Gnome, it was not good graphics that made those MMOs fail.
As I said in another recent post, you build a great game that's great all around - graphics, story, content, longevity - and they will come. Fail somewhere, and there's serious potential that they won't.
Intentionally failing somewhere just strikes me as utterly ridiculous. You may slightly expand your audience. Docking a great story might appeal to those who prefer to grind or enjoy sandbox play. Docking end game content might appeal to those who hate raiding. Docking the visuals might appeal to those with computers that still have Radeon 9800s in them. Docking innovative game design might appeal to those who are comfortable with age-old game mechanics.
But every time you dock a feature, you lose out on those folks who actually appreciate good game design. You might think you're expanding your audience, but in actuality you're not.
But you are arguing for the smallest possible audience ( graphics enthusiasts ) for a game DESIGNED for the largest possible audience (anyone with a PC). Its not a failure, it is an important design choice.
If you cannot fathom why you cannot, as a company making what is thought to be the most expensive game ever, have both in a the game, I don't know what to tell you.
It would be nice but its not a good idea for bioware, or arguably any MMO company, to have dx11 sli omg awesome graphics in an MMO. pro tip- the first m is MASSIVELY.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
I was able to play Crysis just fine. I just dialed back on some of the bells and whistles.
Yes, you had to scale it back. You had to take a game, you just bought, running on cutting edge modern hardware, and scale it back just so it would run. You don't see the issue here? I'm assuming here you were running on modern hardware when you picked up Crysis, and not like a GeForce FX 5200 or something silly.
I was able to play Crysis just fine. I just dialed back on some of the bells and whistles.
Yes, you had to scale it back. You had to take a game, you just bought, running on cutting edge modern hardware, and scale it back just so it would run. You don't see the issue here?
What I see here is a bunch of good programmers making an engine that scales well.
Name an MMO with cutting edge graphics that's still alive and making serious amounts of money. It's okay, I'll wait.
You continue to ignore the 800 lb gorilla in the room, because it suits your argument. Unfortunately it doesn't make your argument right.
Aion?
The problem with trying to beat the 800lbs gorilla in the room is, there's already an 800lbs gorilla in the room.
When you try to do things that the other big guy does, after the fact, you just look like a wanna-be. With the obvious exception ironically being, the 800lbs gorilla in the room. Who has mastered ripping off and polishing.
I do enjoy the revisionist theory that Blizzard actually made the terrible graphics engine as conscious decision. Like it was some kind of feature to broaden their user-base. Blizzard had absolutely, positively no clue that the game would be as popular as it was. The game was in development for 5 years and the engine looked 5 years old when it came out. It's not a slight, it's just the way it is. It wasn't a design decision, hardware just caught up with the modified WCIII engine before the game was released.
Wow did look dated when it came out. It came out right around the time of FarCry, Doom3, Half life 2, UT2k4, etc all of which looked significantly better. Granted, they're not the same genre, but that really doesn't come into play when you're talking about an engine looking dated. Heck Dawn of War had arguably looked better and it was an RTS.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited June 2010
Dawn of War DID look better.
You're still ignoring the "no real shadows until the second expansion", which is the biggest evidence that WoW's graphical requirements were a choice, not an accident of Blizzard's incompetence.
You're still ignoring the "no real shadows until the second expansion", which is the biggest evidence that WoW's graphical requirements were a choice, not an accident of Blizzard's incompetence.
Is that really an argument? You believe that because blizzard added a feature several years after release, a feature that either wasn't prioritized before launch or wasn't even considered at the time before launch, was a conscious decision to help the users with poor hardware? You're saying they tuck away features in a bottle waiting for hardware levels to catch up before they unleash them on the poorly hardware'd masses?
If that was the case, why not add the feature and make the default setting have the shadows turned off? That's just a poor argument.
edit: we're getting way off topic though, on a pretty dumb argument. Long story short, I think TOR's graphics engine has some catching up to do. It shouldn't have a graphics engine steered towards 2001 machines like the modified WCIII engine that wow used. Bare minimum it should be based on 2007 average hardware, and look it.
I'm a pretty huge fanboy about this game and have been watching and reading everything I can about it. But when you step back and take an honest look at the way the game looks from a pure VISUALS perspective, so far from what I've seen it is obviously sub par. We all agree on that point.
The points we appear to not agree on:
1. Can you build a MMO that runs decent graphics and function well? Ironforge lags, therefore perhaps the large-scale MMO world simply can't handle good graphics.
2. Can you build a MMO with a graphical system that scales from being playable but ugly on a shitty PC, and beautiful on a great PC? (See: StarCraft 2 for an example of this, though there are many others)
3. Assuming you can't build a system that scales, does a game with sub-par graphics result in more users playing your game? That is, would dropping good graphics as a feature result in a greater subscription loss, as you're selling a game with objectively less quality when playing on a decent PC? In other words, which results in more subscribers, all else being equal: a pretty MMO or a plain MMO?
