Dawn

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Revenge of the shrooms

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The undead trolls keep a dinosaur here...

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All along the watchtower

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Here be vikings

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West gate of Moria

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Midwinter's night

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Dance of a thousand veils

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Cold out there

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The journey begins

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Wrath of the Lich King

A new continent was availible for exploration today with the release of the new expansion, and it seems very promising. First impressions are that Blizzard has learned some new landscape tricks (for example creating mountains with sharper edges, instead of the usual round shapes) and changed their landscaping strategy a bit (building very tall set pieces with layers on top of each other). When you get deeper into the lands, you also encounter beautiful new trees which are very highly detailed.

But one improvement I do not like, is the fully 3D wooden beams on various structures. The old wooden beams, which are simply painted straight onto a flat surface, do actually appear as having more depth. Even though the game has new shadows, the realtime lighting has not caught up to the old hand painted art, and I believe that is why it looks off.

Really bad weather

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They call this a prison?

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Visions of gold

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The sharp end

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Pouring rain

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Dark teachings

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Glowy fruit

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In the shade

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City sights

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Echoes of doom

It seems that not only does the new World of Warcraft patch add soft shadows to nearly everything in the game world, but it also slightly adjust the brightness levels of the entire game, which produces higher contrast. This is exactly the effect I have been applying to some of the images using Photoshop, and it's cool to see games doing this in real-time now (I've seen other examples as well). This also means that I won't have to apply these filter effects anymore, but since I still have unpublished screenshots, such images will appear for a while longer.

However, the increased view distance is one feature I won't always be using. Many landscapes in World of Warcraft do not benefit from it, as they were not built for it. Blizzard adapted the scenery for short view distances, placing set pieces at regular intervals so that there is always something interesting happening in front of you. If you're able to see further, you'll loose the suprise effect of what's around the next corner and unnecessarily clutter your view with all of the set pieces in the landscape. Removing the fog also removes some of the atmosphere of a location, and in some cases also removes the sense of depth and scale.

Hot in here

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Crystals and creepy crawlies

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Shrooms

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Way down low underground

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Almost Escher

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Warm and fuzzy inside

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Along a forest road

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Mundane areas

Just like the old Ultima games from Origin Systems, you will find interesting places around every corner in World of Warcraft, whether you like the art direction or not. Every stone and tree seems to be placed with an afterthought. I've found no other MMORPG with this amount of detail and most importantly of all, with an absolute consistent level of quality. No area looks unfinished or uninspiring. And yes, that includes Mulgore.