Blizzard is making the game look better through new anti-aliasing (MSAA and SSAA) and lighting tech (HBAO+)

Feb 13, 2015 09:04 GMT  ·  By

Blizzard Entertainment will deliver a pretty significant graphical update to its massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft in the upcoming 6.1 patch.

The company has been working on making the ten-year-old game look a little better and up-to-date, as its aging visuals are one of the reasons some players don't feel the need to renew their subscription.

The game's aesthetic direction has been criticized from the get-go, with a lot of gamers opining that it's too cartoonish, that it's not realistic enough to create an immersive atmosphere, and not colorful and outlandish enough to provide a completely novel experience.

In any case, Blizzard aims to solve some of the problems stemming from the game's flat general outlook by introducing MSAA and SSAA (anti-aliasing), and make textures look much more detailed thanks to the HBAO+ ambient occlusion technique.

Lighting is a very important aspect of making 3D objects look good, and it goes hand in hand with smooth edges to make scenes look like they're part of a world, rather than simply polygon collections.

In any case, Blizzard has also provided some examples of how the game looks before and after applying the graphical update, because it's hard to describe the difference relying on words.

More tech stuff that makes the game look good

With patch 6.1, Blizzard intends to apply multisample anti-aliasing and supersample anti-aliasing, with their role being to turn jagged and harsh geometric lines into softer edges, making the world feel a bit more realistic.

The options will be available to all World of Warcraft players who own a DirectX 11 compatible graphics card, and the company promised to offer the widest variety of anti-aliasing options to date.

The lighting system is also getting an overhaul, with the introduction of per-pixel deferred point lights, making every light source, especially dynamic ones such as camp fires and torches, illuminate the world in a more realistic and satisfying way.

For the time being, patch 6.1 is live on the test realm, with no official release date announced yet. Blizzard also issued a quick hotfix yesterday.

World of Warcraft screenshots (8 Images)

World of Warcraft is a technical masterpiece
World of Warcraft screenshot without ambient occlusionWorld of Warcraft screenshot with ambient occlusion
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