These are not exact but i think you get the general idea. I don't expect them to ever get to photorealistic as the art design is not creatd with that in mind. Just that they look more realistic (such as more approiate hands, Facial features that make sense, wrinkle that sorta thing) and look more human and less cartoony.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
For an MMO the Graphics and more than fine; Not sure what this whining thread has to offer anyone with decent eyesight can see the quality that oozes from this game.
________________________________________________________ Sorcery must persist, the future is the Citadel
Nice vid this one. Running looks pretty good imo, the casual walk still has a distinct "Oh crap, I pooped in ma pants ..." factor though.
Heh, looked surprisingly better than I'd expected, imagine that.
I don't know as for the walking, that first one looked pretty good and subtly natural. I did notice that there seem to be differences between the animations, older and newer builds mixed together?
The torso are still too static and not synchronised with the legs.
They give the impression that the characters are a upper and lower part assembled together.
Another example the female imperial agent walking animation felt like she was walking on eggs. It's not horrible but it needs some polishing.
Yeah, that's why I wondered if it's a mix of older and newer builds, after all the compilation is all shots taken from footage ove the course of months. Some animations looked good while some other animations for the same running or walking looked mediocre.
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums: Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
BW need to show this more and not post concept art and other useless stuff. If you look around internet people talk so much shit about this game and it's graphics... they are looking at very old pictures and video clips.
By now we know they have been working hard on the story missions and that everyone can talk in the game... now they must show us something new!
Run animations is something they just made to make the character move and I'm sure it will be worked on before the game is out.
I was enjoying it... until he started showing low-res blurry screens of the games. The only game that seemed to be shown in good quality was GW2, all the others were just quick in-game shots from who knows where.
Though it is true that the game has evolved, I still think it was unfair at how this video depicts other games. Most players who have played the compared games would probably agree that those screens were not top quality.
Now if BW would just make the environment less blocky. That's pretty much the only thing I don't like about the current SWTOR graphics... the blockyness of the scenes. Or at least, the general blockyness of most scenes.
I was enjoying it... until he started showing low-res blurry screens of the games. The only game that seemed to be shown in good quality was GW2, all the others were just quick in-game shots from who knows where.
Though it is true that the game has evolved, I still think it was unfair at how this video depicts other games. Most players who have played the compared games would probably agree that those screens were not top quality.
Now if BW would just make the environment less blocky. That's pretty much the only thing I don't like about the current SWTOR graphics... the blockyness of the scenes. Or at least, the general blockyness of most scenes.
Well, he is going to put some spin on his videos, since he obvious is a fan of SWTOR.
I will admit that the graphics have improved and are more tolerable, but the animations I find still feel very rigid. Especially when characters are taking damage, they just don't look right, it doesn't seem very...fluid. Some of the animations are done very well, like the running while throwing a lightsaber. The running animations are actually pretty good, the walking still needs help.
Many of my major points of contention with the animations and graphics are mostly lessened, at least to a point where I can overlook most of it, you have to be a little forgiving in mmos. However, the actual gameplay is still a big question for me.
I'd prefer to wait and see what this years PaX east shows us in the way of footage. I think this will give us a better indication of what we might expect from animations/graphics and such. They are getting better yes, but it's not perfect yet (aka still room for improvement).
I'd say give it time,
As for logun's Vids? yeah theres some spin on it as hes a fan (like the poster above me stated) but i think they are still working on it. I'm pretty much on a wait and see what pax brings before i start debating on it too much. Want more updated vids to work with.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
BW need to show this more and not post concept art and other useless stuff. If you look around internet people talk so much shit about this game and it's graphics... they are looking at very old pictures and video clips.
By now we know they have been working hard on the story missions and that everyone can talk in the game... now they must show us something new!
Run animations is something they just made to make the character move and I'm sure it will be worked on before the game is out.
All Bioware are good at atm are sitting on their thumbs and releasing shitty concept art that nobody gives a fuck about.
