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
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.