For those unfamiliar with the unofficial World of Warcraft server scene, Turtle WoW is a group of private servers that hosts Mysteries of Azeroth, a fan-made expansion story for World of Warcraft Vanilla that delves deeper into exploring the game's original lore. This expansion aims to take a different path from the Burning Crusade, emphasizing the familiar Azeroth of Vanilla WoW over the cosmic battle with the Burning Legion.
Mysteries of Azeroth added a lot to the WoW Vanilla content, including playable races (High Elves for the Alliance and Goblins for the Horde), zones and maps, raids and dungeons, arenas and battlegrounds, spells and talents, pets and mounts, class/race combinations, and even brand new features (for that version of the game) like transmogrification, guild vaults, and a new Survival profession.
The big news of the day, though, is that Turtle WoW 2.0 is on the way, and it will usher the world of Azeroth in the beauty of Unreal Engine 5 graphics. That's right, the team has ported World of Warcraft to Epic's latest game-making tool with great visual results, as you can see in the footage below, which doesn't even include the work-in-progress enhanced HD models that will be available when this new version is released.
The Turtle WoW team promises smooth performance on modern machines. The requirements for the new, shiny visuals are obviously higher, though.
- Windows 7 64-bit or later
- Intel i5 6600K or AMD Ryzen 5 1600
- GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD RX 580
If you don't meet those requirements, you can still optionally switch to legacy mode, which reverts to vanilla assets. Remarkably, this new version will also support Android mobile devices and add NVIDIA DLSS/AMD FSR upscalers. That's just the tip of the iceberg for Turtle WoW 2.0, which will include an extended quest log beyond the 20 quest limit, a field of view (FOV) slider, full add-on support, new, powerful modding tools, action queuing, and an improved anti-cheat system when it launches next year.
There are countless World of Warcraft Unreal Engine concepts, but this is something different. This ambitious team is porting the whole game to Unreal Engine 5, which is no easy feat. If only Blizzard would follow their example, just like they did with WoW Classic. Perhaps they will at some point, but in that case, a combat revamp to action style would be needed, too. One can hope, at least.
Meanwhile, Blizzard will release the tenth World of Warcraft expansion, titled The War Within, on August 26.
