Ironically I think the fan made went too far on crunching the textures but otherwise it's miles better stylistically. Alliance coded regal paladin armor versus butterboy on the left.
Yeah, ive seen way better examples. The ones with high poly but same artstyle as classic are better imo. I dont like classic looks because of low poly, its the artstyle.
There's a difference between something looking like shit stylistically and looking like shit design wise.
Some tier sets are designed like crap. Banana armor was crap. But obviously they all match the same style. Generic golden paladin with no defining features is both shit design and shit stylistically.
On the bright side you can mog something you do like on.
Alternatively if you’re a purist you can bitch about how transmog shouldn’t exist while simultaneously complaining that the tier sets look like ass. So we got options this time around.
Oddly enough blizzards art team is one of its best attributes. It does so much heavy lifting. More then likely this is by design not that absolute best thing they can do.
you’re right that it’s by design, blizzard is still wrapping their head around the fact that not all players want retail art style. that’s why we’ve been so vocal, to let them know what we actually want. maybe after this time they’ll learn
correction: blizzard's art team was one of its best attributes. those days are long gone. blizzard went from a prestigious workplace to yet another microsoft outfit somewhere between 2016 and now. just compare the original overwatch cinematics to what we now have. compare the designs. its unrecognizable.
retail designs are too chunky and thick, each plate, even on cloth armor, looks like it was an inch thick. the details are too simple and color is too flat as well
I'm honestly not a fan of the general style Blizzard has gone with.. like, a lot of armor (since at least Legion) has had plate look like it's made from plastic from 80's-90's children toys. Like, the Paladin T2 (original) looks more simplistic, yet much better, than a lot of modern sets in general.
I agree completely. I was calling them plastic too, especially the weapons, everything looks like it is made from the same material. I lately heard people referring to them as foam, and I can see that too. The upgraded T2 armors also suffer from this.
I think people are overly focused on the fact it looks "HD" but it's quite possible that there is also a "SD" version that looks much more like classic than retail. It genuinely looks more classic to me then whatever they were going for on right.
Looks a lot better in the wowhead changing room viewer especially when not on a modern/hd human male (they are way too bulky and make gear look too different to classic style)
under items sets just click the class and find them, then 'view in 3d' and if you wana add weps etc you can click open in dressing room bottom right of the 3d viewer
It looks better than the human, but still not like it belongs in classic. The polygons are too detailed, like the feather ornaments coming off the shoulders and wings on the helm. The edges should be more jagged, and the curves and slopes of the armour should be less refined.
I disagree about the other turtle sets. Loved them all except for the t3.5 rogue set.
Ok, the t3.5 priest felt a little weird thematically, but it looked cool.
My problem with the T3.5 Rogue set was that it looked far too alliance-coded, to the point that I'd never wear it on my horde rogue. I can't find pics of the others.
I've never really played WoW but I actually think the original looks way better, it has style & character like an actual boss in games like Blasphemous or something, compared to the new one which just looks like a rando NPC with shoulders way too big to wear while the og at least looks like it doubles as head protection from a sword or axe swing.
Personally I feel like it suffers from the exact same issue retail has been suffering for a while but has been rampant since Dragonflight. Every detail is chunky, pastel coloured and with flat surfaces. Classic WoW was also heavily stylized and with exaggerated proportions but it allowed itself to have smaller detail and textures with... texture. It also alloed itself to have thinner geometry. Things had edge. Not in the edgy teenage type of edge, as in blade edges. You see swords in classic and they look sharp whereas most blades in retail are thick as my arm.
I find the forever set extremely generic and... safe? I guess? The bulkiness is also very retail coded. The set you posted there has so much more grandeur and uniqueness to my eyes.
These things seem pretty subjective, but at the very least I think the designers should shoot for classic style for classic+
The retail feel definitely throws me off. The detail being in the polygons instead of the texture leaves it feeling out of place compared to the old sets.
Yep. Shrink the shoulders and hands on the Forever set and it looks about as passable as everyone's favorite banana. Vanilla->Wrath had a few duds when it comes to tier sets and I'd rather people didn't forget about that.
There is no real cohesive complaint that more than a couple people will agree on. Or rather; no complaints that make any sense to someone without a hate boner.
