While no one is in any doubt about WoW being the leader in the world of MMORPGs, there is one element about the game that players feel could be improved upon - the graphics.
WoW has been around for 3 years now, and in that time computer games’ graphical capabilities have soared, while the appearance of WoW has remained the same. Surely, with all the money Blizzard rake in, they could afford to improve the graphics engine. Users on the US WoW forums asked the questions: Why haven’t they done it? Could Blizzard make the gameplay like the amazing WoW cinematics?
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.
Blizzard have always stated that they want WoW to be accessible by as many players as possible - not just the ones with top-end machines. Keeping the system requirements relatively low means players can continue to play on mediocre computers and laptops. However, if you do happen to have a mighty super computer with all the bells and whistles, WoW will look and play a lot better, so players do benefit from having hardware that packs a punch.
Don’t forget the fact that Blizzard increase the polygon count on most new graphics (Blood Elves and Draenei for example), so we’ve have some nice improvements already, with plenty more to come in WotLK.
That said, Blizzard haven’t ruled out a graphics engine update altogether.
Instead of gfx engine upgrade, they should really focus on how to make end-game even more accessible/appealing and how to recapture their audience before WoW growth rate becomes negative.
GFX is for attractiving new players, NOT for keeping players in the game. If pretty gfx actually KEEPS player playing, quite a big number of people would have stuck to playing Lineage 2 or EQ2 or FFXI instead of switching to WoW.