That being said, it hasn’t stopped fans from imagining what a modern World of Warcraft could look like.
Redditor u/todtodson took it upon himself to envision what World of Warcraft would look like if rendered in Unreal Engine and made similar to Overwatch. Although the 2016 hero shooter by Blizzard uses an in-house 3D game engine, the creator did a great job approximating a more modern look for World of Warcraft. After uploading the results on the official World of Warcraft subreddit, the creator got plenty of praise and positive feedback from the community.
A common criticism of World of Warcraft is how jarring the difference between the game’s cinematics are with its in-game graphics. Although developers make cinematics hyper-realistic on purpose, how World of Warcraft looks when you’re playing it is night and day, in comparison. Also, one commenter said it best when he said that u/todtodson’s work doesn’t “try to make WoW look ultra-realistic.” Instead, as the user put it, u/todtodson “does a good job of capturing the classic cartoonish art style in a new environment.” According to Activision Blizzard’s latest earnings call, the publisher made a record sum in microtransactions last year. World of Warcraft played a huge role to make that happen. Even if a single post isn’t enough to prove to Blizzard that there’s a demand for a more modern WoW experience, the positive feedback should give the fan-favorite studio a reason to consider the idea of making this a reality. If it’s any consolation, Blizzard just confirmed that it is working on a Warcraft mobile game that will be released this year. If that game looks even remotely close to u/todtodson’s work and does well on the market, a major graphics overhaul for World of Warcraft might start to make sense. Unfortunately, we’ll never know for sure if that is going to happen or not. We do know that Microsoft is coming in to take over by next year after the acquisition. Fingers crossed, the regime change puts World of Warcraft’s aging looks at the top of the priority list.
