GW2 Graphics?

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]