"That's actually something we talk about every expansion," he said. "I'm positive we'll talk about it next expansion."
To a degree the World of Warcraft engine is showing its age. That doesn't really bother me very much... I enjoy the semi-cartoon look of the MMO as it seems evocative of the RTS games, especially WCIII, and stands out against a sea of very flat and sterile attempts to make hyper-realistic graphics in games. For all that I would like a bit more flexibility in my character design, I don't mind that WoW has a low polygon count or whatever. But I am very curious as to what they'd do with an updated graphics engine. I believe it was Jeff Kaplan who said, perhaps in jest, "Our designers assure me we haven't even begun to see how big shoulder armor can get."
This has been circulating for a while now, but some players have found commands that will improve the graphics display on World of Warcraft. In the category of oops-we-missed-this-one, reader Matthew actually sent us this tip as far back as mid-March after stumbling on a link at the EU forums. We've dug up the commands that he sent as well as the before and after pictures. Simply log into WoW and type up the following macro:
This macro supposedly pushes the sliders in the Graphics Options part of the game beyond what the controls normally allow, although these values are the maximum allowed by the current game system. Using higher numbers will have no effect and some improvements will only take effect when the game is restarted. Some reports say that using this macro will slow down your Frames Per Second (FPS) while some report no impact on even mid-range systems. If you try it out and find that your performance decreases, however, you can simply type the following macro to return everything to normal:
If your system can handle it, you should expect more vegetation, more objects visible in the distance, more detailed weather effects, and sharper graphics overall. Important: readers have written in saying that the revert macro described above doesn't revert to your previous set-up, but instead puts all your graphical preferences to the lowest settings. Proceed with caution.
For those of you who do not frequent the forums, you might not know that since patch 2.4, there has been a Tauren outcry.
It seems that cows everywhere are logging in to find that their weapons are roughly 50% smaller than they were previously. Should you take your weapon out to get a better look at it, you'll get to watch it grow back to pre-patch size.
Unfortunately, this is not a bug. Hortus has confirmed that it was an intentional change because certain weapons would clip the ground while sheathed.
While the Tauren have been getting some support on the forums, some players seem unsure of why this is such a big issue. Let's take a deeper look into why players are upset, including the fact that cows will seemingly be the brunt of even more jokes. Not innocent jokes either; not like "steak! It's what's for dinner!"
If you've been waiting for yet another performance upgrade, you might not have to wait too much longer -- the kind folks on the test realm forums have confirmed that patch 2.4 will bring both audio and video performance upgrades with it. As we've said before, Blizzard is usually pretty kind to system requirements, but players are reporting that graphic and audio glitches are fixed when you load up the PTR for 2.4, and CMs say that those changes will move to the live realms as well.
Unfortunately, there's no more details than that on what got fixed, but it's good news, we're sure, for anyone dealing with technical problems. If our readers are right, you've only got a few more days to wait -- patch 2.4 ahoy!
As you all know by now, patch 2.4, currently up on the PTRs, is going to bring many changes (although not as many class changes as I would have liked, but what can you do). Here's one more: a new animation for fire! As seen in the YouTube video above, it currently seems to apply to outdoor, stand-in-one-place type fires, but we can only hope it will be applied to fire effects from spells as well. Mm, fire...
If you haven't visited the forums or the official site in a while, you'll probably not have noticed that the ice we'd seen before on the logo has now overtaken it. Not too surprising-- the background on the forums and the homepage has changed as well, and considering that Winter's Veil is here, odds are that Blizzard is just getting a little seasonal with their graphics.
Or are they? The original ice showed up more than a month ago-- way back, according to our readers, when Wrath of the Lich King was announced in August. And so, despite the candy canes, it's hard not to wonder if this signals a turning point in the WoW universe. We've still got the Sunwell coming before the expansion, but is there a chance that this icy winter could be here to stay? Northrend ahoy?
For a very long time now, druids have been bemoaning the "feral range bug," which makes it so that feral special attacks sometimes don't work, even though the regular auto attacks are fine. I've always thought this bug caused special attacks to have a shorter range than auto attacks (and I wasn't alone), but some videos demonstrate that the bug (as shown above, and also here) has to do more with positioning than the actual range between the druid and the target.
I play a feral druid, and I can't say that I've noticed this bug very much, but I tend to shy away from PvP situations where it would be likely to show up most -- mainly because I find feral druid PvP to be very difficult (though I keep trying now and then). Perhaps this bug is one of the reasons for that, but everything is just too fast-paced for me to see?
In any case, Vaneras on the European WoW forums responded to a poster in order to let us know that the developers are indeed aware of this "concern," and they ... well... that's it. They're just aware. Nobody knows if they'll actually fix it or not, though I would assume they will at some point.