The way this game is going it will be released in 2015 and then it will look even more dated than it is now lol.
I see a lot of improvement but I did not think the comparison pictures where shown in optimal settings.
A lot of them where blurry and not even in max settings as opposed to the SWTOR pics.
The AOC pictures especially gave me a chuckle ... come-on put that game on max and no way those SWTOR picks could hold a candle. The differences would have been eye-soring!
Now the graphs are evolving, who knows where they will be at release.
If one needs evidence that early game footage =/= final product then one should look at another Bioware game called Dragon Age2, out on March 8th (for the US i think? its March 12th in my country).
Yes, the early game footage was bad, yes the combat/animation was bad, but the demo (barring the odd bug during convo) showed the final product in a very good light.
Whether it has all the latest 'XYZ with AAx8 features' is irrelevant when the game looks good.
PAX East will be 11th of March - 13th of March so not more to wait until we get to see it.
Not sure if it'll be a significantly new build but I'm sure they'll show off more stuff.
As someone who is in the 'dev' side, it is not uncommon to have early screenshots modified so it looks like 'what we think it'll look' when it gets released. The modification itself is usually not done by the dev team though; normally the raw picture is given to the PR company. (this is my personal exp but I've seen this done in 2 companies I've been with).
Depending on the engine/dev cycle etc the modified screenshot can turn out to be horrendously wrong or fairly accurate.
Gdemami - Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
It was intressting but very missleading. The screens he compared sw:tor to as like AoC and Rift are just wrong, the games dont even look half as bad as he showed them. Same with Aion and GW2.
I am all for Sw:tor and will buy it and play it when it comes out, but I dont like missleading information.
If one needs evidence that early game footage =/= final product then one should look at another Bioware game called Dragon Age2, out on March 8th (for the US i think? its March 12th in my country).
Yes, the early game footage was bad, yes the combat/animation was bad, but the demo (barring the odd bug during convo) showed the final product in a very good light.
Very true, the blatant Directx 11 stability and performance issues were shown in a remarkable light!!
Originally posted by Seffren I see a lot of improvement but I did not think the comparison pictures where shown in optimal settings. A lot of them where blurry and not even in max settings as opposed to the SWTOR pics. The AOC pictures especially gave me a chuckle ... come-on put that game on max and no way those SWTOR picks could hold a candle. The differences would have been eye-soring! Now the graphs are evolving, who knows where they will be at release.
Well to be fair all around the SWTOR images werent either. You also have to take into consideration that most of the SWTOR footage in the video was cam video footage of a 20 foot projection of the game live at Pax last year. .. and it looked damn good.
So by far the SWTOR images I used for most of the video were not the best quality out there but they seemed to represent the newest build....IMHO.
Yea graphics in SWTOR have improved a bit, animation too. But they are still lackluster for a 2011 release. One thing I find unacceptable is armor painted on characters (just a texture, no actual model). Sorry, there is no excuse for that. I remember a video that featured a bounty hunter talking to some NPC...the BH armor was so bad, a low res texture painted to the character's chest, that I almost forgot to listen to the dialog.
Animations improved, but still terrible. It looks like your character has two brains, one that controls the upper body (rigid as a robot) and one that controls the mechanical legs. WoW has better animations by a very large margin.
Misleading video too...no way SWTOR has graphics even close to games like AoC, Aion and GW2. Just watch the videos. SWTOR clearly focuses on low end computers, using the same techniques that WoW uses but slightly better. Sure on high-end machines it will look a lot better, but the painted armors are still there, stretched textures are still there, etc.
Dont get me wrong...I'll still play it. Just wish they would make a step forward with the graphics and (for the love of god) animations.
I agree that the animation can use some more upgrading and improving, especially the running animation as seen in several footage.
But I found this quote from BW guy Georg Zoeller:
On that topic:
The way game development works is that you often create assets during early development that eventually get replaced.
