Holy, an Esfand react in my timeline? And it's MY video? Today is a good day.

Thanks for watching and supporting, y'all.

I'm in disbelief about the amount of people who cannot tell art style apart from texture resolution.

They are not saying “keep it ugly.”
They are not saying “no new armor and no new zones.”

Forever is still the old Azeroth. Stormwind still looks like Stormwind. If the new armor and new monsters look like they walked in from Retail, you get two games in one screenshot.

More polygons is not the problem.
A new zone is not the problem.
New stuff that does not match the world it stands in is the problem.

Blizzard called this Classic Plus. That means add to Classic. It does not mean drop a different art style into Classic and call it for everybody.

You can like Retail. Retail is right there. This version was sold as the old world, kept alive, with new things that still look like they belong here.

If the art fights itself, it will not feel like one game.

Not sure if anyone has mentioned this but the old icons were what you would find in the original books that came with the physical copies. I still have the books and, the pages are falling out but, those icons are only the faces of the almost full body art in the books. They fit the races perfectly imo and are far superior to the new, lifeless icons.

I fully agree that faithfully recreating an art style is a nontrivial task, but the excuses ("we lost the tools") fall flat when amateur fans and private servers manage what Blizzard apparently can't. I suspect much of the problem is how Blizzard builds its models, as I understand each armour set is authored as a bespoke piece rather than built on a proper modular armour system. On a more positive note I watched Guzu explore Hyjal and the zone looks absolutely phenomenal, so the talent is clearly there. Whatever else has gone wrong at Blizzard over the years, the art and audio teams have never been the problem.

This definitely would be one of the best topics to talk about with your buddys at Blizzard Esfand.

the old icons are so much better

Report icons on character creation screen as a bug, so we get the strong classic icons from classic.

9:09 The new icons all look like they are screenshots of the character creator, whereas the old ones were drawn to be sprites. The new ones are all the same, they are all the same shape, position, angle, head shape, etc. Compared to the original which has distinct contrast, angles, clothes, facial hair.

Those retail models are reason I quit back in the day, they never screamed WoW to me. The whole softy shift at the time killed it for me. That shouldn't be a part of Forever. Blizzard should redo them in vanilla style for Forever and if it's not ready by end of beta, fine - just inform us that those retail-style models are placeholders until the OG-looking ones are ready to swap in.

15:54 one of them looks like a Scooby-Doo villain.

It's a way to get classic/vanilla-to-wrath players to progressively accept the new art they would otherwise reject.
They don't want to replace the modern artists so they'll spoon-feed the style slow enough that people don't turn away.

Art style coherence is so important

8:58 I can explain why, the old ones look HEROIC, the new ones look like someone making a cartoon of something Heroic. And it DOES matter, cause those small subconscious visual cues SET THE TONE in your imagination.

It seems Blizzard got stuck between the very Classic + Turtle WoW direction.
And the unhinged, retail with classic content, Ascension experience.
To their credit, the community is all over the place and the success of both probably lost them a bit because they offered radically different experiences. And in my opinion, Turtle and thus a very Classic + content, is the way to go and by far superior to ascension for what Blizzard aims for. Consistent with the lore, reworked to get rid of the dumb stuff from old days, but not completely out there.

They need to make up their mind, we can't have both and certainly not a " little bit of this and a little bit of that " that's where you lose everybody. In this day and age, in all things, you want 70% people hating you and 30% backing you up all the time.

8:56 I think it's because these classic icons are specific drawings made in mind as a form of identification, both by what they look like, and who they are as a people. The HD/retail version looks like they hit the random customize option, zoomed in, took a snip, and called it a day.

9:13 these icons have way more contrast, more dynamic poses and the colours aren't so bright.  That's the difference between these and the current WoW forever beta onces.

I love how the biggest issue and argument was talking about it. People trying to shut down everyone that doesn't agree with them lol

9:20 you may not know this, but those pictures of the different races are actually from hand-drawn art. They were basically archetype pictures that were drawn up for every race during the original world of Warcraft design process. There were both male and female representatives of every race and these images were also used in a variety of promotional material for the game as well. The original world of Warcraft Atlas from 2006 included a set of 8 book marks that had the male versions of this art on them.

The difference you're likely seeing in style, therefore, is probably related to the old character select icons being hand-drawn and then imported into the game rather than being digitally created.

Item has 4 full blown recolors in the datamine

Esfand: "I think they are not done yet"

smfh