// KOTAKU — GAMING
WoW: Forever Players Are Gushing Over Lighting Updates To A 21-Year-Old Game
World of Warcraft: Forever‘s beta is officially online, which means anyone who spent $30 to unlock the Skyborne Elves can also now play a limited amount of the game. But what’s drawing the most attention from players isn’t the new blue elf race, or the new camping feature, or the newly-added quests.
Nope, we’re all just taking screenshots of sunsets.
And sunrises, and misty forests, and pretty much anything else that looks especially good thanks to the new lighting update. For some context, WoW: Forever is essentially built on World of Warcraft‘s original, base game. You know, the one that looked like this:
However, Forever comes with two different modes: an original classic mode, and an updated version where you can see the original world and textures and models as they were, but with updated lighting and water and other effects. And, dangit, dorky as it sounds, the changes are pretty cool. It’s really neat to see what 20 years of lighting tech can do when implemented in an older-looking game like this, particularly when the rest of the game isn’t being updated to some weird HD situation that would go against the tone of Classic WoW.
So, naturally, we’re all taking screenshots of sunsets, sunrises, sunbeams filtering through trees, misty woods, and more! Here are some nice looks I found, but there are many more:
This looks absolutely stunning byu/Active_Law2045 inwow
Anyone else loving the new lighting changes? byu/PossessedCashew inwow
never seen so many people just stop for a view in wow. byu/Premo_Says_Things inwow
I just wanted to share how incredible this new game looks byu/K_Rocc inwow
Do what’s your opinion on new lighting? I think it’s quite spectacular byu/chihuahua_man inwow