For example, you need a movement animation in the game as a prerequisite for pretty much anything else involving a character.
These kind of high-dependency assets get roughed in or prototyped as quickly as possible early on to minimize bottlenecks - e.g. once you have basic character movement, you can start doing more specialized work. If you don't, you can't start on that, so they block the rest of development if they're not there.
Usually, all those early assets will get replaced with their final versions later in development - at a time when all the details have been worked out (e.g. the character speeds have been fixed, their special attacks are known, etc.).
This is true for all kinds of assets. Animations. Sounds. Weapons, etc. We've mentioned that almost nothing about the UI is final - again, it's much more important to get a functional and somewhat presentable prototype UI in place to allow development and testing of dependent features than it is to get everything beautiful, right and polished the first time.
In fact, using a 'rough in now - refine later' approach often enables developers to collect internal and customer feedback, work out previously unknown issues and then implement a much stronger final feature (instead of trying to get it all right from paper to screen the first time).
The stage the game is in now, is where things are rapidly coming together, a lot of polish happens on all fronts and where two or three weeks of concentrated work make huge differences in how things appear.
There'll be still quite a few of those kind of functional placeholders (such as the UI) in the game around PAX, but you'll also see a lot of things that used to be placeholder in their final versions.
Anyway, I thought I'd give you some insight on how this works. It's not that we don't listen to feedback on the forums - we do - but sometimes you just have to let the schedule run it's course, even if the community is very vocal in their concern about a specific placeholder feature.
So I hope that what I've seen in some footage was just the placeholder animation and that the gradual improving of the animation will continue in the months to come.
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums: Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
I will agree some of the animations need work. However it's still in the process of being worked out so many things could still be improved. They have stated that some things need to be put in first as place holders so you can work the rest of the stuff out. Put the legs in so we can work on the rest of the animations and we'll come back to them later when the game is closer to release/the most important thing to fix that won't hinder everything else.
With a game with no release date and still in closed beta where things can be corrected or may have been already, i think it's a bit premature to start juding things. I iwll say that some of the animations need work. I won't count it as a bad thing until it gets into open beta however.
Why open beta? because as they stated themselves, Open beta is stress test/promo only. Once you get to this point, your game is basically done.
This tells me anything before that, is suggest to change, including animations.
As for the armor? the earlier images of the kill the captain scene had this rather bad look to them. Fortuantly in some more recent images the armor actually looks like armor now instead of painted on to the skin.
Before:
Notice the armor is rather washed and plain looking. Very little detail.
Now that is old so lets get something newer to look at:
Notice the detail on the guys armor is a lot better, you can see the features better here.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
Comments
Those graphics are anything but photorealistic.
Logun actually stated moving towards a more photorealistic look.
They aren't photorealistic, they are stylized. Just on the scale they are moving in the direction of photorealisitc
They used to be here
Stylized i----------------ToR------------------------------------------------------------i Photorealisitc
Now
Stylized I------------------------------ToR---------------------------------------------I Photorealiistic
These are not exact but i think you get the general idea. I don't expect them to ever get to photorealistic as the art design is not creatd with that in mind. Just that they look more realistic (such as more approiate hands, Facial features that make sense, wrinkle that sorta thing) and look more human and less cartoony.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
For an MMO the Graphics and more than fine; Not sure what this whining thread has to offer anyone with decent eyesight can see the quality that oozes from this game.
________________________________________________________
Sorcery must persist, the future is the Citadel
The torso are still too static and not synchronised with the legs.
They give the impression that the characters are a upper and lower part assembled together.
Another example the female imperial agent walking animation felt like she was walking on eggs. It's not horrible but it needs some polishing.
Yeah, that's why I wondered if it's a mix of older and newer builds, after all the compilation is all shots taken from footage ove the course of months. Some animations looked good while some other animations for the same running or walking looked mediocre.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Well even in the new ones it seems the bodies are a bit too rigid. Legs movement are correct so it looks likes it's due to the chests.
