Many players worry about the overhaul of the races, finding its shapes too generous or wondering if the minimum required configuration for World of Warcraft will increase.
Currently they are remaking the models staying true to the original models, even though they are redoing all the work from scratch. They want to keep the original essence while increasing the number of polygons, texture resolution and animation. Bashiok insists on their desire to keep our identity in play, our digital representation. They want us to recognize our character in all its aspects, posture, figure and proportions. Let it be the same, just with a higher level of detail.
Perfect Bashiok source
As we've said, we're looking to in essence update the original models, even though in actuality making them completely from scratch. Our goal is to keep the "spirit" of the originals, but increase poly count, texture resolution, and animation (to a pretty amazing effect, we think :). What we're not looking to do is change what these characters are and what they've been. We already face a huge hurdle in that we're messing with what is the most iconic and personal part of the game - a person's character. A digital representation of themselves in the game world, even if if that representation is a giant cow-man. Way above and beyond anything else in the game, changing how someone looks is a monumentally delicate task. We want to keep the proportions as similar to the original models as possible, we're going to keep posture and silhouette close to the originals, but all just with a much higher level of detail. When you see your character it should still be your character, and these should still be representative of the player character models we've all been playing as for the past 9+ years.
It's really tempting to want to make major revisions, but someone chose to play a character largely because of the way they looked, and it has come to represent their in-game identity.
To answer the accusations that the human looks like Barbie, he presents us with a montage allowing us to see the difference between old and new model.
Compared to the minimum configuration, they do not plan to change the specs until there is a major addition of content. They are vigilant in this regard and carefully check that nothing affects performance. It is still too early to estimate the impact of the new models on the performance of the lowest systems but as soon as the beta is in place, it will be easier to know.
By the way, Bashiok recalls that the game still supports processors and graphics cards that are more than 8 years old. To put it more simply, most current systems are 50x more powerful than the minimal system the game calls for. Improving the graphics is something that inevitably impacts the supported configurations, but first and foremost they have to do some testing, tweaking, and optimization to really determine what they can still handle.
Perfect Bashiok sourceWe don't, and we tend not to have updated system requirements/recommendations until most content is in, most big changes and engineering are done, and we're looking like there isn't going to be anything else that would greatly affect performance. So we won't really know absolutely until some point through the beta. We're keenly aware of the system requirements the new character models may require, and how that could impact client performance. No further details yet on how they'll be supported on lower end systems, if at all.
Fun fact, the game still supports processors and graphics cards that were released over 8 years ago. To put that in other terms, modern day systems are in some cases 50x more powerful than the lowest end systems the game still supports. Moving us forward graphically in such a dramatic way with the new models is going to require a lot of testing, tweaking, optimizing, and determination of what we can realistically support going forward, but we just don't know what that will look like yet.
