Evolving a Timeless World of Warcraft Forever World

Blizzcon just released a few hours ago a third information update to the upcoming World of Warcraft Forever game.

A flurry of details follow below:

• ‘Azeroth as you remember it’. The overall, visual, goal is to be honest to our memory of Azeroth, how we remember certain zones, the feelings, the experience there. They will play to the nostalgia and our imagination.
• They have looked at new content coming, and pre-existing zones (around 40), expanded and updated zones, and try to incorporate it all to feel like the Azeroth we know. They mentioned the new zones by name, Riverglades, Zephras Isle, and Mount Hyjal, (and Dalaran, in all it’s glory!).
• Previously mentioned Azeroth as the main character, this time it is approached as a larger cast of characters instead, each one with it’s own mood, atmosphere, and colour palette.
• New zones have been created to feel like they have always been there, and new life has been breathed into the existing, to create the version we imagined them always.
• They have applied new rendering updates and technologies, and have created new assets, zones, dungeons, and raids, to make them feel like they’ve always been a part of our world.
• They developed a Guiding Artistic Principle they followed every step of the way… everything must be authentic, to the world, the art style, and our memories of Azeroth.
• They are not changing things just for the sake of being able to update and change them.
• New rendering technologies, and used fog, lighting, and water, to help explain the different tech.
• Fog: Before each zone had it’s own kind of fog. It was used for ambiance, and to help hide distance rendering because of technology limitations with draw/view distance.
• They have replaced this with volumetric fog, which is now controllable, for the effect of wind in a zone, the amount and style of fog, and adjust the sight line of distance views at the border of zones.
• Rays of light, or god-rays, are now spectacular as they shine through the new fog style.
• Light: new lighting system has received an overhaul, using new shadows style, and also the position of the Sun and Moon which cast shadows from land formations, mountains, and terrain.
• They have also fixed the ambiant lighting with a new global illumination system in enclosed areas, under trees, and according to the time of day it fills in the shadows with appropriate colours more naturally depending on the surroundings.
• The new custom ray tracing system will work on minimum system requirements with their optimisation, so available to all!
• Water: they worked on movement (waves etc), colours and transparency, and reflections, and how and what is reflecting.
• Movement, the size of waves in the water, the depth, the flow of the water, bending around rocks etc, how foam is created when it crashes into obstacles.
• New water shaders, density, how light reflects, different depths, and if water is murky or clear.
• Full reflection, with ripples and movement of water, of all environments, and also sun and moon rises and sets!
• Using WoW 1.12 client, they meticulously recreated lighting and atmosphere from the ground up for all zones, for all times of day, to recreate the original vibes.
• Finally, they pulled up the original Duskwood and proceeded to apply all the above effects, adding moonlight, point lights, global illumination, fog, light scattering, noise, ground fog, bloom and colour correction (post processing), removed some contrast, turned down bloom, and calmed down the saturation. And new Duskwood was beautiful, but suprisingly it felt the same!