Image source: Blizzard.com
World of Warcraft. Love it or hate it, this MMORPG has had an absolutely tremendous impact on the world of video games. Largest among these, perhaps, is WoW’s iconic art style: exaggerated, colorful, and with a hint of absurdity.
What led to the creation of Warcraft’s instantly recognizable aesthetic? Thanks to an interview with Blizzard executive Patrick Wyatt we may have an answer — and, surprisingly, it doesn’t have much to do with artistic creativity at all.
Wyatt explained, ”If you consider the artwork of the Warcraft series, you’ll see that the colors are shockingly loud in comparison to, say, Diablo, where only in a dim room is it truly possible to see the beauty of the art. The bright, cartoony art-style was different from the style of many other PC war games of the era, which hewed to more realistic color palette.”
Image source: Battle.net
He continued, “[Older] games required more dynamic colors since televisions of that era were so much worse at displaying colors than PC monitors. Console games on TVs, which had lower pixel resolution and color bleed, needed high-contrast artwork to show well.”
I can’t agree more… possibly because I’ve written about this exact topic twice before. One time I argued that style trumps graphics, which is definitely backed up by the fact that WoW’s cartoony graphics have withstood the test of time while more realistic-looking MMORPGs have died a slow death. I also wrote a piece about how old graphics can inspire your modern-day projects. Clearly, gritty realism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Blizzard has proven that heaps of style and a throwback to the past can be much more effective.
Image source: Stuffpoint.com
Wyatt added that Allen Adham, Blizzard’s co-founder, “Charged all the artists with drawing artwork in bright conditions. He’d regularly stalk the halls of Blizzard turning on lights and opening window-blinds. His view was that most folks play games in bright rooms, so our artists should be authoring our games to play well in that environment. He argued that it’s easy to draw artwork that reads well when viewed in a dark room with no outside light can distract from the monitor. But when computer art is competing with bright lights it’s much more difficult to see. And fluorescent bulbs are the worst form of light available – the cold, flickering glow of their tubes tires the eyes and washes out colors.”
It’s a unique strategy — Adham has his artists to endure a trial by light, as it were, in order to create art that looks superb no matter what. Did this approach lead to the success of games like World of Warcraft and Starcraft? It’s hard to say for sure, but it can’t hurt to try!
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