Next Graphical Enhancement

Guild Wars is a beautiful game for it's age. With the final version having been released in 2005, it's obvious to see that they had to cut back in a few areas to allow older machines of the early to mid 2000's era run the game. All of these "cut backs" are hard coded and thus, forced, even if you have a high end system.

One of these (the high resolution textures for other players in outposts) was recently rectified in the latest update, but there remain a couple more.

One that I really think should be updated next is the crappy-ass looking 2D textures off in the distance. I don't know about you, but in 2005, I had a tiny 1024x768 15" LCD on a budget system, so it didn't matter then. But were in 2011, and I'm running 1920x1080 on a graphics card that has more ram and clock speed than the PC I started playing GW with... those textures are a lot more obvious on such a large screen and having them all converted to 3D (as an option) would be really awesome. As you know they change to 3D when you take a screenshot, but not while playing live. Imagine how awesome it would look?

The other one I will mention are fake shadows. The game uses fake shadows. I never really put much thought into it until I used texmod for the first time. When I was capping textures, I noticed that the shadows were literally half-transparent black textures, plus if you turn shadows off, they stay (except character shadows, which are live). I thought to myself, MAN this is ghetto rigged and GENIOUS at the same time. The resources this method saves must be phenomenal.

But alas, this is something that could probably be added too, live shadows would probably look a lot more sharp and bring so much more detail to the game. But it's also possible that the engine wasn't designed for enviro-shadows too so I'm not really worried about those too much, it still looks nice.

But yeah, that 2D stuff did kinda catch my eye again. I decided to kick up a new PvE Mesmer in Prophecies, and just looking towards Ashford from Ascalon City, the big waterfall is 2D... it looks so shitty.

Thanks for reading.

To be honest, I've been playing Guild Wars for 6 years now on the lowest possible graphical settings (crappy computers), and I've been perfectly happy with how it has looked the entire time. Granted when I did play on a computer capable of displaying the graphics on high settings, the game did look a lot nicer, but I don't really find it necessary to use any more resources to make the game more aesthetically pleasing. The game is getting old anyways, and with GW2 coming out (hopefully) soon, it's doubly unnecessary.

Also, genius*

Suggestion #1 is done in screenshots so it shouldn't be hard, I approve.

Suggestion #2, issue is they'd have to design what, a realtime shadow system in an engine that has none? Talk about work.

I do it at lowest too and find it rather nice already (wouldn't have bought it if I hadn't) so no complains from me.

Plus, to do that is a clear waste of time. Have you any idea how long it would take to do it? It isn't a texmod you can place over the entire game and it would happen.

I understand your concerns, but I don't think we can expect sweeping changes to the engine like that. It's not impossible, but remember the Live Team is quite small in number and they need to make changes/additions, which have the biggest impact on sale numbers.

Actually I am unbothered by both so called issues, gw is still a very visualy pleasing game imo.
I would consider this a really minor addition to the game, I would not complain was it added, and I'd prolly turn it on (as I did with the recent update to players in outpost although it a thing I hardly notice at all) but I would not really rejoice in it either.

Im sure GW2 will look even more awesome than gw, and maybe it will even satisfy you.

I still like how the game looks, but I just thought it couldn't be hard to give us an option to render them in 3D all the time. Afterall, they pop 3D when you take a screenshot. Most games have an ini file so people can tweak the graphics to the way they want. Guild Wars does, but said config file is encrypted and stored in the dat, unfortunately. I'd imagine all one would have to do was change the 3D object fader distance setting in amounts of meters or perhaps 1 for on and 0 for off.

Yeah. Since the sun doesn't really move, they don't need to make dynamic shadows, so they are 'painted' instead.
Sounds kind of a Monty Python joke or something like that. I think that goes with the engine, so there's probably nothing that can be done.
I suppose that in GW2 all shadows will be dynamic.


Now, as for these 3D textures...
Using 2D sprites that always face the camera is called billboarding, and the sprites are called 'billboards', and billboards that replace 3D models at a distance are called 'impostors'.
(The more you know...)

For the impostors, it would be nice if those guys with high-end machines could disable them, and even better if there was a slider to choose the distance that it takes for them to switch to the actual 3D model, so everyone could find their setting, even making them appear sooner with lower-end machines.

Well you learn something new everyday. Now I know the official name for the method. Can't think of any other games that use the method on a large scale other than Oblivion's speedtree engine.

Oh, there are many, many, of them, I've seen them used countless times.

They just hide it better than GW, making the switch much later, and/or when they are outside the camera.

As long as this update has no effect on the performance of lower end systems running with without the new graphics options.

Guild Wars is, as of today, still one of the best looking MMO games out there, especially considering the machines it runs on. I\'m all for the first improvement of 2D textures. Maybe also reduce some of the popping of the ground clutter, which is also an arbitrary limitation. As for more drastic changes to the engine... don\'t bother, not worth the time.

When I show guild wars to friends for the first time, they still consider it one of the best looking games out there. Any improvements are welcome but entirely unnecessary.

I started out with a 512mb pentium4 2.6ghz @ 15\" screen. Today I sport an i7 920 with 12gb ram (I like virtual machines) and 2 22\" screens.