One of the primary reasons why I strongly dislike modern World of Warcraft is that it just does not look the way it should. With classic wow, it totally makes sense, old retrographics like you are cruising through some classic area of the game, fills you with nostalgia and a retro feel to it. But if we’re talking about modern day retail World of Warcraft, it looks like a really bad PS3 game. They have tried to update the graphics, but on any modern PC with a high definition display, the game looks horrible in every way. Character textures look god-awful for human and elf, everything else looks like an ugly beast creature…
But the worst part is that we can’t even fix the game. At least in RuneScape old school, people are contributing to 117 HD, a major project to overhaul the graphics in the game and make it more graphically appealing. Like, that’s totally allowed. World of Warcraft does not allow you to edit texture files even slightly. So even though you can create add-ons, we cannot possibly fix their broken, ugly, silly looking PS2 game. On the flip side, other MMOs look gorgeous. Guild Wars2 looks awesome, elder scrolls online is beautiful and picturesque no matter where you go. Destiny 2, which isn’t really a true MMO but still an MMO lite, fantastic looking game.
It’s amazing that a monopoly can turn a game into something so ugly. Wonder what it would look like at their 30 or 40th anniversary? Compared to modern graphics?
Counterpoints:
Describing the graphics/art style as broken or ugly is highly subjective. A lot of WoW players like the art style as it is. I would’ve preferred the graphics got updated when I played, but it is what it is.
Updating assets and textures takes art resources, which means taking designers off of working on new projects. Blizzard’s allocation of resources is another discussion entirely, though.
A lot of WoW players play WoW and nothing else, and a lot of them play on hardware that’s barely able to run the game. Check the forums whenever the system requirements get updated with new expansions and see all the people complaining about not being able to afford new hardware. Now, Blizzard definitely shouldn’t support everyone’s dinosaur PCs forever, but they risk cutting off portions of their playerbase whenever they raise the system requirements, so I’m sure that’s taken into account.
WoW’s engine is built in-house and OLD, and started as a heavily modded Warcraft 3 engine. They most likely face significant challenges whenever they want to add or update anything, including graphics.
Note: Take my post with a grain of salt, as I stopped playing in 2018 and haven’t been playing the closest attention since.