Beautiful Game Appreciation

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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!

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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.
 
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:

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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:

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And some more random shots from more recent play sessions:

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

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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.
 

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