No Vista Required

Posted by Stropp on March 14, 2008

There was a little bit of a rumor going around this week on the WoW forums that Wrath of the Lich King was not only going to provide a graphics upgrade for World of Warcraft players, but that the upgrade would require DirectX 10 and be Vista only. In other words, Wrath of the Lich King was going to require WoW players to upgrade to Vista.

Aside from being an obvious forum troll, the post generated much discussion on the mental health of the poster and the friend who provided the scoop.

Blizzard poster Nethaera came to the party at comment 235 and stated quite succinctly:

The Expansion is not going to require users to upgrade to Vista. We have some things in the works on the end of graphics, but it’s not anything that is going to require this specific upgrade.

Hopefully, that puts this rumor to rest.

It’s nice, but not unexpected, that there will be a graphics update when the expansion is released. The Burning Crusade client also did some graphical updating. The new client which will be version 3 is likely to do the same.

But Blizzard won’t be updating it so much that it will require an operating system upgrade. For one thing that would be subscription suicide. Vista is slower with games, Blizzard isn’t going to alienate their players. I think they’re a bit smarter than that.

Considering that World of Warcraft still works perfectly well on lower end hardware and Vista doesn’t, to upgrade will force players to also upgrade their hardware. Blizz would lose a substantial number of subscribers and kiss any hope of getting back to ten million.

So the moral of this story?

Don’t believe what you read on the WoW forums.

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