GW2 Graphics?

I sure hope GW2 comes with good graphics like:

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/mo...e-engine/52522
or better.

But whats the odds of graphics being equal og better than the link above?

You wish....

GW2 is almost certainly using Unreal Engine 3, so look at games using that engine to get an idea of what the graphics capabilities will be. IMO, it won't be a huge visual improvement over the already superb engine GW used (superb from a performance bang-for-your-buck perspective). It should allow more interaction with the environment, however.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CZi_FKsyPE&NR=1

Is this the same engine?

you have a source for that claim?

Indeed, where's the source that GW2 uses the Unreal Engine 3?

Imo they will probably use the same Engine as GW, but heavily modified. After all, it's a very stable engine, so the Core will probably remain the same. They will probably add a usable Z-Axis, higher resolution Textures, and a few additional Shaders. I don't see why they should get a completely different engine, the one they got is excellent. It will be cheaper and faster than licensing a new engine, and then figuring out how it works.

Didn't they buy the Engine that the AoC people use?

So it may be more closer to looking like AoC in my idea.

MMOs always have lower visual specs then top of the line games, because you have to network other players into the game. You can't get graphics that nice when you have to be able to squeeze in 80 people shooting at each other in a room, then when its just one person playing a game against CPU opponents. I always hate comments on youtube videos about how some new MMO's (STO, TOR, Champions) graphics look "shitty" compared to... Mass Effect or Crysis. They just aren't comparable. MMOs need to have dumbed down graphics to be playable and not lag like holy hell.

I hope it looks even better than Aion (as it is coming out 2 years later) and runs as well. Aion's characters are very nice to look at, although the ground/wall textures are actually pretty low-rez. Most MMOs tend to have crappy looking ground textures actually, will be interesting to see if GW2 breaks the mold there.

GW2 will use a heavily modified GW engine, adding a z-axis, higher resolution textures, and about 3x the triangle count per character.

anet has also licensed "Umbra" technology, which increases performance by telling the game engine to not render anything that's obstructed. in other words, GW2's engine will be very good at NOT rendering things that it doesn't need.

I honestly hope they are keeping the same sort of idea, that the game should be accessible to everyone and the specs should be kept relatively low. Just my opinion though :P

I'm not a an expert on this subject, but since GW2 will support DX10 doesn't he have to have an engine that actually supports it (wich I think isn't the case of Unreal Engine 3)?

GW2 will use the source engine... xP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOPcn_BnNsI

But what is "accessible to everyone" 3 years from now will still be pretty good.

http://www.umbrasoftware.com/index.php/player
Video explaining Umbra, used in LotRO and AoC.

It looks great, but when playing a MMO I couldn't care less about the spider on the tree, the grass that bends with the wind, the dust that flies in the direction of the wind, the water that reacts to the ground.

As pointed out by Yahtzee and proven by games like Conquer, Gaia and Runescape.

Graphics in a MMO's are just:


It might be funky-pants the first time. But it gets old after two times.

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/37...eal-Engine-III

Combined with some interview somewhere from one of the higher-ups at arenanet saying they'd likely license an engine for GW2 so that their man hours could be better spent on design rather than reinventing the wheel. I couldn't be bothered to search for it but I'm pretty sure I'm not imagining things in my old age.

well gw2 release window pushed back to 2010-2011 anyways.


plenty of time to get addicted to a different mmo :/

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/02/15/gu...-to-2010-2011/

This comes up all the time, that's NCSoft, not GW2, people keep getting confused with the parent company's other games. I've never seen any article saying GW2 abandoned its own engine.

That article was dated for 2008 anyways. GW2 was announced in 2007 wasn't it?

Graphics are important. Guildwars 2 better be an improvement over gw1 graphics if only slightly better and runescape was complete garbage. Visually offensive games are only played by people who like ugly games like runescape.

Guildwars has great graphics though. I do care about the environmental animation, so I hope we do get a good looking game. Progression means moving forwards, not standing still and not going backwards. Video games are a major visual stimulation which is why we need newer graphic cards or newer pc's to handle better graphics and all the rest of the animation going on.

