At BlizzCon 2019, Blizzard announced Shadowlands, the eighth expansion of World of Warcraft. In an interview with Champion MMO Senior game producer Michael Bybee and lead software engineer Patrick Magruder have now announced an interesting technical detail about the next add-on: World of Warcraft will receive raytracing support.

However, according to the developers, the focus is still on keeping WoW system requirements as low as possible in order to provide access to a wide range of players. Raytracing (Nvidia RTX) is therefore only an option to provide incentives for players with stronger PCs.

The basis for raytracing is already there

The basis for complex real-time lightning calculation was already laid with Patch 8.0 for the Add-on Battle for Azeroth in July 2018. Since then, the WoW engine has mastered the DirectX 12 low-level API (programming interface).

The fact that Blizzard is innovating with WoW on technical issues and even pioneering is evidenced by the portability of DX12 for Windows 7 in cooperation with Microsoft last March.

To what extent World of Warcraft will support raytracing, developers have not yet revealed. However, raytracing titles published to date are generally based on individual features such as raytracing shadows, ambient occlusion, lighting, or global reflections.

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands should appear in 2020 and can now be ordered through Battle.net.