I don't know if any of us is technologically savvy enough to definitively answer any of these questions. My suspicion is that #1 doesn't matter, as most of the real gameplay appears to center around groups smaller than the hundreds of people in Ironforge. My suspicion is that #2 is totally possible, given that many games have done it successfully before. But even if it isn't, my suspicion is that - in regard to #3 - when you build a better quality game, the subscribers come, and it's a terrible business plan to intentionally retard any critical component of any game - visual presentation included.
But those are just my suspicions and I am not a game developer. These might be interesting questions to ask Bioware.
E: Just as a final note, my suspicion is that the real answer for why TOR's graphics aren't that great is that it's simply been in development for a very, very, very long time (probably more than 6 years by now). I highly doubt that it was an intentional design decision.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
You're still ignoring the "no real shadows until the second expansion", which is the biggest evidence that WoW's graphical requirements were a choice, not an accident of Blizzard's incompetence.
Is that really an argument? You believe that because blizzard added a feature several years after release, a feature that either wasn't prioritized before launch or wasn't even considered at the time before launch, was a conscious decision to help the users with poor hardware? You're saying they tuck away features in a bottle waiting for hardware levels to catch up before they unleash them on the poorly hardware'd masses?
If that was the case, why not add the feature and make the default setting have the shadows turned off? That's just a poor argument.
edit: we're getting way off topic though, on a pretty dumb argument. Long story short, I think TOR's graphics engine has some catching up to do. It shouldn't have a graphics engine steered towards 2001 machines like the modified WCIII engine that wow used. Bare minimum it should be based on 2007 average hardware, and look it.
Do you know how easy basic shadow maps are to implement? I've done it several times, just for fun, in several different API's. I'm not a professional graphics programmer (although I am a professional programmer). To suggest that Blizzard didn't implement shadows because they couldn't is silly. There was a conscious choice there not to introduce shadows. The only argument is: Why was the conscious choice made?
I say it's because they know their audience and the hardware, others disagree.
You're still ignoring the "no real shadows until the second expansion", which is the biggest evidence that WoW's graphical requirements were a choice, not an accident of Blizzard's incompetence.
Is that really an argument? You believe that because blizzard added a feature several years after release, a feature that either wasn't prioritized before launch or wasn't even considered at the time before launch, was a conscious decision to help the users with poor hardware? You're saying they tuck away features in a bottle waiting for hardware levels to catch up before they unleash them on the poorly hardware'd masses?
If that was the case, why not add the feature and make the default setting have the shadows turned off? That's just a poor argument.
edit: we're getting way off topic though, on a pretty dumb argument. Long story short, I think TOR's graphics engine has some catching up to do. It shouldn't have a graphics engine steered towards 2001 machines like the modified WCIII engine that wow used. Bare minimum it should be based on 2007 average hardware, and look it.
Do you know how easy basic shadow maps are to implement? I've done it several times, just for fun, in several different API's. I'm not a professional graphics programmer (although I am a professional programmer). To suggest that Blizzard didn't implement shadows because they couldn't is silly. There was a conscious choice there not to introduce shadows. The only argument is: Why was the conscious choice made?
I say it's because they know their audience and the hardware, others disagree.
Ah, I didn't know you were a programmer Gnome.
Tell me, is it possible that World of Warcraft's core engine simply was not designed with shadows in mind and it was a pretty huge cost, economically speaking (in terms of hours redesigning, etc), to add them in and optimize them? Or is shadows something that really could have been added on at a minimal economic expense to Blizzard?
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
You're still ignoring the "no real shadows until the second expansion", which is the biggest evidence that WoW's graphical requirements were a choice, not an accident of Blizzard's incompetence.
Is that really an argument? You believe that because blizzard added a feature several years after release, a feature that either wasn't prioritized before launch or wasn't even considered at the time before launch, was a conscious decision to help the users with poor hardware? You're saying they tuck away features in a bottle waiting for hardware levels to catch up before they unleash them on the poorly hardware'd masses?
If that was the case, why not add the feature and make the default setting have the shadows turned off? That's just a poor argument.
edit: we're getting way off topic though, on a pretty dumb argument. Long story short, I think TOR's graphics engine has some catching up to do. It shouldn't have a graphics engine steered towards 2001 machines like the modified WCIII engine that wow used. Bare minimum it should be based on 2007 average hardware, and look it.
Do you know how easy basic shadow maps are to implement? I've done it several times, just for fun, in several different API's. I'm not a professional graphics programmer (although I am a professional programmer). To suggest that Blizzard didn't implement shadows because they couldn't is silly. There was a conscious choice there not to introduce shadows. The only argument is: Why was the conscious choice made?
I say it's because they know their audience and the hardware, others disagree.
Ah, I didn't know you were a programmer Gnome.
Tell me, is it possible that World of Warcraft's core engine simply was not designed with shadows in mind and it was a pretty huge cost, economically speaking (in terms of hours redesigning, etc), to add them in and optimize them? Or is shadows something that really could have been added on at a minimal economic expense to Blizzard?
Shadow maps (which WoW uses) can be added with very little cost. It requires one extra render pass per shadow casting light (which in WoW's case is always one) to render the shadow map, and a simple texture sampler lookup when drawing shadow receiving objects. It's incredibly easy to tack on to an existing 3D engine. If they had used stencil shadows, which require edge information for all meshes, that would require some more effect, but they don't.
