WoW Graphics Reboot Coming?

World of
Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Q&A on Eurogamer discusses the upcoming
expansion for Blizzard's MMORPG with Jeff Kaplan, Tom Chilton, and J. Allen
Brack, with J. revealing along the way that they are probably going to start
looking at rebooting the game's graphics with the expansion after Wrath of
the Lich King, while acknowledging such a move has not gone perfectly when
tried in other games in the past: 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.


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