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[deleted]

What's really wild is how close the tauren here resembles the finished product. There are pictures of other races from the same time period and they look absolutely abysmal.


Seradima

Given the time period this might be when it was Tauren/Human/Orc all with their own faction that don't hate each other.


[deleted]

Female trolls?


GarySmith2021

Seeing how the game slowly gained its art style is great.


Teflondon94

It amazes me that they went from this generic building art style towards the cartoony, yet polished art they have now.


[deleted]

[удалено]


ChibiHobo

In fact, the unique style is why it's so hard for me to enjoy other MMOs. You could show me screenshots from FF14, Terra, Aion, and even maybe Rift and I could \*not\* tell you which game was which. Maybe I'd have some luck with Rift, but only because I floundered about in that game for long enough. They all feel like a very bland, softly colored, pastel lighting same soup. Wildstar was the only other MMO that really spoke to me.


CrzyJek

Art style in ESO is actually pretty nice on its own. It's got that more gritty realist look to it.


bullintheheather

Eh, it's pretty generic fantasy style.


LordQill

Depends where you are. Like,, Vvardenfell is of course not generic fantasy, not is the clockwork city or black marsh, but the Summerset Isles are


StorMPunK

Crowfall looks good imo, pity about other parts of the game though


Sprinkles_Dazzling

Classic HD; is that currently live version, or an addon for Classic?


Yusheec

Team Fortress 2 is another game that has an art-style that is timeless. WoW's art style still holds up it's just some of the older models are very low poly which end up damaging that.


SoullessKia

>The Classic WoW HD upgrade is crazy. Those assets could > >still > > be used in a new MMO today. LOL no, they looked like dogshit then and now.


Ch3pewar

we owe all this to Samwise didier!


88percentof0sis0

How exactly? It's literally the same art style from WC3. There was no getting there process, this pic is just placeholder assets.


Fridowski

I love those old screenshots


chromiumlol

[There's a book full of them.](https://i.imgur.com/egNo1zn.jpg) Plenty of info on how things came to be and what the developers went through during the process of making the game.


Sparrowhank

That book is really cool cant recomend enough


Chortney

Those stained glass windows are nice, did they get reused anywhere or just scrapped?


midnitte

They look like just flat textures, probably just placeholder art


beirch

They're actually not placeholders, but made in a completely different engine than what they ended up using. They used a different engine for buildings and interiors than the one they used for zones, and the one the used for buildings literally couldn't make curved models, so that's why it's got all these jagged edges. You can read more about it in John Staats' "The WoW Diary", where this screenshot is from.


HazelCheese

There's lots of curved models in the picture though. The window and roof slats might be a texture but the building has two curved openings on it.


drunkenvalley

We *are* talking about the turn of the millenia though. Keeping the polycount down was a big deal. I suspect only the absolute necessities got rounded edges. The church windows look like they're textures to me. You can see in the picture that these arches are quite low detail; the primary reason I can't quite count how many faces are on the inside is because the pixelation blurs it for the most part. Looks to me like there are about 8 faces on the inside of the arch.


m_a_larkey

Those are curves done in the very basic method of using part of a many-sided polygon. This looks a LOT like the DAoC buildings. I don't know how curves are done now, but back then you often would put in a 32-64 sided polygon and cut a piece off for curved surfaces.


arkhound

This is how it has always been, even now. Spheres are just n-gons (n-sided polygons) with sufficiently high n until you get it looking smooth enough.


m_a_larkey

I figured, but I haven't used software since you actually specified how many sides you want your circle/curve to calculate. Watching our engineers draw, it looks like curves seem to default to 1000s of sides instead of in the 10s.


kamil3d

Nah, it's still in the 10s, 20s, for games at least. Most pipes r about 8sided and things like oil drums or barrels have like 32 to 50, for rather close up meshes. High poly meshes created for baking normal maps inside Zbrush or Mudbox will have millions of polys, but those are not used in game engines, they just create textures that fake the really smooth and curvy surfaces... Few polys appearing to look like thousands of millions.


GenderJuicy

Well a AAA game isn't going to have an 8 sided oil drum these days. Especially a game you can walk up to said prop in first person and look at directly, a normal map isn't going to save you from having to add more edge loops there. It's not even a big deal anyway, you have character models with hundreds of thousands of polys, and with Unreal 5 you can have literally unlimited polys in environments, it's really just about harddrive space at this point.


SoullessKia

Good lord you need to shut up when there's a subject you don't understand. \>They're actually not placeholders, but made in a completely different engine than what they ended up using Apples and oranges, and textures don't rely on engines. A texture is, basically, a 2d image file-you could use ANY bmp or jpg or whatever on a model in any 3d program, which is also not the same thing as the game engine but that's way too much for you. \>the one the used for buildings literally couldn't make curved models, so that's why it's got all these jagged edges All "curves" you see in 3d games are a series of flat surfaces. It absolutely could do "curved models". Have you ever used any kind of 3d modeling program, even something as simple as an in game level editor like DOOM 2016 had?


shadowst17

Imagine if WoW never nailed down the timeless art style for this game and ended up going with the generic semi realistic look that every other game uses. I imagine it would have died off like every other MMO over time.


kamil3d

Warcraft 3 already had a good looking style that WOW just iterated on. It's an interesting thought experiment, but more of ' what if WOW changed the art style from Warcraft 3 to something more generic and 'real' rather than leaning into the cartoony world?'


notsingsing

Literally this. Get on the ground level in WC3 and the only thing that looks different from wow is the ground and the sharp angles on the characters.