No one buys a next gen console to play games graphically equal to those found three generations ago, except maybe nintendo wii fans.

Graphics are very important in an mmo considering the amount of time spent LOOKING at the screen. Who wants to look at an abomination when they can opt to play a game with better graphics.

Functionality is also important and should not be a contest of which is more important, they both go hand in hand. Subpar games only have one of these and poor games have neither.

ncsoft licensing UE3, not arenanet. the two are different.

anyways, if they really don't want to reinvent the wheel, they can just modify their own engine. after all, why should they readapt to a different engine, when they already have experience with their own?

So their game can look better and play better.

Simply using the unreal engine isn't going to achieve either of those goals - especially the second one. And I'm pretty sure they'ld need to heavily modify it anyway to get the bandwidth usage down, add the streamed updates and so on.

There are several things they could do to improve the graphics, such as add dynamic lighting, normal map support, or just increasing the poly count of the art. None of that requires changing graphics engine completely.

Isn't unreal engine 3 used in RTCW?

An up to date GW engine will probably look just as good, and it has the advantage of being built specifically for their own game. It saves the programmers a lot of time since they built it themselves. Upgrading it is more cost and time efficient than having to license a different engine, then having to learn how to use it properly, and then changing it to what they need.

Besides, the current engine runs super smooth, why not build on that and improve it?

There's tons of games who use the Unreal Engine 3... most popular games do, including Mass Effect and Bioshock. If you mean Return To Castle Wolfenstein, that doesn't use the Unreal Engine 3, but the homebrew id Tech 3 engine.

Ah my bad, I got it mixed up with Quake engine.

It would be funny if people are expecting next gen graphics... and it looked like WoW. Profitability wise they should probably do that though. The amount of assholes with laptops and old computers that aren't worth $20 gets bigger and bigger. 'Upgrading' and getting a new system every 4 years has started to fall apart. People will even accept the Wii's dogshit graphics for a cheaper console. You have to weight the complexity of the economy (everyone is cheap) except a minority, against making a new PC game now.

Looking at Guild Wars 1, I have no doubt in my mind Guild Wars 2 will look amazing. ArenaNet has some damn good artists.

In a recent youtube review of Aion, the reviewer was saying how the game would run smoothly on a 4-year old PC. Anet did wonders with GW1, litteraly a unique feat in the gaming industry. I bet some secrets from the Anet dev team ended up in Aion. One can only wish for GW2 to be something THAT big...

Even if it looked like GW1 I'd be satisfied lol. Graphics, while nice, don't really alter gameplay. I can play everything on low settings perfectly fine (actually some of the jade sea looks worse IMO when you turn it up)... always funny to see graphics snobs shocked and appalled when they see "worse" graphics.

like you.

Going slightly off topic, I sometimes think simple graphics are better... Rollercoaster Tycoon 1/2 compared to 3 (puke), even the Sims 1 I liked a bit more than 2/3.

for you that is... <_<. prophecies runs fine, factions is a little slowdown, nightfall and eotn test my patience.

At the time they said that (March 08) GW2 was already announced and well into development. If Anet switched to UT3 this late, it would mean their first engine exploded on them and they had to restart from scratch. (Happens, though). Since NCsoft only lists GW2 and Blade&Soul as upcoming MMOs, there might be something to it, but we can't confirm.

The quote about "not reinventing the wheel" was made when ArenaNet licensed the UMBRA middle-ware for optimizing framerates by means of removal of non-visible polygons. (October 08)
http://www.umbrasoftware.com/index.php?page=clients2

It can be assumed from comments on the Wiki that around this time GW2 was booted up in the office and people got to see it running.

Umbra can be used with a lot of engines, UT3 among them. But the UT3 engine is not particularly well known for its fantasy vistas.

It's all guesswork sadly.

Not just amazing but optimized as well.

I first played Guild Wars on a horrendous computer, barely touching upon the minimum requirements - but I still got a very playable framerate and the game didn't look that bad at all!

