Comments (29)

The freshest seems to come from yours.

Guess what: Even without tesselation, designers have the possibility, to use a couple of polygons on their modell. More precisely: They could use tons of them without maxing out PCIe2 or current CPUs, so Tesselation does not even prevents bottlenecking. The current limitation ist not getting lots of polygons to the gpu (which could actually profit from DX11 tess - if one uses round objects... otherwise, old DX10 displaycementmapping is the way to go anyhow), but rendering lots of polygons. And Tesselation helps exactly nil here.

Just a couple of high res modells won't get Blizzard a lot of new players. To have up to date graphics, they would have to do a complete new engine, refine the landscapes and effects (both things would cause balancing/compatibility problems if they are optional)..... Essentially they would have to make a WoW2 that accidently uses a similar maplayout and compatible client protocol.
Imho your suggestion is not a win-win, but a win-COST situation.

Because a beta is supposed to reflect the final product and should only differ in the number of bugs.
These screenshots suggest a lack of about 1-2 years of designers work and mind you: As DX11 allows exactly 0 things, that cannot be rendered on DX9 or 10 hardware (though at less performance) or in worst case by a software rednerer, the designers could and should start working on detailed models a long time before the final engine is avaluable. That they haven't done this yet is a very strong hint, that they will never.

On the other hand, I agree:
Why is everyone making a fuzz about it? WoW has been locking old since the day it started and anyone, who is still interested in WoW today should have found a lot better reasons to play, then graphics.