Worse case, they have to implement something like cascading shadow maps, to deal with far away shadows. In this case, the biggest cost is tweaking the algorithm that generates the cascading splits. We're still talking about a day or two of work from a skilled programmer.
The graphics could use some tightening up on level 3.
I didnt like the art style when I first saw it, the enviromentals look good but the characters .. meh.
But I can live with that, they do need to work on animations, maybe its the videos I seen but they seem kinda jerky.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited June 2010
The animations definitely need work, but animations are one of the last things to get smoothed out in most games, because animation takes a huge, huge amount of time. Usually the artists will rig up basic animations, just to make the characters move and give the programmers data to test the animation system with, then will go back and painstakingly tweak the rig to make it look right.
Shadow maps (which WoW uses) can be added with very little cost. It requires one extra render pass per shadow casting light (which in WoW's case is always one) to render the shadow map, and a simple texture sampler lookup when drawing shadow receiving objects. It's incredibly easy to tack on to an existing 3D engine. If they had used stencil shadows, which require edge information for all meshes, that would require some more effect, but they don't.
Worse case, they have to implement something like cascading shadow maps, to deal with far away shadows. In this case, the biggest cost is tweaking the algorithm that generates the cascading splits. We're still talking about a day or two of work from a skilled programmer.
So if I understand you correctly, it should have taken a day or two of work from a single programmer to implement shadows in the World of Warcraft video game?
That just strikes me as very hard to believe. I'm wondering how I would go about verifying that claim.
The animations definitely need work, but animations are one of the last things to get smoothed out in most games, because animation takes a huge, huge amount of time. Usually the artists will rig up basic animations, just to make the characters move and give the programmers data to test the animation system with, then will go back and painstakingly tweak the rig to make it look right.
I thought most of that stuff was mo-capped now a days. (Then again I guess you cant really mo-cap some of those moves :P )
Do you know how easy basic shadow maps are to implement? I've done it several times, just for fun, in several different API's. I'm not a professional graphics programmer (although I am a professional programmer). To suggest that Blizzard didn't implement shadows because they couldn't is silly.
Good, because I never ever said it wasn't because they *couldn't*.
There was a conscious choice there not to introduce shadows. The only argument is: Why was the conscious choice made?
As I said, I believe it was because it simply wasn't a priority at the time of release and other things were higher on the list. I mean they had view distance sliders which would cause just as much load on a cpu/gpu as shadows would, yet they shipped with it. It's not like real time shadows were going to really put the pizazz on an already 5 year old graphics engine. I'm just saying that it wasn't a priority for them to ship with real time shadows so they didn't put it in, and focused on other things.
I think if you really think they left that shiny little feature tucked away for a special day, you're giving them way too much credit. The game had bugs that were not resolved for *years* and you think they're just stockpiling content and features?
They didn't have 40 man raids or battlegrounds, or an honor system, or any meaningful pvp either at launch. Were those things they had stuck in their pocket and just opened the magic box when hardware levels caught up?
I'm a pretty huge fanboy about this game and have been watching and reading everything I can about it. But when you step back and take an honest look at the way the game looks from a pure VISUALS perspective, so far from what I've seen it is obviously sub par. We all agree on that point.
The points we appear to not agree on:
1. Can you build a MMO that runs decent graphics and function well? Ironforge lags, therefore perhaps the large-scale MMO world simply can't handle good graphics.
2. Can you build a MMO with a graphical system that scales from being playable but ugly on a shitty PC, and beautiful on a great PC? (See: StarCraft 2 for an example of this, though there are many others)
3. Assuming you can't build a system that scales, does a game with sub-par graphics result in more users playing your game? That is, would dropping good graphics as a feature result in a greater subscription loss, as you're selling a game with objectively less quality when playing on a decent PC? In other words, which results in more subscribers, all else being equal: a pretty MMO or a plain MMO?
1. Of course you can. The problem is that it costs a very large amount of money and a good amount of time, which you then have to recoup, which means you need a ridiculous number of subscribers. Or else bad things happen. Bioware has a large war chest, especially with EA's backing, but it does not have the luxury of ten years to create an MMO.
2. Well, yes. Beauty is subjective, but this is precisely what WoW does with its highly stylized art. It looks like crap when settings are cranked down, and I think it looks pretty damn appealing when they're all turned up. Building a graphics engine that scales perfectly and smoothly with hardware and then building an MMO around it is expensive, time-consuming, and incredibly risky. This is why we have stylized graphics and exaggerated art styles: they still look good and run on a wide range of system specs almost by default.
3. Assuming you've met the ridiculous criteria of making World of Crysis Online that looks like Doom when run on a 486 to its max settings requiring PCs that aren't even on the market yet while simultaneously providing a fairly deep, engaging, entertaining, and most importantly long-lasting MMO then sure, a pretty game will be preferable to a "plain" one. But that game will probably cost $500,000,000 to make and would require four million subscribers to break even.