People overestimate the engine and underestimate what the engine is showing. Beautiful birds, trees, grass in the most modern engine... and yet, an almost identical thing could be done in an older engine with just some extra work on the world detail and texture quality.

I'd worry much more about the work the artists are doing than the work the techies are doing

So thinking about GW2 graphics and what the state of the art is for MMOs, here's something else it will be competing with. I hope GW2 can out-do this on the graphics (it will be coming out after it, after all).

TERA is in friends and family testing already and is due for worldwide release in 1Q/2Q 2010.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCc2zUBGync

I would honestly expect nothing less than a game equally as breathtaking in visual design and execution. The 2nd biggest reason that I stuck with gw over WoW was it's graphics, I think WoW is just plain ol ugly (the first by subscription)

In the end, we wont know how it will look until final release, if you look at the game in even the late betas, it was pretty ugly compared to what it was when it was finally released. So as much as we would like to hash out what will/wont be, we have another year or so before we get any real answers out of it.

That's what I definitely hope GW2 looks like, and it's sort of what I'm expecting.

At the time of its release, GW1 looked pretty impressive. And there are still parts of GW1 in EotN and Nightfall that take my breath away. I'm hoping that an upgraded engine and increased poly counts will really be apparent in the game.

compared to the current gen, gw1 still does look good.

the current engine, with greater environmental interactivity, proper 3 dimentional worldspace (z-axis), and modern graphical shine would be a good start.

One thing to consider is that the low-to-average DirectX 10 machine is likely much better than the low-to-average DirectX 9 machine (due to it requiring Vista/Windows 7, and who would upgrade an XP machine to Vista? So it is generally found on newer machines), so they could target the DirectX 10 pipeline to better machines while targetting DirectX 9 at lower end machines. Might be more trouble than it is worth though.

I am probably wrong.. But isnt Anet doing somethgin on its own regarding the game engine?...Isnt Guild Wars Engine is Unique?... I smewere read that they are working wiht either Improved GW1 engine or remaking it completely for the GW2.

Sorry , you think wrong , UT3 engine does support dx10, and is amazing.

Now I don't think ANet will abandon their engine , gw engine is great , they just need to improve it and make it support dx10 , by that time we will have dx10.1 and probably dx10.2 so who knows if they will make it dx10 or better.

I have my hope on Anet and I am sure they will use the latest tech possible for gw2.

EDIT:

Direct3D 10.1 is an incremental update of Direct3D 10.0 which is shipped with, and requires, Windows Vista Service Pack 1.[8] This release mainly sets a few more image quality standards for graphics vendors, while giving developers more control over image quality.[9] It also adds support for parallel cube mapping and requires that the video card supports Shader Model 4.1 or higher and 32-bit floating-point operations. Direct3D 10.1 still fully supports Direct3D 10 hardware, but in order to utilize all of the new features, updated hardware is required.[10] As of June 16, 2009, only ATI's Radeon HD 4000 and HD 3000 series, NVIDIA's GeForce 200M series and S3's Chrome 4xx GTX series of GPUs are fully compliant, NVIDIA has yet to release a DirectX 10.1 compliant desktop card.

[edit] Direct3D 11
Main article: Direct3D 11
See also: List of games with DirectX 11 support

Microsoft unveiled Direct3D 11 at the Gamefest 08 event in Seattle, with the major scheduled features including GPGPU support, tessellation[11][12] support, and improved multi-threading support to assist video game developers in developing games that better utilize multi-core processors.[13] Direct3D 11 will run on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and all future Windows operating systems. Parts of the new API such as multi-threaded resource handling can be supported on Direct3D 9/10/10.1-class hardware. Hardware tessellation and Shader Model 5.0 will require Direct3D 11 supporting hardware.[14] Microsoft has since released the Direct3D 11 Technical Preview.[15] Direct3D 11 is a strict superset of Direct3D 10.1 - all hardware and API features of version 10.1 are retained, and new features are added only when necessary for exposing new functionality. Microsoft have stated that Direct3D 11 is scheduled to be released to manufacturing in July 2009,[16] with the retail release coming in October '09.[17]