Battle-of-the-bands.info/blog

The kingdoms of Azeroth are going to change forever. After the Cataclysm that hits the Warcraft World, the areas that you once knew will be changed forever.

Ashenvale will live up to its name, and looks like it will now be a Vale…full of ash, on the flip side the barren areas of Desolace will become the purple and green that signifies a night elf territory. Stranglethorn will be lovely – as it should be, but may well have a live volcano in the middle. These things happen.

But it’s not just the changes that we need be wary of. It is the requirements on your PC. Looking at the videos for the new zones it is clear that they are much more detailed than the existing Azeroth. A good thing. However, for those of you scraping by on an old PC, this expansion might signal the need for a change.

If you are a multi boxer this will of course stack up. You’ll need to keep a careful aye on the detail levels you set four your slave clients. Reduce the frames-per-second and perhaps change the settings on your keymapping software a little if they have the options.

Take a look at the videos, what you notice more than anything (well I do) is the amount of movement and animation in scenes where there are not even any players of NPC’s present. Weather effects, flags, clouds, water detail. Everything is improved. They all need to be rendered by your hardware.

Warcraft has never been a particularly resource intensive game, and realistically it will still be a couple of years behind the zeitgeist hardware wise. But people play on mid and low end machines, and these may struggle to keep up, or risk compromising the beautiful landscapes and player models that blizzard are adding.

The Cataclysm expansion for Warcraft is still many months away. If you have a low end PC, then maybe take the time between now and the release date to see if you can upgrade your GFX card, Processor and memory. Cataclysm looks like a site worth seeing.

Tags: Games // Add Comment »