The key with MMOs, any MMO, is accessibility, accessibility, accessibility. It is why WoW is so successful and other generally good games are relegated to the subscriber goalposts of yesteryear. Accessibility in quest design. Accessibility in class and skill design. Accessibility in world and dungeon design. Accessibility through your system requirements. Mass-market MMOs do not play by the same rules as mass-market single-player or competitive multiplayer games. If you don't cast your net as wide as you possibly can, and this includes people with laptops and older PCs, you are severely limiting your audience, and thus your revenue stream. It doesn't matter how pretty your MMO is or how engaging its gameplay, if your system reqs are too high for that poor college kid to play reasonably well on his netbook, you are likely going to fail to recoup your development costs.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Shadow maps (which WoW uses) can be added with very little cost. It requires one extra render pass per shadow casting light (which in WoW's case is always one) to render the shadow map, and a simple texture sampler lookup when drawing shadow receiving objects. It's incredibly easy to tack on to an existing 3D engine. If they had used stencil shadows, which require edge information for all meshes, that would require some more effect, but they don't.
Worse case, they have to implement something like cascading shadow maps, to deal with far away shadows. In this case, the biggest cost is tweaking the algorithm that generates the cascading splits. We're still talking about a day or two of work from a skilled programmer.
So if I understand you correctly, it should have taken a day or two of work from a single programmer to implement shadows in the World of Warcraft video game?
That just strikes me as very hard to believe. I'm wondering how I would go about verifying that claim.
Go look on Google for shadow map tutorials. See that they are all pretty short, and require maybe 150-200 lines of engine and shader code. It's literally this easy:
Render scene from perspective of shadow casting light, using depth as your "color", write to a texture not the frame buffer.
Render scene, doing a texel lookup in to the shadowmap, using depth as your lookup component.
In the pixel shader, the final color is "weighted" by the shadowmap texel lookup value to make it darker.
That's it, that's shadow maps.
e: Obviously, that's a simple case. To make your shadow maps look really good, you need to understand render texture resolutions and how it effects pixelation, you'll probably want to filter the shadow map somehow, with Gaussian blur, or some kind of anti-aliasing, to give you the "soft shadow" effect. A box filter will even do the trick in a pinch. If you start working with huge terrains (which WoW does), you'll want to look in to the cascading shadow maps i mentioned before. Still, it's not a huge amount of work, and is one of the first things most hobbyist graphics programmers implement because the effect is "wow" and the implementation is easy. Much easier than something like, say, SSAO.
Shadow maps (which WoW uses) can be added with very little cost. It requires one extra render pass per shadow casting light (which in WoW's case is always one) to render the shadow map, and a simple texture sampler lookup when drawing shadow receiving objects. It's incredibly easy to tack on to an existing 3D engine. If they had used stencil shadows, which require edge information for all meshes, that would require some more effect, but they don't.
Worse case, they have to implement something like cascading shadow maps, to deal with far away shadows. In this case, the biggest cost is tweaking the algorithm that generates the cascading splits. We're still talking about a day or two of work from a skilled programmer.
So if I understand you correctly, it should have taken a day or two of work from a single programmer to implement shadows in the World of Warcraft video game?
That just strikes me as very hard to believe. I'm wondering how I would go about verifying that claim.
Go look on Google for shadow map tutorials. See that they are all pretty short, and require maybe 150-200 lines of engine and shader code. It's literally this easy:
Render scene from perspective of shadow casting light, using depth as your "color", write to a texture not the frame buffer.
Render scene, doing a texel lookup in to the shadowmap, using depth as your lookup component.
In the pixel shader, the final color is "weighted" by the shadowmap texel lookup value to make it darker.
That's it, that's shadow maps.
It's so simple and yet it took them ages to add it to the game. Just how incompetent are these people?
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mojojoeoA block off the park, living the dream.Registered Userregular
edited June 2010
Have they stated what specifically will be craftable?
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Korodullin, You bring up an additional question we simply don't know the answer to. We've talked about the economic impact on the consumer in terms of a game with high system requirements, but we haven't talked about the economic impact on the developer in terms of building a game with excellent graphics. Maybe you're right on that point - maybe building an MMO with graphics dated to 2009 simply wasn't economically feasible. That's about as good an explanation as I've heard yet.
In regards to the accessibility issue, we still don't know for sure if the increased accessibility of low system requirements actually results in higher revenue. For every person who catches wind of TOR, but loads up a screenshot and sees it's about the same visual quality as a game he bought in 2005 and decides not to buy it, there might be three who catch wind of TOR, see that it can run on their old PC, and then decide to buy it. That certainly might be the case, as you argue.
But it might be the exact opposite. Maybe it's three people who choose to buy TOR because it's visuals are fantastic, and one who doesn't buy it because it's system requirements are too high.
It would require some statistics to really get us a solid answer.
e: Of course I might just be rationalizing. I personally just hate that the graphics suck, and wish they looked better. :P
What does crafting entail? Is there going to be a lot of crafting, or is it going to be very focused?
