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The latest World of Warcraft expansion, currently in its Alpha phase will bring with it lots of changes to the game. The new character models that are implemented for Warlords of Draenor particularly seem to stand out from the crowd. Blizzard has already revealed new models for three of Wow’s races: orc male, gnome male, dwarf, both male and female.
The improved models will feature additional polygons and textures, as a result there have been concerns regarding performance issues. In a recent post on Battle.net Blizzard addressed the problem and claimed that the changes will probably not affect performance. They did mention however that there are many factors that might slow down your computer, armor being one of them. “On top of that, raids have their own surrounding geometry, bosses, etc… and all that adds up in the end. Obviously, new (more detailed) models means slightly more processing power is required, but new models aren’t the only big change coming to WoD” the company mentioned.
Blizzard also added that “we are also applying a squish to anything related to stats; this means that in certain situations, there might be some performance improvements, especially when it comes to addons that process combat data. More importantly, we are reducing the amount of visual clutter that currently fills every fight where a lot of players are involved. “
Good news after all, we might actually see some improvements in some cases while playing Warlords of Draenor. So for those of you wandering if a new PC will be required to run the upcoming expansion, the answer is probably no. “I’d say that you shouldn’t be worried about any big drop in performance; things will most likely remain very close to what you are experiencing right now. So if you’re satisfied with what you have right now, then there shouldn’t be any need to change anything.”
As a final note Blizzard stated that “Client performance is something we care about a lot. It doesn’t matter how well-designed an encounter is: you aren’t going to have fun raiding at 8 FPS. We want everyone to be able to enjoy playing with the new models, and our dev team is working hard making sure that WoW is as resource efficient as possible in order for that to happen.”
World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor will be released this fall. The expansion brings changes such as a new maximum level cap of 100, a Garrison where you can build a base and recruit followers, racial traits rebalance and more.