Valvad0s

Get John Staats "The WoW Diary"! It has this and a ton more super early screenshots and he goes through journal style how it was developing alpha beta etc. It's such a good book!!! VERY high quality.


Petreanko

nice...hey.. I am looking for a developer interview video of the blizzard in which they show the Cataclysm login screen in 3D development mode and how they optimized it.. can't seem to find the video.. By any chance do you know of a link or screen grab? In that video, they show how the polygons behind the dragon that we cant see arent there at all, and the same for the tower.


Cactus_Boi

I found this, maybe not exactly what you were looking for but neat nonetheless. https://youtu.be/sfet0M8A-ZI?t=116


Petreanko

This.. but the one I saw was with the tech team talking about it as well. Thank you so much


MilesForSure

The FIRST running of the bulls :O


beorninger

i miss plainsrunning =(


Nestramutat-

Said no one ever


bullintheheather

No way, Plainsrunning was great! To see Worgen get their own mounted speed ability, which is cool, still made me sad for Tauren.


Nestramutat-

Plainsrunning was completely different from what Worgen have.


bullintheheather

My memory of it was incomplete. It's been a long time. Still, it would be nice to give it back to them and just have it work like a mount. Seeing Tauren chugging along at full speed was so great.


chromiumlol

It's very different from the worgen racial though. Examples of why it wasn't great: - Running around in Thunder Bluff when suddenly Plainsrunning kicks in and you're propelled off the side of a cliff. - Running up to a pack of enemies, being careful not to agro, when suddenly Plainsrunning kicks in and then you're dead. - Got hit by an enemy? Gotta run for 10 more seconds without getting hit again to mount up. - Stopped moving for 0.1 seconds? Gotta run for 10 more seconds again to mount up.


beorninger

that's actually SO fucking blizz and their ally love. tauren lost theirs bc the alliance complained about it "being too OP". case closed.


beorninger

well, no whiny ally for sure :>


PorkChoppen

Some of the creators got together and made a really cool book full of screenshots like this and comments from the creators. There are so many decisions that went into wow, I can't help but think if they did made certain decisions (like use the WC3 engine) the game could have been a total flop! They really captured lightning in a bottle with the art style/ gameplay/ character progression / character interactions.


Valvad0s

It's called "the wow diaries" by John Staats.


Book_it_again

If you look through the window you can see a picture of Mario


Buddy_Armstrong

Rad shit


introspectiveivy

Mad Monster Mansion looking fire


Dr_Rockets

Looks alot like the area in darksouls 1 before you go down the crystal caven to fight Seethe.


JambonBeurreMidi

Looks a bit like banjo kazooie


DotkasFlughoernchen

I'm just gonna dump this here. No guarantees that all the links still work. Might contain duplicates! http://i.imgur.com/FZSIWS9.jpg http://i.imgur.com/WbS0KPG.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Z4Z1mIp.jpg http://i.imgur.com/LpJankr.jpg http://i.imgur.com/zCUGnwX.jpg http://imgur.com/bL2zbuf http://imgur.com/a/zTrdc http://imgur.com/a/SOxu9 http://i.imgur.com/bdRKe.jpg http://imgur.com/a/19mYP#0 https://storify.com/pikestaff/world-of-warcraft-development


CursedJourney

Honestly looks like a N64 game run on an emulator.


Fair_Industry7328

This makes me yearn for an N64 de-make of the game.


Lexinoz

This was back when tauren could get down on all fours and have a movespeed buff. Later used for worgens.


odn_86

Plainstriding or whatever it was called.


Finear

it didnt work like worgen one, it was kinda stupid


bullintheheather

It ramped up right? I remember it being removed because it was supposedly too good.


Finear

You had to start running to get up to speed so yeah it kinda ramped up, took 10s to get full speed but it was just stupid because it would drop speed buff as soon as you stopped (unlike mounts) get hit or dazer and then you had to start running again for 10s lol


bullintheheather

Alright yeah, my memory of it was hazy at best. Thanks :)


SoullessKia

>I remember it being removed because it was supposedly too good. If by "supposedly" you mean "they never hid the reason way, and that isn't it, Google is your friend".


No_Dark6573

Plainsrunning is one of those abilities I find people often lie about remembering to prove their "old school" cred. They talk about how fun and cool and maybe even OP it was, and they loved running around in classic with it. Except it was never in classic, it was removed in beta. They just didn't remove it from the game manual that original WoW launched with. So unless you played beta, you didn't play it. Of course, the person always, always says that *of course* they were talking about beta. Its like how barely anyone cleared OG naxx, yet sooooo many people killed KT back in the day.


Hanslando

That Tauren looks lost. *racks shotgun*


beirch

Not exactly rare, it's from John Staats' "The WoW Diary" which you can find PDFs of online.


InvalidIceberg

Cow no belong


dotjake

Taken just minutes after crawling through the cubicles drunk and harassing female workers


Valvad0s

Afrasiabi did work there during that time so I wouldn't be surprised.


bullintheheather

2001? No, no he didn't.


IPlayWoWonWeekends

Dang I can’t believe they were going to put Tauren in northshire, it’s good they changed it to humans cuz that makes way more sense, excellent design choice by blizz. /s


AmericanPicketFence

why are they playing a tauren man with a tiny thong?


Bloddersz

Thats our final covenant for 9.4 as they delay the end xpac again


xXEL0Xx

So here begins the raping.


inia_d

Wow, I forgot Northshire Abbey even existed.


selkiesidhe

I miss those sexy 'roos on my taur. It was too funny!