14 DAY TRIAL // World of Warcraft plans to expand a bit further with the upcoming Warlords of Draenor, which is set to bring a host of changes to the popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game.
Among those changes are greatly improved character models and animations, which some people are worried will translate into a performance drop, especially when raiding.
Many players who can run around Azeroth without a hitch experience a slow crawl when it comes to raiding, because of the visual clutter caused by 10-25 people dancing around them in fancy armor while raining sparkly death on various bosses.
A blue post on the World of Warcraft forums puts players at ease, stating that the Warlords of Draenor update won't slow down the game that noticeably.
The upcoming expansion will add additional polygons and textures to all character and armor models, as well to all the environmental geometry of raids and to bosses, all of which will translate into a need for more processing power.
Players are already asking whether they should start saving up for an upgrade in order to be able to enjoy a seamless and smooth experience when Warlords of Draenor drops, but Blizzard revealed plans to implement various performance improvements.
One noticeable improvement will come with the announced squishing of stats, resulting in smaller numbers, which in turn will result in a better performance of the add-ons that process combat data and other such stats.
Additionally, the development team intends to also reduce the visual clutter, especially during encounters involving a large number of players, in order to provide a clearer experience and better performance.
"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," reads the official response.
The blue post goes on to say that users shouldn't be worried about big drops in in-game performance, as things will most likely remain around the level they are now, and that people who are satisfied with how World of Warcraft runs for them now aren't likely to need to change anything for the upcoming expansion.
Warlords of Draenor is scheduled to launch sometime this fall, taking place on the home world of the orc and draenei races, raising the level cap to 100 and adding many new raids and dungeons.
The World of Warcraft alpha test is already underway, and if you want to learn more about the update you can check out the gargantuan alpha patch notes.