I know that graphics don't "make" a game, but I must admit that SWTOR is gorgeous now. I was on during launch and stopped because I was bored... I'm back now, and I must also admit that I'm having fun.

It's not perfect, but they're taking steps in the right direction - for me at least.

But again - OMG is this game stunning (for an MMO).

 

 

 

- i7 920, 560ti, 12gigs of 1600mhz, Vista Ultimate

 

Edit - I finally found an image sharing site to use, not a perfect example (it was resized by the website), but on my screen it's 99% jaggy-free.

 

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/337/swtorp.jpg/

Originally posted by Falice

I know that graphics don't "make" a game, but I must admit that SWTOR is gorgeous now. I was on during launch and stopped because I was bored... I'm back now, and I must also admit that I'm having fun.

It's not perfect, but they're taking steps in the right direction - for me at least.

But again - OMG is this game stunning (for an MMO).

 

 

 

- i7 920, 560ti, 12gigs of 1600mhz, Vista Ultimate

It's like a picture painted by an artist, and with about as much active life.

Funny, I logged in during some free play time after 1.2 and didn't notice a difference. Everything maxed out and the game still loooked like crap.

 

If they actually upgraded textures, I can't see it.

Originally posted by AZHokie54

Funny, I logged in during some free play time after 1.2 and didn't notice a difference. Everything maxed out and the game still loooked like crap.

 

If they actually upgraded textures, I can't see it.

 

There is a drop down box or something in the settings, yes you can tell a difference.

The Anti-Aliasing in this game is the worst. They make this great looking vista in Coruscant, and it looks like it's built with legos. I could live with the oil-painting textures if they had smooth edges. I have AA set to highest setting and even tried forcing higher levels with my card.

I think the graphics are fine. What they need to do is bring those graphics to life . They need to add more sound whether it's in the form of atmospheric music or John Williams.

Originally posted by ignore_me
The Anti-Aliasing in this game is the worst. They make this great looking vista in Coruscant, and it looks like it's built with legos. I could live with the oil-painting textures if they had smooth edges. I have AA set to highest setting and even tried forcing higher levels with my card.

I'm not having this problem, the AA works perfectly for me.

Originally posted by RefMinor

Originally posted by Falice

I know that graphics don't "make" a game, but I must admit that SWTOR is gorgeous now. I was on during launch and stopped because I was bored... I'm back now, and I must also admit that I'm having fun.

It's not perfect, but they're taking steps in the right direction - for me at least.

But again - OMG is this game stunning (for an MMO).

 

 

 

- i7 920, 560ti, 12gigs of 1600mhz, Vista Ultimate

It's like a picture painted by an artist, and with about as much active life.

I agree it is "lifeless" most of the time, but at least now it's worth looking at.

Call me when they have fixed those horrible 1999 looking armors with 2 pixels.

 

I've seen minecraft mods with better textures.

Originally posted by spaceport

Call me when they have fixed those horrible 1999 looking armors with 2 pixels.

 

I've seen minecraft mods with better textures.

They were fixed with 1.2. They look pretty good now actually.

Originally posted by Falice

Originally posted by ignore_me
The Anti-Aliasing in this game is the worst. They make this great looking vista in Coruscant, and it looks like it's built with legos. I could live with the oil-painting textures if they had smooth edges. I have AA set to highest setting and even tried forcing higher levels with my card.

I'm not having this problem, the AA works perfectly for me.

This is a serious request, can you post a screen shot please?

 

Originally posted by ignore_me

Originally posted by Falice

Originally posted by ignore_me
The Anti-Aliasing in this game is the worst. They make this great looking vista in Coruscant, and it looks like it's built with legos. I could live with the oil-painting textures if they had smooth edges. I have AA set to highest setting and even tried forcing higher levels with my card.

I'm not having this problem, the AA works perfectly for me.

This is a serious request, can you post a screen shot please?

 

If I can figure out how, certainly.

Originally posted by Falice

Originally posted by ignore_me

Originally posted by Falice

Originally posted by ignore_me
The Anti-Aliasing in this game is the worst. They make this great looking vista in Coruscant, and it looks like it's built with legos. I could live with the oil-painting textures if they had smooth edges. I have AA set to highest setting and even tried forcing higher levels with my card.

I'm not having this problem, the AA works perfectly for me.

This is a serious request, can you post a screen shot please?

 

If I can figure out how, certainly.

cool. Maybe I can get some perspective on my analysis.

I would not say the graphics is bad or horrible, but it has some design weaknesses. SOME vistas are really nice, but all Bioware games of the last years have a bit sterile and dead textures and a lack of design elegance. It has to do with love for detail, making something look alife.

In SWTOR all textures look a bit too much like plastic. Metal on armor, marble ruins or stone on buildings, nothing looks "real". I know they wanted a "stylized" look but IMO they went too far. I mean, sure to see Coruscant, Nar Shadda or Tatooine has some grand vistas. But overall, it lacks this "used" and real moments. Take as counter example LOTRO. LOTRO is also more stylized and has low polygons compared to other MMOs, but they knew a lot about placement, colours, textures and detail. Any region in LOTRO is grand. There are so many grand vistas and places, I never stopped marvelling at the meadows in a sunrise when the wind blows through the grass and flowers, some trees and a starry night, old ruins, forbidden forests... everything in LOTRO looks great in the landscapes and scenery. For me LOTRO is the best designed MMO visuall (except the characters). If you explore the Old Forst the first time, it REALLY feels mysterious. It breathes atmosphere in every corner. No SWTOR place has such atmosphere. If you explore the forst world Tython or any other, I never felt mystery or atmopshere. Never. All is plain and direct. There is no feeling you could find some hidden corner or anything. It is like a flat 2-dimension thing. I never seen something that was so vast and yet so sterile.

