Why is WoW basicall the only 3D game of the 2000s era to use the absolutely kino graphical practice that is crooked lines and unsymetrical landscapes?
When I look at the 3D RPG games from the 00's, one thing that always puts me off is just how souless the graphics look, especially in the cities. For some reason everything feels dead and flat, as if it was all just cardboards. But I never got this feeling from WoW, even though it was an early 00's game, while games from late 00's and even early 00's still had this dead feeling. Later, I realized this is because the 3D in WoW was highly asymetrical - all the graphics were crooked - landscapes weren't flat terrain, but had hills, even if small ones, regularly. Objects often were off-centre somehow and were imperfect. Housing most of all felt different - there were no straight walls to be found and even doorways are often imperfect rectangles. A really sharp contrast to even something like Dragon Age that had extremely sharp and orderly object design. The uneveness made the 3D look better - both more real and more lived in. Thus I can't help but wonder, why haven't other games of the period done this, instead going for the fake looking cardboard box vibe? Was it just more expensive to do?
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Smaller dev teams and less dev cost back in the day. These two things explain many things about games.
Most of early WoW's maps were not designed with overarching progression in mind, which is to say that the map designers were given very loose guide lines and the quest designers filled the maps they were given. From LK onwards this flipped around, which is why all of those expacs feel like fast food tier vidya design and everything looks like shit.
You might be interested in John Staat's book, anon:
http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=E391D4EC306FB4D07A2FF6C863F9DF14
Details WoW development. is right, designers were given a lot of freedom, and it took a LONG time for other departments like the netcode and physics and such to finish, so there was lots of time to place what they call doodads, I think.
How many WoW threads more do we need
two more would be ideal
>Why is WoW basicall the only 3D game of the 2000s era to use the absolutely kino graphical practice that is crooked lines and unsymetrical landscapes?
Among PC RPG devs, there was a perceived stigma against "console games" and anything that "looked console". During the development of Sept-Terra Core, the suits ordered that the color palettes be desaturated because it "looked too console". So Warcraft was an exception in going with more colorful aesthetics while everyone else pursued hideous realism.
It's one of the best RPGs, anon. It deserves to be discussed.
It's not an RPG.
>It's one of the best RPGs, anon. It deserves to be discussed
Yeah, in one of the other two WoW threads
It's one of the best RPGs, anon. It deserves to be discussed.
it's not and it never was.
It originally leeched off its own name brand, and was plagued with poor balancing, no content, over-reliance on poorly-implemented RNG mechanics, and bad server maintenance. Paladins were one of the most famous cases of terrible designs, with RNG mechanics that relied on other RNG mechanics. The two beginner zones had quest lines to take you through that area, but by the mid-game, actual gameplay became scarce, and ultimately about finding other players to fail your way through the various dungeon for loot to make your numbers go up, because the main focus on WoW itself quickly became about endgame RAID content. And that was shit too, because it was mostly about herding cats through big caves while trying to mitigate the high-school drama on a friday night when you could be out drinking with friends.
The ONLY reason people kept playing was because it fostered addictive behaviors; like drinking or gambling, and the and the only thing the expansions really added were better Skinner Boxes to tap into that illusion of "progress"
WoW was shit. It still is shit, and the only thing that kept it alive was its trademark.
>Tell me you're a seething SW Galaxies fan without telling me you're a seething SW Galaxies fan
I weep for you zoomers.
What because I'm not crippled with a blood-hazed view of the past tinted by seething delusional anger?
If a zoomer plays an MMORPG, he plays ff14. WoW relies on nostalgia to maintain its playerbase, see their Classic release. Cata launched 10 years ago, no zoomie has nostalgia for it
Its mainly BRICS zoomers
holy shit you're mad
and also mostly wrong
>Thus I can't help but wonder, why haven't other games of the period done this, instead going for the fake looking cardboard box vibe? Was it just more expensive to do?
Expensive, yes, but also against the "realism" and hardware-pushing graphicshomosexualry culture of the time. Devs designed games for high-end or even future hardware and included settings to dial down detail on the toasters players actually had.
Old school Blizzard famously took a very long time to develop games and ALSO famously designed their games to look good on and perform well on much lower specced hardware than its competition. Part of this involved developing a distinctive art style (whether derivative of 40k or not isn't relevant). WoW was ripped on constantly at the time for its "cartoony" graphics. But, they invested a lot in it, hiring good artists and developers and coordinating them effectively.
If you're a zoomer, you probably have no idea how stellar Blizzard's reputation was in 2004 when they released World of Warcraft.
>Thus I can't help but wonder, why haven't other games of the period done this, instead going for the fake looking cardboard box vibe? Was it just more expensive to do?
It's mostly a money / time issue, as other Anons said. WoW's world was hand crafted, where I am pretty sure just about every 3D game of that rough time period that wasn't Morrowind was at least 70% copy/paste.
Even oblivion that came out in 2007 felt very generic, smooth and copy-paste.
Another example of a good 3d world is Gothic 1/2, the whole map was hand-crafted over a long period of time and has a great sense of flow / exploration, it's unique in how it's an action RPG where nothing respawns and everything is hand-placed into the world for a reason.
Most gamedev doesn't have the luxury of sitting on a project for literal years with no shareholders to answer to. Up until and including WotlK Blizzard was an indie company that answered only to itself. Then they sold their soul to activision, and, well. Yeah.
