World of Warcraft Grafik Update vielleicht in der 3. Expansion

Die Seite Eurogamer hat ein interessantes Interview mit den Lead Designern Jeff Kaplan, Tom Chilton und Producer J. Allen Brack veröffentlicht.

Auf Seite 3 äußerte sich Allen Brack auf die Frage noch einer kompletten Überarbeitung der Engine eher etwas zurückhaltend was diesen Punkt betrifft, stellt allerdings klar daß ein komplettes Grafikupdate mit Sicherheit irgendwann kommt. Vermutlich sogar schon in der nächsten Expansion nach Wrath of the Lich King.

Eurogamer: Do you think WOW is ever going to need a complete overhaul of the engine?

J. Allen Brack: That's actually something we talk about every expansion. It's interesting, two games have really tried that before, Ultima Online tried it and EverQuest tried it as well, and in each case it was only somewhat successful. In each case a lot of people continued to play with the original client, because it was faster, or they preferred it, or were just used to it or whatever. And so for me as a game developer, the idea that we would spend so much time and energy on something and have people go, "meh, that's not really for me," that's not very exciting.So I don't think there's really a clear model as to how to do that successfully. The model we have with Wrath of the Lich King allows people with high-end machines some additional graphical effects, and then we'll have some kind of fallback for the people who don't. Will we need a graphical update from the ground up at some point? Yep, probably. And I'm positive we'll talk about it next expansion.

Ich denke daß Blizzard sehr gut daran täte die Grafik etwas zu verbessern denn die neueren MMORPGs, die dieses Jahr noch releast werden, haben grafisch schon einiges zu bieten. Wer z.B. Age of Conan schon life auf einem guten PC erleben durfte wird wissen was ich meine.