What's all this talk....Follow

...about the graphics in WoW not being good? All I have to say... turn on every effect (especially Full Glow :F) and the game looks pretty dam good. Of course if your graphics card can't handle it then it will look bad (assuming you dont mind slow down and such by putting on the other effects).

"All this talk?"

I've seen a couple mentionings of people's distaste for the "cartooniness" of Warcraft, but good graphics can be disliked too.

WoW graphics are excellent. They are certainly cartoon-ish, but they capture WarCraft brilliantly.

The graphics are so so.

The enviroments are without a doubt stunning. The world is massive and just fun to tool around in. everything looks great in this regard the water, the trees, the ruins, the cities; everything here is top notch.

The character models on the other hand are poor in my opinion. the characters are blocky the animation is clunky and the textures are low quality. I don't mind cartoony graphics I really don't, but considering that most the standard graphics card is 64 MB leaves me wondering why the models weren't optimized more. I mean, hell, FF11 utilized 4MB!!! of playstation video ram to present the dazzling world of vanadiel with charater models reaching 3000 polygons each with 100 on screen at a time. I would think that with an extra 60 mb to toy around with they could have optimized more and given the characters a better look and feel.

lol my video settings are all up to the highest. :D I run a GeForce Ti 4800 with everything cranked up. no slow down at all. being a charater modeler and animator I notice the little details like low texture rez, poly count, improperly turned edges, etc. on everything I play. To the average user, yes It probably looks swell, but to me the charaters look blocky and rushed.

Well they need something to for expansion packs! =)

By average I mean people aren't usually breaking open the animation packages and texture packages loading them up and studying them to get a better feel for how these things are made and to get a better grasp on game modeling/animation. Some people do lots of people don't. When a user gets to the point where they can (and want to) objectivly look at thier games and not just play them they pass the mark of "average".

These games are art and should be treated as such. While art is subjective techinical aspects are not. Building super low rez low poly characters was fine 2 years ago but with the advances in technology it is not as easy to get away with these days. Luckly this is a good game and the techincal hurdles that should have been over come with the characters can be overlooked because it is a great game. However we should not blindly say that the character models are great; they are not. We should at least objectivly look at the components of the game individualy and make and educated critique of what is good and bad and relise that the bad is overshadowed by the good.

That is what sets apart the "above average" use and the "average" user.

For all of those people that bought the CE watch the making of and they will explain why the graphics are the way they are.
They could have and did make them better but they felt it didn't have the right Warcraft feel so they toned down the graphics to put that feel into WoW

I want to know what's with all this talk about posters that aren't scholars rating people down. Please check the Forum FAQ and read it so that you know that if you don't have an average rating of above 3.00, you can't rate anyone's posts up or down.

So i'm average because I like to play games, instead of opening them up and looking at what goes to put them together..... fat head.

You don't have to want to pull apart games to see the smaller stuff to pass some invisible barrier of being superior then the rest of the player crowd. Sure there are some people that blast through games without giving a second thought to what is around them, but there community of people that like knowing the little details is by no means small.

A person who never gets involved with game creation can have just as much appreciation as the people who went into making it. I actually take a very detailed look at all the graphics of every game I play, and an even larger intrest into the engines that run them. However I have yet to continue my pursuits into learning programming, and you'll never see me pick up the tools to do graphics.


Though if you would consider me average because I only play my games and nothing more then I stand by my earlier statement..... fat head.

And would I be safe to assume you somehow consider yourself above average because you do more then just play the games. Cause it really does sound like your trying to make yourself in some form of light feel superior then everyone else. Broad generalizations really irritate me because 90% are said by people who simply think they are a cut above the rest and better then they'll ever be.


I'll just end it all quick and say what really bothered me was his poor choice of words rather then the point he was trying to get accross. I would say the vast majority of gamers are what you "could" consider your common gamer. Many share things in common, but that in no means makes them average. Those who take a deeper interest into games as he put it (i.e. wanting to make games) stand out more then the common gamer and are a bit more uncommon. Though in the end that doesn't make him above average like he won some IQ contest and found out his brain pan is larger then his fellow gamer.


Average this

But back on subject.


Yes, the graphics used to be much smoother and cleaner in the Beta testing, but they stepped them down for various reasons.

I guess they prefered gameplay over eyecandy.

I only played FFXI on a PS2, so that is my frame of reference, however this is what I saw:

I think Holy is only looking at one aspect of the graphics here too. FFXI makes liberal use of skins and and what I would call flat "paintings" in it's landscapes and buildings, while WoW uses fully realized three dimensional polygons for everything, with a skin on top of that. You can't really compare the styles.

Notice when you change a piece of armor in FFXI (one that shows on your character) your WHOLE character has to be redrawn and flashes invisible for a seocnd then reappears. This is because it is one big skin with a low polygon count "skeleton". So, the terminology he is using isn't truly correct. Also, notice that when looked at closely, FFXI doesn't utilize any depth in their armor polygons, they are completely flat, their is NO thickness at all. Everything is paper thin and made to appear to have depth through viewing distance. WoW has actual depth in each piece of armor and equipment. Also, if you could actually zoom in all the way into your character in FFXI, you would notice that the pixels are rather large and quite blocky when up close. You can see this when you try to pan around your character near a wall for instance. At any other time, FFXI doesn't allow you to zoom in close enough to see this.

Another thing to notice, look at the ground in both games. WoW actually tried to render grass, whereas FFXI simply made a bunch of not so little pixels of muddy colors to simulate it.

The two games' artistic styles are completely different. WoW, and many other games, are fully three dimensional and aren't really big "paintings". Fully three dimensional games can be changed and redesigned at the drop of a hat, whereas FFXI type games require alot more intense work to redesign an area, because of the intense use of background "painting" instead of three dimensional structures.

FFXI, in my eyes, made a beautiful game that runs at a purposely slower pace, so that it can keep up. You can see how slow the animations are comparing it to WoW, which mostly runs like a single player game and has fast animations. They gave up some skin detail and polygon count to achieve this, whereas Square, did the opposite. Quite an ingenious plan, but not the creme de la creme in game design. Both are a compromise.

Colors, WoW has a lot more color and I would guess uses alot more of video memory because of this.

These are just a few things I notice and I am an average gamer. But I have eyes and I can see a huge difference in technique and style.

Gameplay, makes the graphics argument a moot point anyway, to me, at least. That is wholly my opinion though and just another way to look at it ;-) I prefer WoWs approach hands-down to FFXI. But then again, while I played FFXI a long time because I liked consoles better, I was never a Square fanboy.



Edited, Tue Dec 7 13:38:05 2004 by Kuritz