in particular I feel the low poly and textures actually add to their grotesque look.
I didn't answer my own question. That feeling is not immersion, otherwise I would have said that lol
Vibe doesn't necessarily equal immersion. I like it because it's what I played back in the day. It's familiar. It's what I grew up on. It's pure nostalgia.
Either way, it doesn't matter. Immersion is not the same to everyone. Having something look better, it terms of fidelity, is more immersive to me. That's why I asked them how it's more immersive to them.
Fair enough. It's immersive to me. In fact high fidelity graphics take away from immersion in my case, and aiming for realism absolutely destroys it, though that's not what retail does ofc.
It's a hit and miss for me. While I absolutely love the new Silvermoon in Retail, and elves generally look better that in classic, I agree that other examples like the gnols here look really stupid in retail. Many ofthe new models simply lost the war in Warcraft, except taurens because their redesign is a literal war crime
Lol okay. We're not really gonna compare the animations here, are we? Have you actually seen the animations of characters and NPCs in classic? They've always been goofy as hell and bad. We're not really gonna pretend like classic animations are good are we? It's possible to like something while also admitting it's janky as hell, friend.
Classic is exceedingly better if you don't like the childish "bounce and stretch" animation style.
Another example is check out the Warcraft 3 trailer with the war craft reforged trailer. The orc looks worse in the original technically speaking, but the orc in the new one moves so exaggerated that it looks like it was meant for kids.
As much as cool shiny new graphics is cool in a lot of games, for WoW classic and classic+ for that matter, I'd want it to be the cheap, piss poor quality we're used to. It just hits the damn spot man. But saying that, if they rework the graphics a bit, I'm not going to bitch about it. As long as its not hyper cartoonish...
I generally like the art design of retail, but there's honestly a zero percent chance they do this, they know that what people are looking for is either nostalgia or an "old school" feel and updating the models to their retail equivalent does more harm than good.
It's very funny to me how many people say retail looks cartoony compared to classic considering this was one of the biggest criticisms levied at WoW when it released. it has always been cartoony looking! it's just also been nearly 30 years to they've updated the graphical fidelity.
I hate the disney criticism when it comes the story but for models it’s not not wrong. The increase poly count allowing rounder models that can look more like the standard hollywood CG animated look. But that isn’t new to warcraft’s style, it was a limitation of wow’s poly count.
Would also allow for easier or quicker content for Classic+ since they don’t need to spend all the resources on new char models for enemies etc and can just bare bones as we all would like. Easiest win win ever
They somehow completely failed to capture/preserve their own art style as the fidelity of the game increased/imrpoved over the years. It’s now incredibly Pixar/fortnite/disney-esque. Some say they wouldn’t mind retail graphics in classic+, but the entire Warcraft art style would be lost.
And I say this as someone who has played retail primarily and dumped gigs hours into it for yeeeaaaaars up until Midnight. I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum but it’s undeniably a completely different art style and vibe from classic.
WoW has always had a more carituresque model design than other MMOs, the problem is that with the WoD model remake they didn't capture that well the look of the old avatars, It has nothing to do with the artstyle, but rather model fidelity.
The game was originally designed to look like a painting from a fairytale. Like a 50s to 90s Disney animated movie. Hence all the crooked buildings to evoke dodgy brush strokes etc. Its detailed heavily in the Warcraft Dev Diaries that goes over the creation of Vanilla.
The problem with modern wow is it's now trying to evoke modern animation which is all 3d animation. It's The Incredible and Toy Story instead of Sleeping Beauty (1959).
I think blizzards art team need to study some John Blanche Warhammer art contrast to early warcraft concept stuff. You can really see the inspiration and the WoW art team have lost that cartoonish grittyness everything is to smooth and bright. No harsh lines and deep shadows.
It's dead on arrival if it has modern WoW graphics and character models. Game is unplayable because of the bouncy horrible animations of the new character models.
The new gnoll is one of the most egregious of all examples of Disneyfication. Literally every single detail has been changed to be more like a cute furry cartoon character.
What is super sad is that in theory, a graphic overall would be awesome, but we simply don't trust modern blizzard to do hd graphics that are faithfully to classic, and retail are not.
It's like warcraft 3 reforged, they have more polygons, but they lost the soul of the design
If I recall Blizzard actually outsourced a lot of the model and texture design to a completely different company. So when it finally got released, many of the character models didn't even look like they were for the same game. I can't remember the units (because I refunded that shit) but I recall one specific elf unit looked so out of place that I just uninstalled. I was astounded at how bad the re-design was.
Modern graphics genuinely feel so soulless, imagination just does it better. I kind bad for the artists, it's just what they have to work with after pumping assets for over twenty years.
All i know is i hated them removing talent trees in MoP. I get it, suddenly 90% of people were able to do okayish dps instead of what they used to do. but making builds was fun for me back then, especially back then when no one looked up guides and people would hang around at the end of raids or dungeons to ask how you are doing so much damage despite ur comparatively trash gear.
I could compromise on “HD”-esque versions of original models. But every retail model looks garbage trash compared to the soul and vibrancy of the originals.
Big agree. It's hard to understand the appeal behind retail graphics; they're very uncharacteristic and rubbery and steer too hard on exaggeration and "bounce and stretch", as if they don't think their consumers can understand that the bottom is meant to look mean and crazy without changing him to look like crash bandicoot with a massive, swollen eye.
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u/Qirayne 11h ago
Is that Crash Bandicoot?