World of Warcraft Increasing Draw Distances

[HardOCP News]

I am not a WoW player so you are going to have to forgive me for not knowing a 12 year old game did not have the ability to adjust the level of detail until this update. Apparently these changes are available to check out in the current beta test. Here's a couple screenshots provided by Blizzard.

If you’re interested in the “how,” a bulk of the effort to achieve this went into changing the way we draw terrain and water in WoW to render fewer vertices at a distance. But it also necessitated the implementation of Level of Detail (LOD) for game models, like trees, and buildings as well. A model with LOD can swap to a lower polygon count model at a distance without negatively impacting the visual quality of the scene. We prototyped aspects of these systems in both Warlords of Draenor and Mists of Pandaria and learned enough from those two expansions to feel confident about making this change in Legion.

 

[{NG}Fidel]

Its about damn time.

 

[sfsuphysics]

So would this give a player any advantage? I know MP games tend to cater to hheLCD simply because extra screen dize, etc can give people "unfair" advantages

 

[ZenDragon]

To be clear though, the game has always had the ability to adjust level of detail at a distance, however it did so by creating a distance fog and fading the scene into the fog at a user specified distance (as you can plainly see in the screen shots). That said, the rendering engine on this game is as old as the game itself, which is altogether not a bad thing as the simplicity of the scene keeps the frame rates high especially on modern PCs when there are potentially hundreds of players in view and spell effects all over the place. You never really get close enough to the action to see a high polygon count anyway, like you would in a FPS like Doom. There is no need to have such a high level of detail even close up.

 

[ZenDragon]

So would this give a player any advantage? I know MP games tend to cater to hheLCD simply because extra screen dize, etc can give people "unfair" advantages

Most definitely, in certain situations, like battle grounds, however the graphics engine is so simple in this game that any PC in the last say 4-5 years can easily handle everything maxed out. So unless somebody is just not aware that they can increase view distance it is unlikely it will matter.

 

[Dawill]

I'm a recovering wow addict. I've been clean for over 5 years...

In all seriousness I'm shocked people are still playing this. While I was addicted during vanilla (8+hr/day), I quit after about a year and just barely tried out buring crusade and cataclysm later. Magic was gone, nothing to be addicted to. I'm guessing they done some type of analysis though were it's worth making these type of enhancements on the existing game. Looks like most MMO's since WoW have failed as the grindy MMO recipe doesn't seem to age well. My personal opinions is these type of enhancements are just life support for a dying game.

 

[NeoNemesis]

After an 8 year hiatus, I picked it up for a few months when WoD came out (and I was looking for work after graduating). The game is a time sink of absolutely epic proportions. I will never touch it again.

 

[ZenDragon]

Hah! Yea definitely a time sink, I no-lifed it for a couple years when it came out but only because I have co-workers that also played. Took a few year break and signed up again a few months ago and I still play, but the only thing I do is PvP. As I've gotten older (I'm 35 now) I've lost the desire to care about the rest of the game. It's just sort an occasional 2-3 hour escape when I'm bored and don't want to think about anything work related.

 

[NeoNemesis]

Hah! Yea definitely a time sink, I no-lifed it for a couple years when it came out but only because I have co-workers that also played. Took a few year break and signed up again a few months ago and I still play, but the only thing I do is PvP. As I've gotten older (I'm 35 now) I've lost the desire to care about the rest of the game. It's just sort an occasional 2-3 hour escape when I'm bored and don't want to think about anything work related.

Ya, I find it hard to believe that I was 21 when WoW was released. How the time flies....

 

[Quix]

WoW is not the game it was on launch, not even close. I used to play, for the first few years and I've been back a few times but it seems like it gets easier and easier every year so it doesn't hold my interest.

 

[daglesj]

I tried playing it for about three months. It was along three months. Just gave up as I couldn't see the point to it.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Just waiting for all the clueless fantasy nerds to complain that "this new patch has lag, the game sucks" because their old integrated graphics machines no longer play it.

Same thing happened back in the day when I moved all my CS servers from 1.6 to Source. "Source sucks, it has lag". Maybe it's your emachines that can't keep up?

Even during the Civ 5 launch, the 2k games forums were full of people complaining that the game sucked, not knowing it was their hardware. Some even blamed it for killing their video cards

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

I thought Everquest was silly when it was launched, and I never played it.

Then WoW came out, and my take was "this is essentially Everquest, right?" and I proceeded to never play that.

Might as well just play Progress Quest

 

[Ruoh]

The game is a time sink of absolutely epic proportions. I will never touch it again.

It's not nearly the time sink that BDO is. Not even comparable. It'd say it's on the low-med side in comparison to the Asian MMOs out there.

 

[tetris42]

Its about damn time.

Maybe they can add widescreen support to Warcraft 3 next, seeing as how they've had 14 years and are still patching it.

So would this give a player any advantage? I know MP games tend to cater to hheLCD simply because extra screen dize, etc can give people "unfair" advantages

Not necessarily, it depends on how they handle it. They could just let the user render the TERRAIN at a long distance, but in order to see other users or enemies, there could still be a shorter draw distance cap on that.

 

[Darunion]

Maybe they can add widescreen support to Warcraft 3 next, seeing as how they've had 14 years and are still patching it.

This is what I like about blizzard, they are still supporting their games to a degree.

 

[GotNoRice]

The whole "herp derp 12 year old game!" shit gets old quick. By that logic Battlefield 4 is a 12 year old game also since it's the same game engine that has basically evolved over the years with each new battlefield game. Major improvements to WoW have come with every single expansion, and they are about to release their 6th expansion... WoW, when it was released, was a game that you could play on Windows 98 with a card like a Voodoo3 or TNT2. Now it's a game with full DX11 support, 64-bit client, etc. They have always had adjustable levels of detail and an adjustable draw distance. Average amounts of Ram and VRam have increased a bit over the years, and so has the max draw distance.

 

[tetris42]

This is what I like about blizzard, they are still supporting their games to a degree.

Oh I know, but come on... widescreen...

 

[EODetroit]

Private (read:unauthorized) WoW servers have been able to do this forever (at least patch 2.0, if not prior). The draw distance is just a line in a text file. The news here is not that they improved their technology, its that they judged their customer's systems able to handle it finally, and now are allowing clients to enable it.