MMO-Champion, one of the foremost sources of World of Warcraft news, managed to interview Senior Game Producer Michael Bybee and Lead Software Engineer Patrick Magruder during the event. Yesterday they shared plenty of tidbits learned from that chat and there is one that is going to be particularly interesting for our readers, as Blizzard seems to be looking into adding raytracing to the World of Warcraft engine with Shadowlands.
The game will continue to cater to the largest possible player base by having accessible minimum requirements. At the same time, however, the developers want to integrate the latest technologies as they did earlier in the game's lifecycle. DirectX 12 support was added with the previous expansion, Battle for Azeroth, and World of Warcraft later became the first title to support DirectX 12 on Windows 7, paving the way to many others.
It is unclear yet what kind of ray tracing features will be added. We've seen ray traced shadows, ambient occlusion, global illumination, and reflections implemented in other titles.
In related Shadowlands news, the art team is working to enable much greater character customization for all of the game's races. It has been possible because this time around there won't be any new races or classes added to World of Warcraft, so the artists were able to devote all their time to implement new options for everyone instead.
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About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief.
In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews.
Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications.
His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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