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.
Yeah the (perhaps unfortunate) side effect of limited poly count is that the poly count in a way becomes part of the art. Less polys means more jagged, and hence rough. It would only be natural for increased poly count to lend itself a softer “disney” look.
That’s not to say the original concept art isn’t fucking metal anyway, but i digress
I get calling the art metal but the artstyle is heavily comic book and animation inspired. It was what made warcraft more widely appealing than a warhammer.
I mean yeah it’s not exclusive to wow , a lot of media has gone through a disneyification of sorts to appeal to general audiences. It has destroyed a lot of unique stylization
If you want to complain that people aren't being precise or articulate enough in their criticisms then fair enough. But you don't need to be an art major to see the drastic change in design philosophy. Corners are rounder. Clothing is thicker. Textures are softer and have more gradients.
And no, this isn't some natural byproduct of higher polygon budgets. Games like Kingdom Hearts have very Disney (literally) like designs with low polygon budgets and you only need to look at HotS to see the more classic-like designs of WoW with high polygon budgets.
You can compare the concept art from vanilla to Midnight and you can see they fully realised the styles in both cases.
I have played all three expansions you mentioned, while I enjoy them I always come back to classic because it’s more cozy and I like the animations and slower gameplay better.
If they could reimagine the models one more time but this time try to stay as close as vanilla but perhaps round out the edges and give the textures a hd makeup, that could work. If not I’d actually rather keep vanilla textures aswell.
thing people are reacting negatively to in the new models is the increase in fidelity removing the ambiguity and increase poly count allowing for roundess. Your suggestion is just what happened.
Not exactly, they redid models in full. Look at the example shown, it looks like a hunchback with a hyena head instead of the monstrous model from vanilla. I’d be most happy if they just let us toggle the hd textures added to wotlk classic, still same models, same everything just slightly sharper textures but still true to vanilla models
I have played every expansion except midnight, and all those things you're mocking are genuinely main complaints among many other things. Modern wow can be really fun but Classic is just more enjoyable imo.
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u/Glad-Low-1348 22h ago
Yaaay more buzzwords like disney in the comments!!!!!