Could we? Most likely so. But that would mean limiting who could play the game. We also enjoy the style that we have and while we continue to make improvements, want to be very careful in how we go about doing it so that we can allow people to play without the need of needing to do massive upgrades.

It’s funny, I’m sure most of my games have options

There’s no reason why they couldn’t add new shaders, HDR, higher-resolution textures, denser foliage, better trees etc… (to name but four), but have the option NOT TO TURN THEM ON.

The age-old argument about “style” doesn’t wash either. Nobody’s saying that you should be able to see the pores in an Orc’s skin should you zoom in fast enough…you only have to look at Team Fortress 2 to see that you don’t have to go with photo-realism to create a good, modern graphics engine.

edit: and on top of that, the “small” graphics updates they have made are not optional, and therefore do screw over people who’ve been playing happy for years then suddenly hit Shattrath, which is counter to the argument they presented.

[QUOTE=spadron;4078178]It’s funny, I’m sure most of my games have options

There’s no reason why they couldn’t add new shaders, HDR, higher-resolution textures, denser foliage, better trees etc… (to name but four), but have the option NOT TO TURN THEM ON.

It was the stardard Blizzard cop-out, justifying why they wouldn’t go down that route. Regardless of the actual reason (Blizzard have never been good at updating and improving thier game’s graphics as they age) it’s a nice little point that easily falls over upon analysis. Partly because this is being said by the PR front not the programmers and designers, most of the statements these days don’t even originate from the same continent as Blizzard HQ, let alone come from people actually qualified to talk about the route that is being followed by the content development team. They simply don’t regard improving the graphics as a good sales point worth the investment.

Then again, to be fair to them, the game doesn’t sell on ‘mind numbing hyper realistic jumbo physics!’ and thus it wouldn’t be targeting the larger player base. Not that it would hurt the game to see a little bit of rennovation to the high end. Just stay out of the whole ‘DirectX 10’ mess and they’ll be fine (for those interested, DirectX 10 is faster and more efficient IF the game has been built ground up upon it, not if it is a DX 9 game with DX 10 extensions slapped onto it in order to aquire a pretty sales logo ‘DirectX 10 Supported!” in order to appeal to the slogan-powered medium of the genre. Stick the right labels on anything, they’ll buy it, just see how the Pentium 4 got flogged off by Intel, then the whole processor family was scrapped for something based on a refitted and modernised Pentium III, turning back the clock and effectively admitting the old design was the better.

[QUOTE=spadron;4078178]It’s funny, I’m sure most of my games have options

There’s no reason why they couldn’t add new shaders, HDR, higher-resolution textures, denser foliage, better trees etc… (to name but four), but have the option NOT TO TURN THEM ON.

It was the stardard Blizzard cop-out, justifying why they wouldn’t go down that route. Regardless of the actual reason (Blizzard have never been good at updating and improving thier game’s graphics as they age) it’s a nice little point that easily falls over upon analysis. Partly because this is being said by the PR front not the programmers and designers, most of the statements these days don’t even originate from the same continent as Blizzard HQ, let alone come from people actually qualified to talk about the route that is being followed by the content development team. They simply don’t regard improving the graphics as a good sales point worth the investment.

Then again, to be fair to them, the game doesn’t sell on ‘mind numbing hyper realistic jumbo physics!’ and thus it wouldn’t be targeting the larger player base. Not that it would hurt the game to see a little bit of rennovation to the high end. Just stay out of the whole ‘DirectX 10’ mess and they’ll be fine (for those interested, DirectX 10 is faster and more efficient IF the game has been built ground up upon it, not if it is a DX 9 game with DX 10 extensions slapped onto it in order to aquire a pretty sales logo ‘DirectX 10 Supported!” in order to appeal to the slogan-powered medium of the genre. Stick the right labels on anything, they’ll buy it, just see how the Pentium 4 got flogged off by Intel, then the whole processor family was scrapped for something based on a refitted and modernised Pentium III, turning back the clock and effectively admitting the old design was the better.

[QUOTE=spadron;4078178]It’s funny, I’m sure most of my games have options

There’s no reason why they couldn’t add new shaders, HDR, higher-resolution textures, denser foliage, better trees etc… (to name but four), but have the option NOT TO TURN THEM ON.