BW need to show this more and not post concept art and other useless stuff. If you look around internet people talk so much shit about this game and it's graphics... they are looking at very old pictures and video clips.
By now we know they have been working hard on the story missions and that everyone can talk in the game... now they must show us something new!
Run animations is something they just made to make the character move and I'm sure it will be worked on before the game is out.
I was enjoying it... until he started showing low-res blurry screens of the games. The only game that seemed to be shown in good quality was GW2, all the others were just quick in-game shots from who knows where.
Though it is true that the game has evolved, I still think it was unfair at how this video depicts other games. Most players who have played the compared games would probably agree that those screens were not top quality.
Now if BW would just make the environment less blocky. That's pretty much the only thing I don't like about the current SWTOR graphics... the blockyness of the scenes. Or at least, the general blockyness of most scenes.
Well, he is going to put some spin on his videos, since he obvious is a fan of SWTOR.
I will admit that the graphics have improved and are more tolerable, but the animations I find still feel very rigid. Especially when characters are taking damage, they just don't look right, it doesn't seem very...fluid. Some of the animations are done very well, like the running while throwing a lightsaber. The running animations are actually pretty good, the walking still needs help.
Many of my major points of contention with the animations and graphics are mostly lessened, at least to a point where I can overlook most of it, you have to be a little forgiving in mmos. However, the actual gameplay is still a big question for me.
I'd prefer to wait and see what this years PaX east shows us in the way of footage. I think this will give us a better indication of what we might expect from animations/graphics and such. They are getting better yes, but it's not perfect yet (aka still room for improvement).
I'd say give it time,
As for logun's Vids? yeah theres some spin on it as hes a fan (like the poster above me stated) but i think they are still working on it. I'm pretty much on a wait and see what pax brings before i start debating on it too much. Want more updated vids to work with.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
All Bioware are good at atm are sitting on their thumbs and releasing shitty concept art that nobody gives a fuck about.
The way this game is going it will be released in 2015 and then it will look even more dated than it is now lol.
I see a lot of improvement but I did not think the comparison pictures where shown in optimal settings.
A lot of them where blurry and not even in max settings as opposed to the SWTOR pics.
The AOC pictures especially gave me a chuckle ... come-on put that game on max and no way those SWTOR picks could hold a candle. The differences would have been eye-soring!
Now the graphs are evolving, who knows where they will be at release.
If one needs evidence that early game footage =/= final product then one should look at another Bioware game called Dragon Age2, out on March 8th (for the US i think? its March 12th in my country).
Yes, the early game footage was bad, yes the combat/animation was bad, but the demo (barring the odd bug during convo) showed the final product in a very good light.
Whether it has all the latest 'XYZ with AAx8 features' is irrelevant when the game looks good.
PAX East will be 11th of March - 13th of March so not more to wait until we get to see it.
Not sure if it'll be a significantly new build but I'm sure they'll show off more stuff.
As someone who is in the 'dev' side, it is not uncommon to have early screenshots modified so it looks like 'what we think it'll look' when it gets released. The modification itself is usually not done by the dev team though; normally the raw picture is given to the PR company. (this is my personal exp but I've seen this done in 2 companies I've been with).
Depending on the engine/dev cycle etc the modified screenshot can turn out to be horrendously wrong or fairly accurate.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
It was intressting but very missleading. The screens he compared sw:tor to as like AoC and Rift are just wrong, the games dont even look half as bad as he showed them. Same with Aion and GW2.
I am all for Sw:tor and will buy it and play it when it comes out, but I dont like missleading information.
Very true, the blatant Directx 11 stability and performance issues were shown in a remarkable light!!
Well to be fair all around the SWTOR images werent either. You also have to take into consideration that most of the SWTOR footage in the video was cam video footage of a 20 foot projection of the game live at Pax last year. .. and it looked damn good.
