The Enigma Order

It doesn't necessarily >need< it imo, but it would be damn sweet if it got it.

I don't want to start buying parts for my computer so i don't see any reason for graphical upgrade. WoW is good as it stands now.. And in my opinion wow doesn't look bad at all.

I agree with Vonhankkija. WoW looks good enough for morpg, since i dont want to upgrade my computer just because some new polygons in WotLK.

What sparked the discussion of improved graphics in WotLK was this picture here, where you can clearly see the vastly increased graphics on flames:


But other than that, I doubt we'll see much improvements.

From what I`ve seen, its mostly the "fire"-graphics, as seen in the ss Apox posted, and some burning tree`s in the WotLK trailer/teaser.
I think WoW looks fine too, what I would like to see, is more interaction with the environment (like the already announced destroyable buildings for example).

SundayDriver wrote:

Maybe we get lucky and flying mounts get usable in old lands, would be fun

Pretty sure that was allready out of the question, as posted by a Blizzard-poster.

Drysc wrote:

Unfortunately our designers and developers are not a limitless sea of people; there are decisions that have to be made as to where we should appropriately direct the development efforts. It's our feeling that providing new content, new places to explore and progress your character, new races and professions, all equal a very worthwhile expenditure of our resources. We're definitely committed to ensuring parts of the game already developed continue to be refined, but in this case delaying an expansion for a potentially "very long time" just wouldn't make sense, and wouldn't be very fair to our fans and players who would rather keep progressing their character than flying through places they've already been.

Let's say that we did allow flying mounts in Azeroth and chose to redesign it at some point, it would be no small task. We would need to correct all of the terrain outside of the 'walkable' areas, including building out zones that currently don't exist but through lore are known to exist in those areas. We would also have to rework most outdoor areas as content not intended to be bypassed could be, as well as any possible terrain exploitation potential (ie lots of time testing and refining). We would need to think about what happens when the edge of the map is reached. Since Outland is flat, a bounding wall makes sense, but for a planet that starts to break down. Do players zone in to the other continent while flying or do we make it seamless? If it's seamless we have to rebuild our server architecture, not to mention any further technical issues, etc. etc. While summed up in a sentence or two each of these things would require teams of people working together for a long time to pull off well.

It really all comes down to making the game fun to play for everyone, and allocating resources and time to do that as efficiently as possible. Right now spending time reworking Azeroth so that flying mounts can simply exist, for some ease of travel and sight seeing, doesn't seem like an appropriate use of our time or efforts. In the future though, who knows?

Last edited by holykami (2008-01-18 23:28:03)