World of Warcraft's big shoulderpads and cartoon style has kept it looking pretty youthful, but after almost 15 years, who hasn't wondered what it would look like if it was made today? Thankfully, a designer has been remaking Azeroth in Unreal Engine 4 for years, and a new video—check it out above—gives us a whirlwind tour of Westfall, Durotar, Duskwood and more.
Daniel L has been making Unreal versions of WoW areas since 2015, and this compilation collects them all. You can also see how Goldshire was remade in a video posted a few years ago.
While some of WoW's cartoon proportions have been retained, the remade areas generally skew towards realism. Even in WoW itself, they're some of the more grounded, conservative regions, with the exception of Durotar. The walls of Orgrimmar and all the Horde buildings are unmistakable and suitably ridiculous.
Unlike the real World of Warcraft, however, this is likely to date a lot quicker. The art design that's uniquely Blizzard does a lot of the heavy lifting, and the remade areas lose quite a bit of that magic. It's also the work of one person rather than a team of designers, of course, and is still extremely impressive.
In an interview about Rise of Azshara, lead designer Kevin Martens told me that the studio has "a lot of plans and potential storylines going on decades, maybe even 100 years of stuff we could do with Azeroth", so we might see an official modern makeover one of these days.
Cheers, Kotaku.