I’ll boil them all down for you though;
“it’s not literally exactly what I would have personally wanted, so it doesn’t fit the classic vibe”.
someone said the pauldrons were too large but i pointed out that they occupy the same amount of space as the banana set, except the new set occupies more it. absolutely crazy how much classic players want to hate this game
As a big fan of Turtle WoW, I have to say the paladin set was a bit too much for me, but it looks better still than Forever's. I would never expect Activision to replace their work off the community's work, so we are stuck with bad designs like the new sets.
I hate the set on the left because it looks to retail but the turtle WoW one looks out of place as well but it is far more interesting than the official set. Twow did drop good sets though, the warlock and shaman 3.5 sets come to mind, and some of the end of life armors like the Windhorn set were great.
I honestly don’t envy the wow forever team because as talented as twows team was even they struggled badly creating sets that fit the classic style, there’s a reason a majority of their new assets were just recolors. But I would far rather a team try and fail to match the classic style than the half and half crap wow forever is looking like they’re doing. I don’t even think I’d care if everything is HD or everything is SD at this point please God just pick something consistent lol
Im also gonna say Im tired of the disrespect of the Banana set lmao put a nice tabard on that set and it really isn’t all THAT terrible, any classic set outside of T3s look like buns compared to Judgement it’s literally the tier set of all time.
Do people genuinely want everything we get in 4Ever to be a 144p texture stretched over a shape you can make in MS Paint?
There is a middle ground between the two and the left side set is pretty damn close to it even if I’m not a fan of the bright yellow power ranger armor.
i give osrs sloppy toppy pretty much any chance i get but man their art team is incredible. The stuff they make looks so good while also fitting in pretty well
iirc Jeff Kaplan said in a podcast recently that there was a pay/compensation/bonus dispute between morhaime and them so they opened the door and left.
I think WoW Forever is meant to be for classic players and to get them to sub on official blizzard servers and are the main target demo they are aiming for.
The problem is they are trying too hard to make everyone happy at the same time. So instead of a game that has one cohesive vision it ends up being a Frankensteins monster made out of both retail and classic smashed together and both sides are upset about certain things instead.
I do wonder about the people in charge of WoW Forever and how many actually played OG vanilla or played on a private server. It really feels like Blizzard doesn't understand what classic players meant when asking for classic+.
I agree with you 100%. Regardless of the underlying servers, they were able to build on top of classic and push it further with SoD. They completely abandoned that approach and went back to retail assets and base systems and under-the-hood math/combat systems and tried to give it a classic re-skin.
The main race addition, which is frankly the most advertised new piece of 'classic' and responsible for a large portion of the new quests they advertised, is pretty blatantly un-used retail content. It's also stylistically at odds with anything remotely classic.
They also confirmed that they weren't even going to allow classic SD skins and animations until one developer and streamer pushed for it.
I would say your feeling is probably a guaranteed truth at this point. There are probably many passionate classic develoeprs but someone in charge does not want what we want and we're getting pieces of what we want to appease us, in a project going in a different direction.
lol this is not a funnel to retail , retail doesn’t need a funnel , and launching a whole new version of the game that you have to support is not something you would do to “ funnel” people to your other game .
You can say it's not an attempt to funnel players to retail and be correct but at the same time if the developers or decision makers repeat mistakes that have made it into Retail than functionally what's the difference?
Because from where I'm standing. Blizzard has created various problems themselves that they now have to compete with Private servers over, entirely due to their own choice. Layering, and it's related exploits, immersion-breaking issues. Lack of GMs. Rife with bots and gold sellers/buyers. Art style downgrades. Legalized gold buying. You're not going to see these issues on private servers (at least if you pick well, moderation style varies).
TLDR: I think Blizzard should strongly consider re-thinking how they design new assets. Sure, make them HD, but if you think people won't notice that armor and new mounts look different, and stylistically worse, you're really underestimating the intelligence of your target playerbase.
Gonna have to hard disagree with your take here. WoWF is definitely not a funnel for retail when most retail players will not last in classic for more than a few days/weeks because of how different the game feels to play compared to retail. WoWF was created to pull in the thousands of global players that have been playing classic on private servers for 10+ years who were still refusing to play Blizzards Classic servers because they wanted something more.
yes, my opinion this last month has really developed to feel like the art team at blizzard simply isn't that good.
