Tsudeki's Realm

[tsudeki]

So I may have been the only one to miss this for so long, or maybe I'm actually not. Who knows? Anyway...I submit the following:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/cataclysm/media/screenshots.html

The top middle and top right screen shots. Notice anything?

One of my biggest issues with WoW over the years has always been one simple thing: Water.

It looks like it hasn't been mentioned anywhere (as far as I've seen) but apparently with the next expansion WoW is also getting rid of the HEAVILY repeated water texture in favor of something at least a little more presentable. I wonder if the same can be said about the water entry/exit/travel effects. We'll see.

Also the picture of the burning Astranaar (bwuahaha) on the bottom right of the second page shows this change as well. As do the Greymane images.

Upon closer inspection of the images, it seems that water reflections are a possibility in the next expansion as well. For me, this adds a whole new level of immersion to the game that can only be surpassed by adding wind.

I can always hope.

[Emizzon]

I believe I read in one of the developer interviews, that was one of the things they were working on. The water and how it's handled. It's pretty sad when there's free MMO's out there that have better water graphics then a main stream MMO like WoW.

[BinoX]

Yeah, I noticed that too... although it still bugs me that there's no bump mapping on any textures... which unfortunately makes everything look flat... But then, there's not really a lot of shading of any sort going on.. even with shadows turned on you don't cast much of a shadow on the side of yourself facing away from the light...

Maybe that's just me being overly fussy though :p