So by far the SWTOR images I used for most of the video were not the best quality out there but they seemed to represent the newest build....IMHO.
Yea graphics in SWTOR have improved a bit, animation too. But they are still lackluster for a 2011 release. One thing I find unacceptable is armor painted on characters (just a texture, no actual model). Sorry, there is no excuse for that. I remember a video that featured a bounty hunter talking to some NPC...the BH armor was so bad, a low res texture painted to the character's chest, that I almost forgot to listen to the dialog.
Animations improved, but still terrible. It looks like your character has two brains, one that controls the upper body (rigid as a robot) and one that controls the mechanical legs. WoW has better animations by a very large margin.
Misleading video too...no way SWTOR has graphics even close to games like AoC, Aion and GW2. Just watch the videos. SWTOR clearly focuses on low end computers, using the same techniques that WoW uses but slightly better. Sure on high-end machines it will look a lot better, but the painted armors are still there, stretched textures are still there, etc.
Dont get me wrong...I'll still play it. Just wish they would make a step forward with the graphics and (for the love of god) animations.
I agree that the animation can use some more upgrading and improving, especially the running animation as seen in several footage.
But I found this quote from BW guy Georg Zoeller:
On that topic:
The way game development works is that you often create assets during early development that eventually get replaced.
For example, you need a movement animation in the game as a prerequisite for pretty much anything else involving a character.
These kind of high-dependency assets get roughed in or prototyped as quickly as possible early on to minimize bottlenecks - e.g. once you have basic character movement, you can start doing more specialized work. If you don't, you can't start on that, so they block the rest of development if they're not there.
Usually, all those early assets will get replaced with their final versions later in development - at a time when all the details have been worked out (e.g. the character speeds have been fixed, their special attacks are known, etc.).
This is true for all kinds of assets. Animations. Sounds. Weapons, etc. We've mentioned that almost nothing about the UI is final - again, it's much more important to get a functional and somewhat presentable prototype UI in place to allow development and testing of dependent features than it is to get everything beautiful, right and polished the first time.
In fact, using a 'rough in now - refine later' approach often enables developers to collect internal and customer feedback, work out previously unknown issues and then implement a much stronger final feature (instead of trying to get it all right from paper to screen the first time).
The stage the game is in now, is where things are rapidly coming together, a lot of polish happens on all fronts and where two or three weeks of concentrated work make huge differences in how things appear.
There'll be still quite a few of those kind of functional placeholders (such as the UI) in the game around PAX, but you'll also see a lot of things that used to be placeholder in their final versions.
Anyway, I thought I'd give you some insight on how this works. It's not that we don't listen to feedback on the forums - we do - but sometimes you just have to let the schedule run it's course, even if the community is very vocal in their concern about a specific placeholder feature.
So I hope that what I've seen in some footage was just the placeholder animation and that the gradual improving of the animation will continue in the months to come.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
I will agree some of the animations need work. However it's still in the process of being worked out so many things could still be improved. They have stated that some things need to be put in first as place holders so you can work the rest of the stuff out. Put the legs in so we can work on the rest of the animations and we'll come back to them later when the game is closer to release/the most important thing to fix that won't hinder everything else.
I point you to this article:http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/367/feature/5001
With a game with no release date and still in closed beta where things can be corrected or may have been already, i think it's a bit premature to start juding things. I iwll say that some of the animations need work. I won't count it as a bad thing until it gets into open beta however.
Why open beta? because as they stated themselves, Open beta is stress test/promo only. Once you get to this point, your game is basically done.
This tells me anything before that, is suggest to change, including animations.
As for the armor? the earlier images of the kill the captain scene had this rather bad look to them. Fortuantly in some more recent images the armor actually looks like armor now instead of painted on to the skin.
Before:
Notice the armor is rather washed and plain looking. Very little detail.
Now that is old so lets get something newer to look at:
Notice the detail on the guys armor is a lot better, you can see the features better here.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.