The big thing about crafting is that it will support combat in our game and it is very important. We haven't talked much about crafting, but we will in the future. People will be pleased with what we are coming up with for crafting. I think very pleased actually. It will not be to the extent of some of the games out there, like [Star Wars] Galaxies. It will be very similar to what WoW has. But it has some really cool twists that WoW doesn't have that I think people will like.
Is it more action-y or something?
When I say crafting I mean it is just what you can make, right? Crafting is about the cool items people can make and the ability to sell. And some people really get into that. And people like me who don't want to grind sometimes go and make stuff and sell them on the auction house. That's how I get my money to go out and do things. I love crafting, and it's going to be an important part of our game.
Anecdotal evidence incoming, but from what I've seen over the (way too many) years I've spent playing MMOs is that most people don't go into them expecting a visual feast, and the people who do tend to look past limited or stylized graphics after a while.
But since statistics on that are likely never going to be forthcoming any time soon, the best a developer and publisher can do is cast a large net and use a visual style that is at least somewhat appealing and capable of running on a wide range of hardware.
korodullin on
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What does crafting entail? Is there going to be a lot of crafting, or is it going to be very focused?
The big thing about crafting is that it will support combat in our game and it is very important. We haven't talked much about crafting, but we will in the future. People will be pleased with what we are coming up with for crafting. I think very pleased actually. It will not be to the extent of some of the games out there, like [Star Wars] Galaxies. It will be very similar to what WoW has. But it has some really cool twists that WoW doesn't have that I think people will like.
Is it more action-y or something?
When I say crafting I mean it is just what you can make, right? Crafting is about the cool items people can make and the ability to sell. And some people really get into that. And people like me who don't want to grind sometimes go and make stuff and sell them on the auction house. That's how I get my money to go out and do things. I love crafting, and it's going to be an important part of our game.
I'm a pretty huge fanboy about this game and have been watching and reading everything I can about it. But when you step back and take an honest look at the way the game looks from a pure VISUALS perspective, so far from what I've seen it is obviously sub par. We all agree on that point.
The points we appear to not agree on:
1. Can you build a MMO that runs decent graphics and function well? Ironforge lags, therefore perhaps the large-scale MMO world simply can't handle good graphics.
...
E: Just as a final note, my suspicion is that the real answer for why TOR's graphics aren't that great is that it's simply been in development for a very, very, very long time (probably more than 6 years by now). I highly doubt that it was an intentional design decision.
Code degrades over time. Partly from a lot of tweaking around in it and partly just because it's outdated. I bet if Blizzard rewrote wow from the ground up and released it today you'd see a performance increase in Ironforge/Dalaran. They probably have learned a lot since first coding too. It's been, what, 6 years (?) since launch. Probably 10 or so since they started coding the engine.
But, more importantly.... I LOVE the environments I've seen in TOR now that I've seen them in action in the E3 videos. I'm still not a huge fan of the character models, but I've got zero problem with the environments anymore. Once I get my hands on it I might change my mind about the models.
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited June 2010
When it comes to crafting, "like WoW but better" isn't that difficult to accomplish.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited June 2010
I couldn't care less how the craft system works, provided the goods that are produced are meaningful in someway. Press button, play mini-games, whatever. Just makes the produced goods an important part of the economy and you have a winner.
Are the Republic troopers really the "tank" class?
From what I understand, based on the info they've released on advanced classes and the comments from the G4 interview, you choose (or at least, cement) your character's place in the holy trinity of tank/healer/dps when you pick your advanced class, and Trooper isn't the only Republic class that can spec tank.
In regards to the accessibility issue, we still don't know for sure if the increased accessibility of low system requirements actually results in higher revenue. For every person who catches wind of TOR, but loads up a screenshot and sees it's about the same visual quality as a game he bought in 2005 and decides not to buy it, there might be three who catch wind of TOR, see that it can run on their old PC, and then decide to buy it. That certainly might be the case, as you argue.
But it might be the exact opposite. Maybe it's three people who choose to buy TOR because it's visuals are fantastic, and one who doesn't buy it because it's system requirements are too high.
But MMOs aren't about how many people buy the initial game, they're about how many people pay a monthly fee to keep playing the game.
That means that there needs to be a lot of content at launch, and there needs to be a lot of content continually added into the game. And every human resource spent making everything pretty is a resource that could have been spent adding content into the game.
People are ignoring this. Great graphics take a lot of work, and that's work that's not being spent on actual content for games. It's why graphics-intensive games tend to be much shorter than games of yesteryear despite game budgets ballooning.
MMOs are all about content, and making cutting-edge graphics gets in the way of that.
Are the Republic troopers really the "tank" class?
From what I understand, based on the info they've released on advanced classes and the comments from the G4 interview, you choose (or at least, cement) your character's place in the holy trinity of tank/healer/dps when you pick your advanced class, and Trooper isn't the only Republic class that can spec tank.
Are the Republic troopers really the "tank" class?
From what I understand, based on the info they've released on advanced classes and the comments from the G4 interview, you choose (or at least, cement) your character's place in the holy trinity of tank/healer/dps when you pick your advanced class, and Trooper isn't the only Republic class that can spec tank.
