Part of World of Warcraft’s long-term success lies in the game’s ability to run smoothly even on out-dated systems. This is obviously a result of the game being old, but it’s also a possibility thanks to great engine optimization on Blizzard’s part. World of Warcraft’s upcoming expansion, Warlords of Draenor promises to improve visuals considerably, by adding new character models, textures, and generally refreshing a game engine that, despite standing through the test of time, is seriously out-dated by now.
However, Blizzard understands that many of the game’s subscribers are still enjoying World of Warcraft from older, less capable systems, and keeping these subscribers without forcing them to upgrade is of great importance. Blizzard’s community manager Taepsilum reassured fans regarding system requirements in a recent forum post, where he explained that “Client performance is something we care about a lot. It doesn’t matter how well-designed an encounter is: you aren’t going to have fun raiding at 8 FPS. We want everyone to be able to enjoy playing with the new models, and our dev team is working hard making sure that WoW is as resource efficient as possible in order for that to happen.”
To compensate for the hardware costs of additional polygons and higher resolution textures, Blizzard will be taking several measures to maintain performance levels. Visual clutter will be diminished in major fights, and combat data analysis will be tweaked to reduce performance costs, compensating for the increase in visual quality and rendering capabilities. In some cases, players will actually see minor improvements in frame rates, despite the game’s updated polygon counts, animations and geometry. “I’d say that you shouldn’t be worried about any big drop in performance; things will most likely remain very close to what you are experiencing right now. So if you’re satisfied with what you have right now, then there shouldn’t be any need to change anything.” continued Taepsilum, answering a fan’s question about the necessity of upgrading his PC.
World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor is set for a Fall 2014 release window, and visual upgrades aren’t the only things to be introduced. The level cap will be raised to 100, and a new world area will be unlocked, centered on the homeworld of the Orcs. A lot of end-game PvE content will naturally be introduced too. With upgraded graphics and more things to do, Warlords of Draenor is likely to breathe some new life into a very old MMORPG that is still going strong, and many fans of the game have expressed a desire to return to Blizzard’s flagship title once the expansion is released.