They have all the tools, presumably all the money - and the retail style art is bland, with many soft edges, and with pieces of just blatantly poor art.
Of course the old art had problems (dwarf faces, etc) but they did it significantly better across the board in 2001 in a cave with a box of scraps.
The main visual improvements and beauty in WoW Forever come from the landscape/environment/weather developers.
Just to add my voice: Concerned. Thus far, the art direction doesn't fit the message the development team gave at Blizzcon. So much of it is very Retail.
I think the Forever set is just fine. The pauldrons and vambraces should be smaller. Dude looks like a Tauren. But in terms of the art style, it's almost there. The grey and gold looks a bit more plastic than steel and gilt, though, and I think THAT is what people think of as "Retail-style." The style of the cuisses on the fan version is better as well, since it clearly shows plate over a more flexible material, where the Forever ones are just solid all the way around.
But design-wise, I think it is very in keeping with vanilla. MAYBE TBC at worst.
literally looks like a play on the alliance plate pvp set from vanilla and the tier 1 pally set. this concern over the first forever pally set has convinced me half of the shit said by players should just be immediately ignored.
Like yall. Take the stupid towers off the shoulders and helmet and add some paladin white knight ribbons on it. The data mined set has slightly more Grey on it and some detail. It even is still a barbute helmet and everything....
Right looks like a low rez version of retail to me.
Not that left is great, but it’s definitely more classic to me. And tbh classic has some horrible sets. 😅 I think some sets really are awesome. Paladin is Sadly not one of them.
Paladin tier 1 and tier 2 is the biggest whiplash in the game. Both sets are legendary. One is legendary for how awful it is, the other legendary for how iconic it is.
Every other paladin set in any given version is hot thrash and every other us the most iconic look in the history of fantasy gaming. Tier 1 - shit. Tier 2 - epic. Tier 2,5 - wtf is that shit. Tier 3 - epic as well. Same in tbc, 4 - yeah alright, 5 - wth is that, 6 - absolute goat
Eh I liked crystal forge. It was very on theme. Not really paladin looking. I dunno. Maybe dranei paladin looking. T6 overall was just a bunch of killers. Paladin, warlock, warrior, absolution in priest. Tier 6 might be the best all around tier of gear. No real flops and some total bangers.
Its a stain on what should be the hypest shit I've ever played. Gonna be something we are bitching about and fighting with Blizzard for the rest of time because we want the game to look like classic, not retail.
The one on the right doesn't look good, but it does look more like classic than the blatant retail one.
But ye it is sad to see Blizz blatantly not even trying to make better models. They could at least do something halfway between left and right. They are insulting the whole fanbase by saying the world is the main character, and then copy pasting the majority of new models straight from retail, many of which don't even slightly fit into WoW pre-cata
You think you do, but you don’t…. That makes a lot of sense now.. what you see on right is literal retail tier set as SD.. Set on left, comes closer to classic than the second set
Looking at yhe detailing, the template they used on the left gloves would have looked better using the frame template used on the right. Its literally the same style, minus the blue cloth.
Left is straight dogshit, it looks like a fucking levelling set from BfA. Right is overdesigned too, but at least the artist has kept it in line with classic models, we’re seeing those flat textures, somewhat muted colours.
They would be better off putting in a recolour of an existing classic set and then later releasing a redesign of it than shipping with left.
Was much more than 2/3 devs, from what I have read their headcount was above 200 (and lot of them were paid for working full time), tho this includes all the support staff but still.
The set on the right I would xmog on retail the left set I would avoid using on classic even if it was a big upgrade due to not wanting to look like that
A company with five employees that makes money from stolen content but usually provides better, higher-quality content at good times.
VS
A company with thousands of employees that generates enough money from its cosmetics store that it could remove the subscription and still have money left over, while providing untested and often very poor-quality content.
This is maybe the third one I've seen of people using the same model viewer screenshot of that armour set, with bright white light and no background, few shadows. It's so stale.
Blizzard fan boys will never-ever stop gas lighting you and coping themselves. They've been doing it for 15 years in exactly the same manner, day after day.
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u/BrockLeeAssassin 4d ago
Ironically I think the fan made went too far on crunching the textures but otherwise it's miles better stylistically. Alliance coded regal paladin armor versus butterboy on the left.