He means that the other will be the Jedi Knight
Well, yeah, but who knows? maybe the Smuggler can tank from cover :P
Anyway, I'm very interested to hear how the classes differ from their cross-faction counterpart (BH/Trooper, Smuggler/Agent Knight/Warrior Consular/Inquisitor): Nice to hear that the Bounty Hunter's "Heat" mechanic works differently compared the Trooper's Ammo system (based on the Darth Hater info someone posted a couple pages ago.)
I haven't heard much about the Ammo system... But I would imagine it's pretty simple. It works kind of like mana. It's a resource you draw upon to use skills. You can replenish some of it in combat, and much of out of combat.
Unlike mana, however, ammo actually makes sense for a Trooper!
It's a rather brilliant idea. It also makes a ton of sense from the itemization perspective - bigger armor means more ammo pouches, and more clever ways of safely storing ammo.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited June 2010
Ammo is a mana-like Trooper resource?
This game keeps getting better and better. MY IMMERSION IS IMPORTANT.
Except is seems like it doens't come back naturally like a mana bar that refills. Looking at the list of trooper abilities it seems like you have to reload etc. I like the "reload and heal yourself and an ally" skill.
I bet the consular might be able to tank via health recovery and evasive stats. Getting hit less often and healing dmg to yourself versus large HP pools or high armor.
Next vid i want to see is the Jedi Knight armor progression!
From the videos did anyone else think being a healer class that jsut runs around the outside with a Lightsaber seems lame or boring? I hope they get to be part of the fight.
Crafting is where smuggling can come into it. Although since they're saying "like WoW but better" I'm guessing they mean "like LotRO" which means there's no need to move controlled goods from planet to planet.
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But you are arguing for the smallest possible audience ( graphics enthusiasts ) for a game DESIGNED for the largest possible audience (anyone with a PC). Its not a failure, it is an important design choice.
If you cannot fathom why you cannot, as a company making what is thought to be the most expensive game ever, have both in a the game, I don't know what to tell you.
It would be nice but its not a good idea for bioware, or arguably any MMO company, to have dx11 sli omg awesome graphics in an MMO.
pro tip- the first m is MASSIVELY.
Yes, you had to scale it back. You had to take a game, you just bought, running on cutting edge modern hardware, and scale it back just so it would run. You don't see the issue here? I'm assuming here you were running on modern hardware when you picked up Crysis, and not like a GeForce FX 5200 or something silly.
The only way graphics factor into that is that it's easier to make more content if less human resources are being dedicated to cutting edge graphics.
What I see here is a bunch of good programmers making an engine that scales well.
Aion?
The problem with trying to beat the 800lbs gorilla in the room is, there's already an 800lbs gorilla in the room.
When you try to do things that the other big guy does, after the fact, you just look like a wanna-be. With the obvious exception ironically being, the 800lbs gorilla in the room. Who has mastered ripping off and polishing.
I do enjoy the revisionist theory that Blizzard actually made the terrible graphics engine as conscious decision. Like it was some kind of feature to broaden their user-base. Blizzard had absolutely, positively no clue that the game would be as popular as it was. The game was in development for 5 years and the engine looked 5 years old when it came out. It's not a slight, it's just the way it is. It wasn't a design decision, hardware just caught up with the modified WCIII engine before the game was released.
Wow did look dated when it came out. It came out right around the time of FarCry, Doom3, Half life 2, UT2k4, etc all of which looked significantly better. Granted, they're not the same genre, but that really doesn't come into play when you're talking about an engine looking dated. Heck Dawn of War had arguably looked better and it was an RTS.
You're still ignoring the "no real shadows until the second expansion", which is the biggest evidence that WoW's graphical requirements were a choice, not an accident of Blizzard's incompetence.
Is that really an argument? You believe that because blizzard added a feature several years after release, a feature that either wasn't prioritized before launch or wasn't even considered at the time before launch, was a conscious decision to help the users with poor hardware? You're saying they tuck away features in a bottle waiting for hardware levels to catch up before they unleash them on the poorly hardware'd masses?
If that was the case, why not add the feature and make the default setting have the shadows turned off? That's just a poor argument.
edit: we're getting way off topic though, on a pretty dumb argument. Long story short, I think TOR's graphics engine has some catching up to do. It shouldn't have a graphics engine steered towards 2001 machines like the modified WCIII engine that wow used. Bare minimum it should be based on 2007 average hardware, and look it.
The points we appear to not agree on:
1. Can you build a MMO that runs decent graphics and function well? Ironforge lags, therefore perhaps the large-scale MMO world simply can't handle good graphics.
2. Can you build a MMO with a graphical system that scales from being playable but ugly on a shitty PC, and beautiful on a great PC? (See: StarCraft 2 for an example of this, though there are many others)
3. Assuming you can't build a system that scales, does a game with sub-par graphics result in more users playing your game? That is, would dropping good graphics as a feature result in a greater subscription loss, as you're selling a game with objectively less quality when playing on a decent PC? In other words, which results in more subscribers, all else being equal: a pretty MMO or a plain MMO?
