World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft is an absolutely exceptional game in many aspects. Published in 2004, it is the online role-playing game classic par excellence and almost everyone should have looked into the fantasy world at least once. In 2009, WoW received the Guinness World Record for most active online players. To date, it is also the highest-grossing video game in history.
Changed game principle
A lot has changed in the game since it was launched 20 years ago. New abilities, peoples, worlds and a lot more were added over time. And coming up some of the biggest changes ever to come out of the game. Blizzard Entertainment’s recent announcement is more drastic than many of the previous updates.
In early February, they announced “cross-fraction play” on the test realm. Blizzard Entertainment is changing a basic principle of their MMORPG classic. Because so far, a fundamental aspect of World of Warcraft was that peoples can only cooperate with each other. With the launch of Update 9.2.5, players will be able to create pre-made groups between Horde and Alliance players for “Dungeons, Raids, and Ranked PvP.”
The development effort required by the update shows how big the change is: “Two decades of code and content have been developed under the assumption that parties can only have players from a single faction. While we aim to get this feature available as soon as possible, the scale of the change also means it may not be ready in time for the upcoming Eternity’s End content update.”
Graphics-Update
And the graphics have also changed since 2004. True to the motto “If you don’t keep up with the times, you’ll keep up with the times” the graphics were updated with each expansion. This has been happening every two years since 2008, most recently with the expansions Azeroth (2018) and Shadowlands (2020). Accordingly, the next general overhaul should actually take place this year.
A fan project has now set itself the task of showing what World of Warcraft could look like in 2022. In the project, parts of the game world and the Unreal Engine 5 will be relaunched. In the video below you can see the gate of Orgrimmar, the orc capital, in the UE5 graphic. Blizzard will probably not set the line for the upcoming graphics update that high. Nevertheless, the project shows how gigantic the game world in Unreal Engine 5 can be.
Here you can see the UE5 project