I remember when World of Warcraft was a pretty serious looking game, orcs, humans, so badass looking and whole theme of war. Then they started teasing other races like pandas and stuff like that. The artwork and cinematics for pandas look really badass, same thing with Worgen. Super badass looking wolves and stuff like that. But now, everything looks so clowny and ridiculous. For example, look at this picture of a dracthyr evoker. It looks like such a meme, so damn goofy, and really not in a good way either. It just looks awful. Why does it look so goofy now? Like is this intentional, or they just gave up on development and the gut of the art team? I really don’t understand
I’ve never played World of Warcraft and even I know it was a cartoony art style from day one. Go look up some old screenshots for comparison.
I played during vanilla and burning crusade, so the first few expansions. It was nothing like it is now. Now people running around in yeti costumes and everything looks just plain stupid in my opinion. I’m not saying graphics wise they were ever super impressive or something like that. I’m just saying like, it looks clowny
You and I must have played different versions of BC, because I remember people running around like they fell out of bags of Skittles with their armor, silly transformations (Noggenfogger, anyone?), and other goofy things. WoW has always had a healthy dose whimsy (both intentional and not) mixed in.
Pandas looking badass and Dracthyr not is purely subjective.
I think you have rose-tinted glasses on, friend.
And we’re saying it’s always looked that way. It’s always looked like a cartoon, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s helped it stay relevant for 20+ years.
The reason it looked like that back then was because of the fact that It was relatively new, had just started out, that was the state of technology back then. It just doesn’t make sense to me that after 15 years and being acquired by One of the largest companies in the entire world, they can’t afford to design characters that don’t look stupid. If you look at the statistics for World of Warcraft, all of the animal races are barely played. About 85% of people either play human, or some sort of elf because they want characters that look good. Basically, almost no one plays the ugly ones
It’s not about what they can afford. They could afford to change it, but they prefer to keep the same style they’ve been using.
Whether it looks stupid is your subjective opinion.
The funny thing is that they’ve actually improved the graphics of the game a lot over the years. Not just things like water animation, but in improving the resolution of bitmaps for characters, landscapes, etc. they’ve even totally overhauled the graphics for some races (e.g. gnomes, which for a while in beta led to nightmarish animations of their eyes bulging through their eyelids when they blinked).
But to your point: yes, they’ve deliberately left the characters having a goofy, disproportionate cartoonist feel. Because it’s such an integral signature of the game, always has been, and always will be.
Yeah, I’m not sure my reaction to them adding Pandas as a playable race (in the Warcraft III expansion) was that they were “really badass” as OP seemed to think.