WoW Forever Graphics Update: New Lighting, Fog and Water, and the Classic Switch

Blizzard calls the Classic art style timeless and left the game art alone. The zones keep their shapes, their models and their textures. What changed is the light on them: new lighting with global illumination, volumetric fog and god rays, flowing water and terrain shadows. Blizzard’s own examples are rivers that flow in Elwynn Forest, fog that rolls into Duskwood at night and moonlight that breaks through the leaves in Ashenvale.

The art team set 1 rule for the whole pass: everything must be authentic to the vanilla world. Durotar stays red rock and dry heat. Duskwood stays haunted. Blizzard rebuilt the lighting of every zone against the original 1.12 client, time of day by time of day, so each place still feels like the one you remember.

Blizzard groups the work into fog, lighting and water, and the 4th column is yours. The next 3 chapters take the columns 1 at a time, in Blizzard’s own words where they exist.

Fog shaped the mood of Classic zones from day 1, and the old fog was a flat wall in the distance. Forever replaces it with volumetric fog. It has depth, it sits in pockets you walk through, it hides things, and light and shadow pass through it. Each zone has its own wind, so dust sweeps across Westfall and mist moves in Duskwood.

Light shining through that fog is what makes god rays, and Blizzard shows them in Ashenvale. The new fog also opens the view: from the Barrens you now make out Durotar and Azshara, and from the Wetlands the mountains of Dun Morogh and the Violet Citadel of Dalaran. Blizzard calls the fog 1 of the biggest visual changes in the game’s history.

In Classic, sun and moon in the sky did not match the light cast into the world. Shadows stood still and mountains blocked nothing. Forever fixes both. Terrain, mountains and buildings now block light, and shadows move through the day as sun and moon do. Rays pop over a ridge at dawn.

Deeper shadows need a better fill, so Blizzard added global illumination: light that bounces off a surface picks up its colour and lights the shade around it. Red roofs tint a chapel wall, green leaves tint the path under them, and the inside of a stable is properly dark. Point lights on windows, torches and lanterns finish the scene.

The result is not a filter. Blizzard rebuilt each zone’s lighting from a bare scene up: moonlight, point lights, bounced light, a base of fog, scattered light, moving mist and ground fog. Then it pulled back until the zone matched the original mood.

Classic water was a tiled surface with a little movement. Forever gives it a new shader with 3 controls: movement, look and reflection. Waves scale with the size of a lake or an ocean and react to the zone’s wind. Rivers now follow their path, bend around rocks and foam where they hit them, and Blizzard’s artists can even send a magical river uphill.

Artists also set the density and colour of each body of water, how light is absorbed at depth and what the surface reflects. A murky swamp and a clear mountain lake finally look different. The South Fury River in Azshara and the rivers of Redridge are the examples Blizzard shows.

2 separate switches, both yours. The visual preset is Modern or Classic. Modern is the relit world above. Classic is the look you know from 2019, and picking it also turns transmog off. The character models are HD or SD, applied game-wide to you, other players and NPCs, so everyone on your screen matches.

The HD models come with the restored Classic animations. An HD dwarf runs like the 2004 dwarf, and Blizzard’s own line on stage was “no bouncy dwarves in this game”. If you disliked HD models in Classic, that was mostly the animation, so try HD once here before you decide.

Forever also supports gamepads officially, and it runs on PC and Mac. Blizzard has not published system requirements, a weather system or per-preset performance figures yet.

The zones that show the new renderer best sit at the end of the road: Hyjal at level 60, the Riverglades from the mid 30s, Ashenvale at night on the way. Level 60 takes about 150 hours of play on the quest-led route, because dungeon grinding no longer pays. At 3 hours a night that is 7 weeks, and the raids open 5 weeks after the 4 November launch.

1 of our boosters playing 12 hours a day takes your character to 60 in 14 days. 2 boosters in shifts take about 7. Either way you walk into Hyjal with weeks to spare before 9 December, and a placed pre-order never goes up in price. Cancel before session 1 and the charge comes back in full. For a settings pass on your own machine, coaching is $29 an hour.