It was the stardard Blizzard cop-out, justifying why they wouldn’t go down that route. Regardless of the actual reason (Blizzard have never been good at updating and improving thier game’s graphics as they age) it’s a nice little point that easily falls over upon analysis. Partly because this is being said by the PR front not the programmers and designers, most of the statements these days don’t even originate from the same continent as Blizzard HQ, let alone come from people actually qualified to talk about the route that is being followed by the content development team. They simply don’t regard improving the graphics as a good sales point worth the investment.

Then again, to be fair to them, the game doesn’t sell on ‘mind numbing hyper realistic jumbo physics!’ and thus it wouldn’t be targeting the larger player base. Not that it would hurt the game to see a little bit of rennovation to the high end. Just stay out of the whole ‘DirectX 10’ mess and they’ll be fine (for those interested, DirectX 10 is faster and more efficient IF the game has been built ground up upon it, not if it is a DX 9 game with DX 10 extensions slapped onto it in order to aquire a pretty sales logo ‘DirectX 10 Supported!” in order to appeal to the slogan-powered medium of the genre. Stick the right labels on anything, they’ll buy it, just see how the Pentium 4 got flogged off by Intel, then the whole processor family was scrapped for something based on a refitted and modernised Pentium III, turning back the clock and effectively admitting the old design was the better.

I can’t place a single MMO that overhauled its entire graphics engine. EverQuest released subsequent graphics engines after the zombified corpse of Verant Interactive renamed SOE took control, but the new engine was only used in expansion zones, other than making the unrealistic and way-over-polygon’ed new character models become visible elsewhere in the game.

There is a lot to overhauling the graphics engine. More than the engine would need to be upgraded for it to have any value. The graphics in the game would need to take advantage of the new engine somehow, and I just don’t see Blizzard rushing to overhaul everything. Heck, they won’t even do it to make flying mounts work in the Old World.

WoW doesn’t need superior graphics. The problem with making there be *options* for improved graphics settings, would be that everyone would feel the [implied] need to upgrade their system to take advantage of the new graphics features. Right now, WoW works on a very large percentage of existing computer systems. Raising the graphics engine to a higher tech standard, would result in it becoming less-so for lower end systems, and would be counter to the philosophy of making the game more accessible to the widest player base Blizzard can make it.

The current graphics for WoW are rather good. Perfect for the kind of game it is. The engine works on the widest range of systems Blizzard can make it, and it runs quite well on them, with people feeling comfortable with being able to raise the graphics settings and details to full and experience the graphics at the best there is, without it really impacting anything. The people who want it to be higher-end, have higher-end systems, and that, quite honestly, is a very (very) small percentage of the total customer base Blizzard is looking at.

There just is no current need for the graphics to be pushed further than they are right now. So development of a new engine is probably a very low priority.

I can’t place a single MMO that overhauled its entire graphics engine. EverQuest released subsequent graphics engines after the zombified corpse of Verant Interactive renamed SOE took control, but the new engine was only used in expansion zones, other than making the unrealistic and way-over-polygon’ed new character models become visible elsewhere in the game.

There is a lot to overhauling the graphics engine. More than the engine would need to be upgraded for it to have any value. The graphics in the game would need to take advantage of the new engine somehow, and I just don’t see Blizzard rushing to overhaul everything. Heck, they won’t even do it to make flying mounts work in the Old World.

WoW doesn’t need superior graphics. The problem with making there be *options* for improved graphics settings, would be that everyone would feel the [implied] need to upgrade their system to take advantage of the new graphics features. Right now, WoW works on a very large percentage of existing computer systems. Raising the graphics engine to a higher tech standard, would result in it becoming less-so for lower end systems, and would be counter to the philosophy of making the game more accessible to the widest player base Blizzard can make it.

The current graphics for WoW are rather good. Perfect for the kind of game it is. The engine works on the widest range of systems Blizzard can make it, and it runs quite well on them, with people feeling comfortable with being able to raise the graphics settings and details to full and experience the graphics at the best there is, without it really impacting anything. The people who want it to be higher-end, have higher-end systems, and that, quite honestly, is a very (very) small percentage of the total customer base Blizzard is looking at.

There just is no current need for the graphics to be pushed further than they are right now. So development of a new engine is probably a very low priority.