In addition, Vaneras says the developers are aware of the some graphical imperfections in some druid feral forms, and they also "like the idea of new graphics and models for the Druid forms, however there are no plans for such in the immediate future." The key word here is "immediate," which implies that the not-so-distant future might be quite different! Is there hope for feral druid graphical updates in Wrath of the Lich King, perhaps?
[Update] I just got back from testing this in PvP, and sure enough I found my special abilities weren't landing, even though I was on top of my enemy. Click on the link below to see a video of this bug in a PvP situation.
For the many Orc players unhappy about the state of their shoulder armor, I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that Drysc has confirmed that the fix for the shoulder armor graphics has made it into the upcoming 2.2 patch! And the bad news? Well, no one knows quite when the 2.2 patch is going to get off the PTRs and on the live realms, so you're going to have to live with those oddly-sized shoulders for a while yet...
Reader Scott kindly dropped us a note (thanks!) that Nvidia released new drivers for Windows Vista on Tuesday, and hidden in the release notes is a note that the "low frame rates" within WoW have been fixed.
So if you're running WoW in Vista, have an Nvidia graphics card (with one GPU), and still having graphical problems, a driver update definitely wouldn't hurt. Things seem to have calmed down on the graphics issues since a few patches have hit, but maybe there are still a few of you out there looking for a solution.
As for us Windows XP users, looks like we're still stuck with an older driver version. If you've updated your drivers on XP and are still having problems, the best thing to do is probably just to let Blizzard know about it.
Update: Whoops, Slashrude (and other commenters) point out what I missed: these are beta drivers, which means installing them may not be such a good idea. Update at your own risk.
By now you've heard of the Orc shoulder problem (and maybe you've even confronted Azeroth's Greatest Male Orc about it), but as MMO Champion shows, that was definitely not the only major bug that showed up in 2.1.3. There's a huge list of things going wrong-- Dwarf females' offhands are huge, Blood Elf males can walk through chairs, Cyclone can prevent players from getting their BG marks (!), and ghost wolves, when attacking, can now be seen carrying weapons. What happened?!
The problem becomes even stranger when you consider the patch notes-- almost nothing got changed compared to previous patches. All we saw were a few graphical changes, an added interface option, and some high level raid tuning. As someone asked yesterday, how can all of this seemingly unrelated stuff be breaking? If all Blizzard is doing is updating the mail system, what does the size of shoulderpieces on male Orcs have to do with it at all?
The answer is probably more complicated than we can know. As commenter Okoloth said yesterday, object-oriented programming (which Blizzard uses to code the game) is full of parent/child relationships, which means that a change in one class ("wearable items in the mail") can have strange effects all across the game ("Orc shoulders shrink"). And then there's the whole fact that even though the patch notes for 2.1.3 are small, that most likely doesn't mean Blizzard is slacking-- they could be implementing more subtle changes on the system (in preparation for future content that we don't know about yet), and those changes might be having an effect on the actual game we play.
Of course, just because we aren't being told why these things are happening doesn't mean we should give Blizzard a pass on fixing them ASAP (in my opinion, they shouldn't wait until the next patch to fix my shoulder size, thank you). But just because seemingly unrelated bugs are popping up doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing.
Just a quick technical note (thanks to WorldofWar for the heads up): both of the major graphics card makers have released brand new drivers for their video cards recently. Even if you're not technically inclined, all you need to know is that the newer the version of video card drivers you have running, the better your 3D videogames (of which WoW is one) will look.
If you're running Nvidia cards, you can get the latest version right here. And those with ATI cards can find their new drivers over on their site. Just download the right file for your operating system, run it (you'll probably have to restart your system, so save your work), and then marvel at... OK, it probably won't look too different, but trust me when I tell you you want to be running the newest drivers possible. In fact, if anything will fix those graphical problems people have been seeing in the last patch, this probably will.
But Mike, you say, what if I don't know what kind of card I have? For Windows XP, just right click on My Computer and go to Properties. Choose the Hardware tab, then Device Manager, and then look for the "Display Adapters" menu in the list-- that should tell you the build and brand of your video card. For Mac OS X, you don't have to worry-- Apple updates your drivers for you with Software Update. And for Linux-- well, if you're running WoW on Linux, I'll assume you already know what you're doing, because I sure don't (though you can probably find help here if you need it). And yes, you technically inclined and sharp-eyed ladies and gents, I do call my custom-built, lightning fast XP box "Refridgerator." Why? Because it's freakin' cool, man.
It only showed up for a fraction of a second (not even long enough to grab a screenshot of it, or barely read what it said), but after logging in today, you may have noticed the login screen flash a quick message: "Submitting Non-personal System Information." Say wha? What did Blizzard just grab from my computer?
