Does Warhammer Online really look like WoW?

WAR vs WOW
Inserito originariamente da Abriael

Every time there's a discussion about Warhammer Online in basically every kind of environment, you're bound to encounter someone that will pop in with the usual cliche "It looks like WoW!" in order to criticize the game.

But does it really look like World of Warcraft?
Leaving alone the fact that Blizzard was clearly inspired by Warhammer to some degree when creating the Warcraft universe and as such there might be some very loose similarity between the races (but that's common to many fantasy settings, not only Warhammer's and Wacraft's) the graphics of the two games have very little if not nothing in common, both in technology and in style. The differences between the art direction of the two games can be as well defined "extreme".

The "legend" about WAR looking similar to WoW has been around a lot, and picked up so many times that the definition of "beating a dead horse" has been rewritten. But did the ones costantly jumping on this crowded bandwagon ever watched at the two games closely side by side?

To answer this question i decided to make a simple experiment using what is freely available around the net (sorry, no screenshots from the beta until the NDA is lifted mates), putting Warhammer's screenshots side by side with ones from WoW portraying similar subjects. You can see them all at the bottom of this post.

Of course the first thing that jumps to one's eyes is that Warhammer looks much better than World of Warcraft, but that's pretty normal, since the two games belong to two different generations, and that isn't the point of this post. What is quite noticeable, instead, is that the Warhammer and WoW's graphics belong to two entirely different styles.

World of Warcraft clearly resembles an extremely stylized cartoon, with little detail compensated by very bright textures and shiny effects. Warhammer Online, on the other side, while not being entirely realistic, is much more realistic than it's competitor. It doesn't look like a cartoon, but it's more similar to an illustration or a painting. It sports a great attention to detail both in the 3D models and the texturing, and the textures themselves show an heavy weathering that gives it a plenty different feeling from the one given by WoW. Warhammer's armor looks like it's been actually used in battle, environments show the effects of time and hardships. While WoW is a world that seems to come straight from the pen of a cartoonist, Warhammer's graphics are much darker and grittier, perfectly suiting a world that has been torn by war for millennia since the very beginning of it's history.

On a side note, I'd like to adress a concern that seem to be worrying many gamers over the quality of Warhammer's graphics.
As many games that are still in beta stage, warhammer graphics are still in an unfinished state, and they still lack a few elements that normally are added very near to release (even to avoid forcing all betatesters to download an extremely big client, gigabytes-wise). here's an overview of such elements as you can see from the pictures and movies released by Mythic:
1) lack of high resolution textures: all textures in the pictures shown so far seem to be in low resolution. This is pretty normal, given that texture resolution weighs a lot on the client's size that the beta testers have to download. The addition of high resolution textures will improve detail and general polish a lot.
2) lack of filters and effects: effects like bloom and similar are very important in making a game look great, also, it's quite clear that other embellishments like reflective water and such are still absolutely absent.
3) lack of a proper lighting engine: This is by far the most important element. some pictures shown so far have a very sketchy lighting engine that lacks most ambient light sources and that uses just a few fixed lights, most don't even have that. The lack of a proper lighting engine makes even the most polished graphics look flat and dull (lack of light means lack of shadows as well, and shadows are the most important element to bring out the three dimensional aspect of 3D graphics). I can easily bet a year of my wages that even just the introduction of the final lighting engine will improve the looks of the game dramatically, to the point that it won't even look like the same game.

In any case, you're free to love or hate the game (after all it's a matter of tastes and RvR might not be for everyone), but if you you went about talking on how Warhammer Online would be a WoW clone, you might want to think again.











So, what does Warhammer online look like? You might want to look here and you'll find your answer.