I can’t place a single MMO that overhauled its entire graphics engine. EverQuest released subsequent graphics engines after the zombified corpse of Verant Interactive renamed SOE took control, but the new engine was only used in expansion zones, other than making the unrealistic and way-over-polygon’ed new character models become visible elsewhere in the game.

There is a lot to overhauling the graphics engine. More than the engine would need to be upgraded for it to have any value. The graphics in the game would need to take advantage of the new engine somehow, and I just don’t see Blizzard rushing to overhaul everything. Heck, they won’t even do it to make flying mounts work in the Old World.

WoW doesn’t need superior graphics. The problem with making there be *options* for improved graphics settings, would be that everyone would feel the [implied] need to upgrade their system to take advantage of the new graphics features. Right now, WoW works on a very large percentage of existing computer systems. Raising the graphics engine to a higher tech standard, would result in it becoming less-so for lower end systems, and would be counter to the philosophy of making the game more accessible to the widest player base Blizzard can make it.

The current graphics for WoW are rather good. Perfect for the kind of game it is. The engine works on the widest range of systems Blizzard can make it, and it runs quite well on them, with people feeling comfortable with being able to raise the graphics settings and details to full and experience the graphics at the best there is, without it really impacting anything. The people who want it to be higher-end, have higher-end systems, and that, quite honestly, is a very (very) small percentage of the total customer base Blizzard is looking at.

There just is no current need for the graphics to be pushed further than they are right now. So development of a new engine is probably a very low priority.

The problem with any sort of graphics update is that it takes a ton of new artwork.

Take, for example, normal mapping on the characters. They already have it on the terrain (but not models on the terrain, which is interesting - compare the ground in Shattrath to that in Terrokar forest - it’s much lower resolution textures because it isn’t using splatting with normal maps). But if you want to add it to the characters, you have to make a normal map of a higher resolution model for every character, every piece of armor, etc. Assuming that they already have a higher resolution version of each model (which I don’t think they actually do) that would still be a huge undertaking.

The only things I can think of off-hand that they could just add without much artist work are HDR and bloom, and IMO those tend to be more of a gimmick than a real graphical improvement.

They are adding a ton of polygons in each expansion - my old laptop that can sort of run Orgrimmar absolutely croaks on everything in outlands. I dunno, I wouldn’t complain if they gave me a graphics upgrade, but I’d rather have artists working on new content that actually changes gameplay instead.

The problem with any sort of graphics update is that it takes a ton of new artwork.

Take, for example, normal mapping on the characters. They already have it on the terrain (but not models on the terrain, which is interesting - compare the ground in Shattrath to that in Terrokar forest - it’s much lower resolution textures because it isn’t using splatting with normal maps). But if you want to add it to the characters, you have to make a normal map of a higher resolution model for every character, every piece of armor, etc. Assuming that they already have a higher resolution version of each model (which I don’t think they actually do) that would still be a huge undertaking.

The only things I can think of off-hand that they could just add without much artist work are HDR and bloom, and IMO those tend to be more of a gimmick than a real graphical improvement.

They are adding a ton of polygons in each expansion - my old laptop that can sort of run Orgrimmar absolutely croaks on everything in outlands. I dunno, I wouldn’t complain if they gave me a graphics upgrade, but I’d rather have artists working on new content that actually changes gameplay instead.

The problem with any sort of graphics update is that it takes a ton of new artwork.

Take, for example, normal mapping on the characters. They already have it on the terrain (but not models on the terrain, which is interesting - compare the ground in Shattrath to that in Terrokar forest - it’s much lower resolution textures because it isn’t using splatting with normal maps). But if you want to add it to the characters, you have to make a normal map of a higher resolution model for every character, every piece of armor, etc. Assuming that they already have a higher resolution version of each model (which I don’t think they actually do) that would still be a huge undertaking.

The only things I can think of off-hand that they could just add without much artist work are HDR and bloom, and IMO those tend to be more of a gimmick than a real graphical improvement.

They are adding a ton of polygons in each expansion - my old laptop that can sort of run Orgrimmar absolutely croaks on everything in outlands. I dunno, I wouldn’t complain if they gave me a graphics upgrade, but I’d rather have artists working on new content that actually changes gameplay instead.