General Discussion

Which why WoW has 9 million subs,  love it or hate it.   I recently tried the Lord of the Rings free trial and I haven't played a game that clunky since well....Horizons.   And it's a shame really, the game has tons of potential.  I don't outright hate it but I couldn't see myself playing it for a long time to come.

You can still have a game with good graphics but you need an UI that works very smoothly and the characters need "turn on a dime" fluid movement, especially if you have PvP.

Didn't Turbine work on several projects at the same time? I know it's not an excuse... not a smart thing to do either!

I tried the LOTRO too just this week and the game was... in a word, shoddy. Things felt somehow awkwardly designed (even if most seemed to copy the commonly proven formulae) and the combat felt loose and extremely unaccurate. Character design... forget about it. Everyone looked alike, unless you wanted to make something entirely different, and who'd want to end up looking something near unnatural for hours and hours? No one, that's who.

Still, it feels that I have to give the game another chance. For one, I was pretty busy and didn't get to spend but a few evenings at it. Also I guess I have to get some new hardware since the game didn't run well at all with anything above medium settings. To tell the truth, it didn't even look that impressive on the highest settings that I used to look around in few places. I ran and ran and ran with my hobbit, fleeing from the Shire, but not for the fear of my life nor because I had to, but to see the world... until a evil bird decided that there was one hobbit too many in his woods.

Even the best gameplay in the world cant compensate the graphics of wow Oo

Graphics=easy since it's already a well documented process in the company and the team has done it a few times already.

when it comes to polish that's different everytime around, frustrating, grindy, and annoying.

So true.

Unless you've come across a unique game design (e.g. EVE) Graphics mean very little in the face of a well polished & balanced game.

Graphics = Easy? You ARE a programmer...

Originally posted by zethcarn

Which why WoW has 9 million subs,  love it or hate it.   I recently tried the Lord of the Rings free trial and I haven't played a game that clunky since well....Horizons.   And it's a shame really, the game has tons of potential.  I don't outright hate it but I couldn't see myself playing it for a long time to come.

You can still have a game with good graphics but you need an UI that works very smoothly and the characters need "turn on a dime" fluid movement, especially if you have PvP.

EXACTLY. God I'm so happy somebody noticing this. Seems that nobody cares about it and it's so important, and I also think it's one of the main things why people enjoy playing WoW.

Yea i agree there are so few games out there that are polished first before graphics. [such as WoW and EvE]

well say graphics are easy is clearly an exasteration especially since it took me a half of a semester in high school to render a pyramid(this isn't using any tools at all IE 100% of it was written by me, with me understanding all the math behind the processes of rotating/translating/stretching.  understanding and teaching myself basic concepts of actually putting it on the screen).  basically a royal pain in the neck since I went into something that was over my head when I started and didn't use anybody else's tools except for documentation(I learned more trig, matrix math, and a tiny bit of calc than I did in math class).  Not simple by any means especially with all that time invested I just got an array of points(with line nodes, essentially I could've made any shape but I was literally inputing the points manually since I was using 100% scott code meaning I couldn't use import software) to render.

But besides all that junk and showing off.  There is one lesson you learn very very quickly after you get serious about programming.  It's that once a person gets the thought process down the second thing limiting that person is resources*: particularly code libraries, examples both of which they need to be familar with to use.   In all it's a hell of a lot easier to write new code and add new stuff to it than to find bugs AND fix them correctly.  This is why you see such a focus on graphics+content+whatever since it is easier to write new code than maintain it(I'd be willing to bet that they had some programming staff that there were programmers capable of bug hunting and squishing working on quest content after Vanguard was released).

*guess what there are likely lots of resources for adding a new graphic feature to your engine, a quick google search and you'd likely find some nice documentation on something fancy that could get added(or just search through company resources).  for debug there are no resources you can consult but your own and your teams own experiances, and it gets bloody hard sometimes because of that.