I don't know if any of us is technologically savvy enough to definitively answer any of these questions. My suspicion is that #1 doesn't matter, as most of the real gameplay appears to center around groups smaller than the hundreds of people in Ironforge. My suspicion is that #2 is totally possible, given that many games have done it successfully before. But even if it isn't, my suspicion is that - in regard to #3 - when you build a better quality game, the subscribers come, and it's a terrible business plan to intentionally retard any critical component of any game - visual presentation included.
But those are just my suspicions and I am not a game developer. These might be interesting questions to ask Bioware.
E: Just as a final note, my suspicion is that the real answer for why TOR's graphics aren't that great is that it's simply been in development for a very, very, very long time (probably more than 6 years by now). I highly doubt that it was an intentional design decision.
Do you know how easy basic shadow maps are to implement? I've done it several times, just for fun, in several different API's. I'm not a professional graphics programmer (although I am a professional programmer). To suggest that Blizzard didn't implement shadows because they couldn't is silly. There was a conscious choice there not to introduce shadows. The only argument is: Why was the conscious choice made?
I say it's because they know their audience and the hardware, others disagree.
Ah, I didn't know you were a programmer Gnome.
Tell me, is it possible that World of Warcraft's core engine simply was not designed with shadows in mind and it was a pretty huge cost, economically speaking (in terms of hours redesigning, etc), to add them in and optimize them? Or is shadows something that really could have been added on at a minimal economic expense to Blizzard?
Shadow maps (which WoW uses) can be added with very little cost. It requires one extra render pass per shadow casting light (which in WoW's case is always one) to render the shadow map, and a simple texture sampler lookup when drawing shadow receiving objects. It's incredibly easy to tack on to an existing 3D engine. If they had used stencil shadows, which require edge information for all meshes, that would require some more effect, but they don't.
Worse case, they have to implement something like cascading shadow maps, to deal with far away shadows. In this case, the biggest cost is tweaking the algorithm that generates the cascading splits. We're still talking about a day or two of work from a skilled programmer.
I didnt like the art style when I first saw it, the enviromentals look good but the characters .. meh.
But I can live with that, they do need to work on animations, maybe its the videos I seen but they seem kinda jerky.
So if I understand you correctly, it should have taken a day or two of work from a single programmer to implement shadows in the World of Warcraft video game?
That just strikes me as very hard to believe. I'm wondering how I would go about verifying that claim.
I thought most of that stuff was mo-capped now a days. (Then again I guess you cant really mo-cap some of those moves :P )
Good, because I never ever said it wasn't because they *couldn't*.
As I said, I believe it was because it simply wasn't a priority at the time of release and other things were higher on the list. I mean they had view distance sliders which would cause just as much load on a cpu/gpu as shadows would, yet they shipped with it. It's not like real time shadows were going to really put the pizazz on an already 5 year old graphics engine. I'm just saying that it wasn't a priority for them to ship with real time shadows so they didn't put it in, and focused on other things.
I think if you really think they left that shiny little feature tucked away for a special day, you're giving them way too much credit. The game had bugs that were not resolved for *years* and you think they're just stockpiling content and features?
They didn't have 40 man raids or battlegrounds, or an honor system, or any meaningful pvp either at launch. Were those things they had stuck in their pocket and just opened the magic box when hardware levels caught up?
1. Of course you can. The problem is that it costs a very large amount of money and a good amount of time, which you then have to recoup, which means you need a ridiculous number of subscribers. Or else bad things happen. Bioware has a large war chest, especially with EA's backing, but it does not have the luxury of ten years to create an MMO.
2. Well, yes. Beauty is subjective, but this is precisely what WoW does with its highly stylized art. It looks like crap when settings are cranked down, and I think it looks pretty damn appealing when they're all turned up. Building a graphics engine that scales perfectly and smoothly with hardware and then building an MMO around it is expensive, time-consuming, and incredibly risky. This is why we have stylized graphics and exaggerated art styles: they still look good and run on a wide range of system specs almost by default.
3. Assuming you've met the ridiculous criteria of making World of Crysis Online that looks like Doom when run on a 486 to its max settings requiring PCs that aren't even on the market yet while simultaneously providing a fairly deep, engaging, entertaining, and most importantly long-lasting MMO then sure, a pretty game will be preferable to a "plain" one. But that game will probably cost $500,000,000 to make and would require four million subscribers to break even.
The key with MMOs, any MMO, is accessibility, accessibility, accessibility. It is why WoW is so successful and other generally good games are relegated to the subscriber goalposts of yesteryear. Accessibility in quest design. Accessibility in class and skill design. Accessibility in world and dungeon design. Accessibility through your system requirements. Mass-market MMOs do not play by the same rules as mass-market single-player or competitive multiplayer games. If you don't cast your net as wide as you possibly can, and this includes people with laptops and older PCs, you are severely limiting your audience, and thus your revenue stream. It doesn't matter how pretty your MMO is or how engaging its gameplay, if your system reqs are too high for that poor college kid to play reasonably well on his netbook, you are likely going to fail to recoup your development costs.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Go look on Google for shadow map tutorials. See that they are all pretty short, and require maybe 150-200 lines of engine and shader code. It's literally this easy:
Render scene from perspective of shadow casting light, using depth as your "color", write to a texture not the frame buffer.
