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WoW - Graphics Any Better?
dezso
Member UncommonPosts: 19
I read that with the expansion that the graphics had been upgraded.
Has this been done and does it look better. After playing EQ2 I found the WoW graphics quite basic and I the way the toons moved was very clunky.
Comments
Still the same, after playing AOC or Warhammer, they definitely look dated and although the styling is good, the blockiness and low res textures really get ugly
Clunky? I think you are talking about another game. If you meant blocky, then no, there's no change to the resolution. The biggest change is the inclusion of dynamic shadowing, all the other graphics changes are sublte and unless you have been playing, I doubt you would notice a difference and even then you would only notice the difference in Northrend.
Ignore Greyhoof, he plays War and has the games confused.
There has been a general overhaul of the graphics in way of the dynamic shadows and animations. Things like spell animations are a lot more detailed than they were before and give a whole new feel to everything you do. A very basic example would be the way you actually see the soul being drained from your target when you cast the 'Drain Soul' spell rather than just a plain line of colour, it just gives a whole new atmosphere to everything.
I don;t think that the graphics for WOW were every meant to make people stop in thier tracks and stare in wonder, they just work extremely well in the framework of the game as it is.
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Graphics got an update, although if you didn't like them before it's nothing that'll make you like them now.
I *never* considered character movement in WoW "clunky". Then again I never liked EQ2's graphics... plastic puppets in a world with a drab color palette ranging from grey to 51 tins of brown. But hey, that's subjective xD
Take the Hecatomb TCG What Is Your Doom? quiz.
WoW has some of the LEAST clunky graphics... notice when you chain together a bunch of different abilities the animations match up and change smoothly? Now play WAR and watch them stack up until what you're doing looks nothing like the commands you've issued.
As far as basic/low res etc... still teh same. Blizz designed the game to run well on lower-end computers and when you get 50 or 60 players on teh screen at once in AV or in a city, the polygons add up. To be honest tho they were never aiming for "realistic" like some of the other games... the Warcraft series has always been cartoony, and the theme fits well with lower-polycount characters. Though I agree, an optional graphics update (similar to EvE) would be nice...
I would say the graphics got better in WoW, not super good like AoC but better than vanilla/BC.
A major graphic improvement that has been overlooked was about terrain. In the vanillia game and TBC, terrain could not be too steep, or the terrain texture would be stretched and become ugly. In WOTLK, the textures are correct even on sharp cliffs. This allows for more diversity in the terrain and landscapes. The cliffs of the howling fjord are amazing when viewed at a distance (the viewing distance has been greatly increased, btw).
Good point, well made.
The whole feel of the Wrath expansion is far more immersive and realistic than previous. There is a whole 'living' world feeling now too with eagles swooping down to kill rabbits, rutting stags and so on... this is helped in part by the quests as well.
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Ohh realy...LOL... Meanwhile forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php
Cobra, a video game can not be captured by a still shot. Sad as it is.
A video game has to be played. It is no picture slide show.
AoC had some great ideas, but the feature that killed it were the graphics that are simply too high to be animated well in an MMORPG. Furthermore it appeared they recycled code from AO and this resulted in having beautitul rendered polygons with hampered gameplay.
Once again: trying to cramp gigabytes in the average 256/512MByte graphics cards from a pathetic slow driving HD at 7200rpm is asking for trouble in an MMORPG where you need to load in players data on the fly.
Having to load graphics screen between each little zone, each door entered, each town split up in instances and having an absolute limit of X people (you'll say it is more whatever the number- but the discussion is not about that really).
Half of the quests in WotLK are up in the air or under water (exagerating here
) and just like in Outland there is no loading screen in sight when you fly all over Northrend and land where you want.
So I get the creeps everytime I see those still pictures of a game that doesn't move as it is supposed to be in video game.
Apart from that I think AoC also needed some added PVE dungeons raids, because the idea of constructing guild forts and defending them is not enough as end game content.
I ve learned TWO lessons from AoC and WAR:
- Code in the engines is the most important thing to have full and unhampered control of your avatar to have a good PvP game (I like to combat people not the buttons, lag and war crashes). What's the use of having super graphics if you don't have the same controls as a FPS (and Wow fluid control combat is not discussed even by the haters).
- PvP games STILL need a lot of very interesting PVE. Both in leveling and certainly in its end game. I was on your side about a year ago. I too thought PvP was enough to beat those PVE raiding guys. You can watch a football match thousands of times, right ?
Well I was wrong a good football match isn't quite enough to be a succesfull MMORPG (not even when you have to construct your proper stadium). If Wow only had raids/dungeons I would have left 2 years ago. If it only had BG's or Lake Wintergrasp without great Raid progress, I would have cancelled even earlier.
As for the picture : great picture, but we are talking animated video game play.
Have fun in Conan, it deserves to stay in MMO land. More so than War. At least you got rid of your Director. Mythic is still stuck with MJ, a man who thought he made a better game than everyone else (and uses other man's forums !!!! in every form possible).
I touched on this in another topic but, for me, the environments do look a lot better. Underwater now is eye-popping. I really miss underwater when I play other MMOs that have water (obvious that's not a complaint for EvE-O). But they flubbed it bigtime when it came to the characters. Almost all the quest loot is the exact same patter with a limit in the colors of, maybe, 3 total. When I was leveling 10-60 in the base game or (1-)60-70 alts in TBC what my character looked like was decidedly different from most people around me and varied every few levels.
70-80 my main mage has gone from a dark purple robe to a dark red robe with most quest rewards being dark green, darn brown or dark red. 60-70 had everything from shirts/leggings to robes both light and dark. Blues, reds, greens, a gold or two. I am really, really disappointed with the lack of variety in the drops and quest rewards.
But, honestly, I am not surprised. Blizzard can't seem to cure its case of rectal cranial inversion when it comes to quality of life issues. They broke the LFG tool shortly after TBC was released and it remains broken to this day. They still can't seem to figure out that dual-spec in a raid/pvp/solo game might be a good thing. It took them several years to implement a guild bank and then it was at its most basic. And character customization is a joke. These are things (and more) that have proven wildly popular in other contemporary MMOs that Blizzard seems dead set on not implementing.
LFG, dual-spec and character customization is all done well in CoH/CoV.
EQ2's guilds are second to none with the only exception being that any MMO that doesn't add in Shadowbane-style Nations (guilds swearing to guilds) is missing a killer social feature.
I play WoW because the gameplay is decent and the UI is polished (other games should just adopt Lua and the addon style Blizzard put forth) but I am growing weary of the wiffle-ball that Blizzard is making of the QoL issues. I'm dead tired of the patheticly broken LFG system prevening me from finding groups for hours at a time. I'm tired of the lack of decent guild tools. And I'm really getting tired of graphic updates for the world but my character standing by 20 clones because they can't make anything more than 3 robes for 10 levels!
Not just another pretty color.