I tried logging in again to see the message again, but no dice-- apparently it was just a one-time process after the first login. I can't remember whether I was given an option to opt out of that system check (I usually say no on that stuff, just because I don't want Blizzard finding out that I'm dumb enough to run the wrong drivers on my sound card or something), but I'm sure it's legal. I'm just not sure that sneaking that in for a split second was the right way to do it.
Nethaera says it's not personal-- they were just grabbing some random system spec info (and I'll speculate that it was to determine a good way to fix all of the graphical errors lately). It's not wrong for companies to have that data necessarily-- Valve does the same thing with Steam, and they've gotten some great info about what gaming PCs are like. It would be nice if Blizz shared info like that, but for now they're just using it to work on their product.
Some gamers aren't real thrilled about the implementation either-- if it's so non-personal, why did they throw up a warning we could just barely see? I just hope that if Blizzard is second-guessing their system reqs, they keep the rest of the process as open as possible.
As you've probably noticed, I like to do many of my own screen shots to accompany stories. Up until now, WoW has saved all screen shots taken in the program in a .tga format that has rich deep color and good definition. The only problem with that was that the .tga format was problematic for those who didn't have an image editing program to open their screen shots up with. (I have Photoshop, so not as much an issue here.) With 2.1 came a long-awaited change for those who weren't able to share their screen shots before (Or weren't interested in snagging a graphic program to do so, anyway). As of now, your screen shots will automatically save into .jpg format.
Why is this a change I'd want to change back, you say? While I like .jpg for compression, I will be the first to admit it's not the format I normally think of as being the best for graphic quality as someone who works with images a lot. That said, for all of you graphic fiends out there like me -- makers of icons, wallpapers, and various other graphic goodies -- here is an important imaging tip for you from your friends at the EU WoW Forums:
Well we've seen new armor, we've seen new mounts, and now we even see new animations from BC. Pallysucks points us to this forum thread in which Aireon from Arthas shows us a bunch of leaked animation graphics that look pretty sweet if you ask me. I've mirrored the files here for everyone to check out.
First, as a bonus, here's what's purported to be the Pally PVP set. Nice shield!
New Pally seal animations: Wisdom, Command, Crusader (I like that one, reminds me of the DAoC graphics)
And perhaps the best thing about this leak is that this probably means there's lots more new graphics in store for all the different buffs and heals. I wouldn't even have though Blizzard was going to revamp the current game this intensively, but it looks like they weren't kidding around when they numbered the expansion WoW 2.0. Can't wait to see it in action.
Frostbolt went out and got himself one of those shiny new 20" iMacs, and he says wow, WoW looks good on it. One of my favorite things about WoW is how well it seems to run on almost any hardware, but I know what Frosty means-- there's a big difference between playing with all the options off and turning on the underwater, drunk, and glowy effects. Spells, buffs, and instances look so much better when you have a nice rig and all the effects turned on.
Right now I'm running WoW on a PC I've had for a while-- it doesn't look too bad chugging along at 1.8ghz, 512mb of RAM and a GeForce 5200, but by the time Burning Crusade hits, I'll be done building my new monster: overclocked to 4ghz with a watercooled processor, 2gb of RAM (that's right, baby), and a GeForce 7900 GS in the PCI-e slot. All I need is to find a deal on a case and the RAM, and I'll be set to build my monster WoW machine.
But sometimes you don't even need a whole computer-- a few months ago I went ahead and invested in a sweet 24" Dell widescreen monitor, and that, as Robert Frost says, "has made all the difference." I couldn't imagine healing a 40 man raid with a 15" or even a 17" monitor-- all those meters would cloud up the place before long. Then again, I've seen screenshots around of people playing WoW at 800x600 resolution. I'd consider that unplayable, but maybe I'm being elitist. According to the latest Steam survey, 1024x768 is still the standard for Half-Life players-- Blizzard doesn't track the same info (or at least they don't release it), but I wonder if WoWers tend to skew their tech faster or slower than that. Thoughts? What kind of rig are you playing this game on?
If you've been waiting for yet another performance upgrade, you might not have to wait too much longer -- the kind folks on the test realm forums have confirmed that 
Reader Scott kindly dropped us a note (thanks!) that Nvidia 
By now you've heard of 
Just a quick technical note (thanks to 
It only showed up for a fraction of a second (not even long enough to grab a screenshot of it, or barely read what it said), but after logging in today, you may have noticed the login screen flash a quick message: "Submitting Non-personal System Information." Say wha? What did Blizzard just grab from my computer?![[She doesn't trust me. Hmm. I wonder why...]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.wowinsider.com/media/2007/05/killoff.gif)
As you've probably noticed, I like to do many of my own 
Well we've seen new armor, we've seen new mounts, and now we even see new animations from BC. 
Frostbolt went out and got himself one of those 
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