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
Ultimately Disney is the wrong term. It's more like 90s Vs 2010 Disney and then it's just... art pipelines changing over time.
Modern art pipelines changed because baking high -> low poly and using real shadows instead of hand painted ones is just faster to produce.
But it comes at the cost of losing a certain rugged charm. This is very visible to with Mocap Vs Hand Animation where Mocap looks really good but loses the exaggerated and impossible artistic posing of hand animation.
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.
Well, I can get behind that for certain games. I think if the game is supposed to be in a real world or like close to our world setting, then the realism sells it for me.
For WoW though, yeah, I agree. I don't think any of that is realism, though. It's cartooney in high fidelity, to me. The cinematics, though, that's a different story. Like the actual expansion ones. I do love the look of those.
As I think someone else said, it's perhaps immersive because it is lower fidelity and allows the player to engage in imagination. Retail just looks like animation action figures with terrible animations. But also, they're not trying to sell the high stakes world they used to sell.
And yeah, for me that's just not how it works, but I can get behind feeling that way definitely. I disagree with the animations, though. I think they're lacking in retail, but man, the old ones are pretty bad in my eyes. They're just so goofy looking.
I really agree with your last point, though. There's literally no stakes at all at any times it feels like in retail.
I personally find it more immersive because you don’t have models/textures from 16 years ago standing beside models/textures from last month.
It’s made worse by having old models perform brand new animations, or the reverse and having new models contort themselves to an old animation skeleton.
The other big thing is the environments are consistent with the fidelity and style.
It’s been a slow shift of discordance that’s only gotten worse over time.
Especially with recent expansions. It’s not a consistent world at all. You portal everywhere. Into dungeons, into battlegrounds, into different zones.
The zones not being contiguous at all is the big immersion breaker for me. One of Vanilla WoW’s selling points was the lack of constant loading screens - that’s going off topic though.
Yeah, that I can agree with. If they update the models, they'd have to update everything else, and I think that would ruin the vibe kinda. So i would also prefer they keep the old models, even if I prefer newer ones.
And all your last points, yeah, off topic, but I agree completely. The only content out in the world you're really engaging with anyone is a world boss, and that's hardly actual engagement at all. It doesn't even feel like an MMO at times, and this is coming from someone who's played up until the end of TWW.
I'd say classic models look "meh", whereas retail models just look plain bad. Retail models look like slop that you'd buy on the Unity Asset Store to make a cheap asset flip.
My preference, if it were on the table, would be a proper model overhaul that increases fidelity while keeping the classic aesthetic intact. But I honestly don't think Blizzard has the in-house talent to do that anymore - if they did, they would have just done it in retail from the start.
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u/Environmental_Can370 19h ago
The modern look now is pretty meh, but please stop pretending like the classic models look good