>Up until and including WotlK Blizzard was an indie company that answered only to itself. Then they sold their soul to activision, and, well. Yeah.
This just isn't true. They haven't been an independent studio since '94 and the parent company that merged them with Activision had owned them for a decade prior to the merger.
>Davidson & Associates (1994–1998)
>Vivendi Games (1998–2008)
>Activision Blizzard (2008–present)
I am pretty sure they were still not a publicly traded stock until activision, but I could be wrong. It's just very sus that the moment they were sold to activision the quality of everything just plummeted.
That heroine dude looks way more cool after becoming an addict.
Even the bags under his eyes have a sort of dignity to them.
Like he went from "creepy uncle" to former Rockstar or current b tier Celebrity. Perhaps a character actor.
Yeah they were not independent, but Vivendi pretty much let them do whatever because they kept delivering hit after hit.
>Even oblivion that came out in 2007 felt very generic, smooth and copy-paste.
That's because it literally had randomly generated terrain and dungeons.
>hand-placed
I doubt it because that would eat too much time and make anything that is wilderness seem artifical
they got away with it because Gothic is a toddler game (themepark) and they crunched a lot
if you do that it will kill any sense of exploration since your putting shit everywhere
the map is too busy and what always sucked about these games is that you spend half your time picking up shit from the ground
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Blizzard were absolute masters and were one of the few developers who could make 3d graphics look good.
It's just a case of talent being aggregated together in one place. It produces a whole bunch of effects which have no way for technology to replicate, plus no legal way to put similar teams together (how would you justify it to HR?) means that it all peaks in the past. Similar with Rareware and Lucasarts
this is just zoomer nostalgia
wow graphics sucked, even when it was release it was called outddated and they were right, this was a good move on them since shitty graphics meant more pcs able to run it but graphics are not the place they shine.
They also reused quite a lot of wacraft 3 icons in inventory, which was another source of mockery.
Compared that Everquest 2, it had much better graphics, but this caused many pc's to not be able to run it. They also bet on single core's incresed performance and did not assume duo-quatro cores coming to scene, this cause some compability/optimziation issues post 2005. They also had voice acting, fricking voice acting in mmo it was unheard of but it meant jack shit.
True wrods.
WoW with its WC3 copypasta was laughed at when it came out. But on the flip side it had blizzard level of polish, which was top tier at the time. And then it became a massive normie magnet that everyone started copying, killing off the budding MMORPG genre.
MMORPGs died when the internet got too big and meeting strangers in the virtual world stopped feeling special. They died not in terms of profit obviously, but the magic has been lost forever.
Nope, WoW's popularity and its copycats killed the genre in its infancy.
>wow graphics sucked
I usually don't complain much about graphics, but Blizzard games usually look very revolting to me. WoW was still somewhat bearable, but when I look at Overwatch I wonder how this can be so popular while I try not to vomit on my screen
EQ2 is extremely ugly. Terrible art direction. Like WoW's style or hate it, people with taste may disagree. No one with taste likes EQ2.
EQ2 played the realism angle and, naturally, it aged like shit. It did have advanced tech like real time shadows and directional lighting, though. At the end of the day it just demonstrated art style is timeless while technology is fleeting.
WoW was made to look more stylized and cartoonish instead realistic. Its why it looks less dated than other games from the early 2000s. The reason for that probably has less to do with some long term plans that Blizzard had than with the fact that it made the game more accessible to people with less powerful PCs, because they wanted the game to be as massive (orpg) as possible.
It definitely does because people forget it was competing with EQ2 at the time, a game that went the exact opposite route with renders and shit optimization far and above what the general consumer median PC had at the time.
You could play EQ2 and marvel at pretty jank (for the time) and awful performance with shallow mechanics and non interactive feeling engine and then contrast that directly with WoW's strengths of the opposite of all of the above with much better art direction. There are areas in EQ2 that just had competing textures starting up right next to each other with big seams and weird resolution changes everywhere, odd bird animations etc. It looked good sometimes enough for screenshots but was way less consistent than Wow.
WoW was coming off the original exaggerated 90's hits direction like Joey M. originally and turned to the Pixar please all the leftists and eunuchs/trannies direction later which is why a lot of Blizzard looks like shit now. Not to mention it got overdone by LoL which sadly claimed Joey M's career for the darkness. All cartoon Corporate Memphis/Grubhub style, no substance left there.
Stop pretending WoW is good in any way.
When WoW came out, it was actually pretty great. It's cartoony art style gave it more freedom than many other games of it's era adding to the fantasy aspect opposite of the grittiness of Diablo games. This fantasy aspect helped to keep gameplay more lighthearted. And with it being an immediate successor to W3, the characters and any copied material including icons helped the game feel more familiar. This style as well as the ability to play the game with a ton of people (not really a thing at the time) on a lower tier computer really helped to attract people who would never have played any of Blizzard's other games.
Something should also be said for the quality of WoW. It was well executed, immersive and easy to find something new to do. And when you got a Blizzard game pre-Activision, you knew you were getting a top end game that would immediately have a cult following that would last a decade, easily.
That said end game raid grind killed it for me. That's why a lot of people would constantly start a new character to level. That's what helped to make each expansion so intriguing, thus leading to the continual development of expansions and extending the life of the game.
Balance was always an issue. This issue helped to add the the need to overcome balance issues which in turn prompted a deeper dive into the game as the issues did not outweigh the fun of the game.