 

The four capital mistakes are: placement, texture, animated stuff and ambient sounds.

 

The placement is just dull, sorry. Again, take any mysterious are in LOTRO and its feeling and compare to any natural area in SWTOR. Weather Top, Old Forest, The Shire, Angmar, Moria, Eregion... all these places have soul and character, you FEEL something when you are there. In Tython or Hoth or Quesh or whatever I feel nothing. It looks nice, but dead, and that is a problem of placement.

 

Texture I already explained. Take also as examples the city in Dragon Age 2 and compare it to the human city in GW2. (Angry Joe did that.) THAT is all you need to know about Textures. Bioware has just no skill for great textures ever since they started the KOTOR era. Bioware always makes the same repeated, dull, bland textures on things.

 

Animated Stuff: There are SO few critters, rabbits, birds, deer, whatever. Anything to walk around and pretent fauna. Or city life. Take places like Nal Hutta or Tython: every NPC just STANDS there! In front of the Jedi Academy on Tython are some sparring Jedi. Only the just STAND there. They never actually spar or have a dialogue. They just stand there in fron of each other. That's just one example for many. Mobs don't move either, and some only have a very simple "idle" animation that goes over and over.

 

Ambient Sound: this is what I really don't get, why SWTOR is silent like a museum. It would be such an easy and relatively cheap way to give feeling into places, if the nonexistent animations were at least pretended by ambient sounds. Busy city sounds. Do you recall how busy Baldurs Gate sounded? I still recall that. THAT sounded like a city. Same with forests and nature. It is SO awfully silent. I recall that Prison Planet, whatever the name was, there was a riot going on and it was dead silent in most places. That felt SO wrong.

 

 

As I said, SWTOR hasn't bad graphics. Bioware just made so many mistakes, and simple beginners mistakes, you just don't expect from an experienced company like this. Sometimes I wonder why I write this over and over. I said this for 2+ years and to no avail. Sometimes I think Bioware WANTED SWTOR to fail. Maybe they specualted against EA in some of these bizzare methods of "New Capitalism"...

I agree about LOTRO Elikal. If the actual characters didn't look so craptastic I'd still be playing that game. I couldn't like my character because he looked like a 70's tv-quality marionette. It's like two totally different design philosophies were forced in the same game.

Back to SWTOR. I agree about the textures, they look over-simplified.

 

I have always liked the graphics...

The visual backdrops against which the game's action takes place are pretty amazing.  In some places it almost seems like the artists made an effort to make sure they provided something visually moving/interesting from no matter where you stood. 

 

The foreground though was largely a joke IMO.  Partly due to texture resolution being too low, partly due to the models sometimes not being quite detailed enough, and party due to just crappy, rushed work on many of the textures themselves that any professional texture artist should be embarrassed about.  Maybe some of this has been fixed, but that was how I saw it the few months I played. 

This picture actually illustrates why I don't like the game much.  See those big mountains in the background?  They're just a painting, you can't actually get to them.  See that beautiful skyscraper on the right?  Same thing.  Well, the skyscraper is probably at least a model but you can't go explore it.

 

It's easy to get an artist to paint a backdrop that looks spectacular, but all I need to do is look at the character, the sub-par graphics and the downright ugly armor to know I won't be coming back anytime soon. 

 

I, too, played the free week and did notice an improvement in character models but they still can't even come close to making a shadow in this game and I don't know why.  I finally turned them off because it looked like the shadow came from Minecraft.

 

I took sceenshots constantly in Vanilla Wow, heck I even take screenshots in Minecraft.  I've never  taken a screenshot in SWTOR.  Never saw the need.

 

A painting best describes it to me as well.

Where are the birds? They not exist long long ago in galaxies far far away?

Any ambient life? When I played the trail I didn't see any on the 2 worlds I visited.

No rising and setting sun just says painting even more to me.

Just like posted above, those big beautiful land marks are unreachable. It's like taking a tour of the White house. I have to follow the guided tour or else.

Not meaning to insult you in particular OP but your character looks like some alien from a 70s/80s Saturday morning cartoon like Space Ghost, instead of someone I would imagine as a Star Wars figure. Not your fault OP but just saying.

Originally posted by Falice

Originally posted by ignore_me
The Anti-Aliasing in this game is the worst. They make this great looking vista in Coruscant, and it looks like it's built with legos. I could live with the oil-painting textures if they had smooth edges. I have AA set to highest setting and even tried forcing higher levels with my card.

I'm not having this problem, the AA works perfectly for me.

AA never worked for me but that could be my ATI's fault but i stopped bothering about it a long time ago. i still think that SWTOR graphics even though an improvement on old ones needs more high textures for armors and clothing.