Beautiful Game Appreciation

Rensje · Jul 16, 2020

Been on a WoW Classic binge of late. This game was a huge part of my childhood and I will never tire of these chunky models and the painterly art style. Filtered through a modern rendering pipeline it's still quite beautiful in places!

If 16-year old me could see the game like this he'd lose his mind, I bet. I think I was playing on a 17" CRT monitor at the time, probably at 1024x768 resolution. And my machine would have struggling. Now I play at (effectively) 5120x2160 resolution with all settings pretty much maxed out and the game will still be zooming along. It's just ridiculous how far we've come from a technical perspective.

Frindis · Jul 17, 2020

@Rensje You know you have played a lot of Classic when you can pinpoint the location of the pictures you shared. Stranglethorn Vale is my favorite spot from your pictures. Good place for skinning and fishing; made a lot of money fishing up iron and mithril bond trunks

Zloth · Jul 17, 2020

16 year old me would lose his mind seeing that there was a color other than green on a computer screen.

Rensje · Jul 20, 2020

Small victories: my first ever mount in WoW vanilla / classic.
Never made it to or past level 40 as a teenager.

Zloth · Jul 20, 2020

My first (and only?) was Asheron's Call 2:

Now back to Skyrim!

Zloth · Jul 22, 2020

Frindis · Jul 23, 2020

Ice bathing, here I coooooome!

Zloth · Jul 24, 2020

Rensje · Jul 28, 2020

Blackrock Mountain

Frindis · Jul 28, 2020

@Rensje Remember some sweet fights against the horde in them mountains, not to mention burning my butt off through lava hopping.

Zloth · Jul 28, 2020

Is that World of Warcraft?

Skryim, Hallgate mod:

Hawks

Cranked up the colors for this one!

Vilja mod

Frindis · Jul 29, 2020

@Zloth I went into a vampire cave early on in my adventures (the one with a master vampire at the end); Poor Vilja did not survive the endeavors. I'm sure there is a way to resurrect her, but it would not feel right. I will miss her accent and some other stuff

Rensje · Jul 29, 2020

Zloth said:
Is that World of Warcraft?

It is. Amazing what a modern renderer and the magic of Ansel can do for a 15-year old game that wasn't the world's most beautiful title to begin with. The game always had a great style and atmosphere.

The retail version of WoW has its moments too, mind. Here's a couple shots from its more recent expansions:

Of course, I don't play retail much these days, if at all. It's Classic I came back to WoW for. One fun thing I did back when the Classic beta launched was compare the 'vanilla' graphics settings (there's an actual preset for that if you're feeling nostalgic) with modern day 'max' settings. Spot the differences:

And some more random shots from more recent play sessions:

I love how you can offset the camera these days using a console command.

Draw distance and distant LODs may not be the game's biggest strengths, but despite that I still think the game is quite beautiful. Landscapes and a sense of scale have always been one of the game's greatest strengths, and this was never more true than during the classic days when flying mounts weren't a thing.