Render scene, doing a texel lookup in to the shadowmap, using depth as your lookup component.
In the pixel shader, the final color is "weighted" by the shadowmap texel lookup value to make it darker.
That's it, that's shadow maps.
e: Obviously, that's a simple case. To make your shadow maps look really good, you need to understand render texture resolutions and how it effects pixelation, you'll probably want to filter the shadow map somehow, with Gaussian blur, or some kind of anti-aliasing, to give you the "soft shadow" effect. A box filter will even do the trick in a pinch. If you start working with huge terrains (which WoW does), you'll want to look in to the cascading shadow maps i mentioned before. Still, it's not a huge amount of work, and is one of the first things most hobbyist graphics programmers implement because the effect is "wow" and the implementation is easy. Much easier than something like, say, SSAO.
It's so simple and yet it took them ages to add it to the game. Just how incompetent are these people?
In regards to the accessibility issue, we still don't know for sure if the increased accessibility of low system requirements actually results in higher revenue. For every person who catches wind of TOR, but loads up a screenshot and sees it's about the same visual quality as a game he bought in 2005 and decides not to buy it, there might be three who catch wind of TOR, see that it can run on their old PC, and then decide to buy it. That certainly might be the case, as you argue.
But it might be the exact opposite. Maybe it's three people who choose to buy TOR because it's visuals are fantastic, and one who doesn't buy it because it's system requirements are too high.
It would require some statistics to really get us a solid answer.
e: Of course I might just be rationalizing. I personally just hate that the graphics suck, and wish they looked better. :P
Wait what? Have they said anything will be craftable?
Oh god am I missing some latest TOR info?
But since statistics on that are likely never going to be forthcoming any time soon, the best a developer and publisher can do is cast a large net and use a visual style that is at least somewhat appealing and capable of running on a wide range of hardware.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
http://www.massively.com/2010/06/15/massivelys-exclusive-swtor-interview-starships-pvp-and-craft/#continued
So basically the old "Like WoW but better" line.
e: Damn you reVerse. Damn you.
Code degrades over time. Partly from a lot of tweaking around in it and partly just because it's outdated. I bet if Blizzard rewrote wow from the ground up and released it today you'd see a performance increase in Ironforge/Dalaran. They probably have learned a lot since first coding too. It's been, what, 6 years (?) since launch. Probably 10 or so since they started coding the engine.
But, more importantly.... I LOVE the environments I've seen in TOR now that I've seen them in action in the E3 videos. I'm still not a huge fan of the character models, but I've got zero problem with the environments anymore. Once I get my hands on it I might change my mind about the models.
From what I understand, based on the info they've released on advanced classes and the comments from the G4 interview, you choose (or at least, cement) your character's place in the holy trinity of tank/healer/dps when you pick your advanced class, and Trooper isn't the only Republic class that can spec tank.
But MMOs aren't about how many people buy the initial game, they're about how many people pay a monthly fee to keep playing the game.
That means that there needs to be a lot of content at launch, and there needs to be a lot of content continually added into the game. And every human resource spent making everything pretty is a resource that could have been spent adding content into the game.
People are ignoring this. Great graphics take a lot of work, and that's work that's not being spent on actual content for games. It's why graphics-intensive games tend to be much shorter than games of yesteryear despite game budgets ballooning.
MMOs are all about content, and making cutting-edge graphics gets in the way of that.
He means that the other will be the Jedi Knight
Well, yeah, but who knows? maybe the Smuggler can tank from cover :P
Anyway, I'm very interested to hear how the classes differ from their cross-faction counterpart (BH/Trooper, Smuggler/Agent Knight/Warrior Consular/Inquisitor): Nice to hear that the Bounty Hunter's "Heat" mechanic works differently compared the Trooper's Ammo system (based on the Darth Hater info someone posted a couple pages ago.)
Unlike mana, however, ammo actually makes sense for a Trooper!
It's a rather brilliant idea. It also makes a ton of sense from the itemization perspective - bigger armor means more ammo pouches, and more clever ways of safely storing ammo.
This game keeps getting better and better. MY IMMERSION IS IMPORTANT.
I bet the consular might be able to tank via health recovery and evasive stats. Getting hit less often and healing dmg to yourself versus large HP pools or high armor.
Next vid i want to see is the Jedi Knight armor progression!
3DS FC: 5086-1134-6451
Shiny Code: 3837
3DS FC: 5086-1134-6451
Shiny Code: 3837
I just looked up tibanna gas on Wookieepedia to make sure I was right about it... It exists both as a liquid and a gas and is also used to heat homes.
Anyone want to make a King of the Hill / Star Wars parody?
Or buy it from suppliers who get it from the miners, y'know.
Yeah, right, like I'm going to pay the 400% markup on the auction house. Unless they copy SWG's auction house and cap bids/buyouts to 6000 credits.
Which, again, means no smuggling.