Factions Rendering and 3D modeling

Will Factions use the same graphics engine as the Prophesies Campaign?

If no, will the new engine be fully 3D? Will there be additional graphics capabilities?

Looking at the system requirements of the pre-order package and being able to play it Mar 28 with the current game engine, I don't think that factions will be a trigger / show off for a new engine at all.

Some of the beta testers for Windows Vista (next Windows to come out) indicated GW plays fine so I no real changes are needed to make it work.

I do suspect there working on an improved engine but don't think it will be rolled out w/ Factions (the slip of showing what DX render GW uses comes to mind in the options screen).

I thought the entire concept of the gw engine was it was streamlined updates thus never needing a complete replacement, just patchworking up.

you know, like Half-life2, only this time it's real

Um, I think the graphics engine is pretty high quality as it is now (esp. compared to MMO's like WoW, Everquest, Diablo II, Lineage II, etc.).

Half Life 2 taxes a system's resources very much.

I think this current system is full 3d, isn't it? (Other than the issue with not being able to jump 3 feet down from an overhang, while at the same time scaling 30 foot tree vines).

It's not fully 3D because there is no real z-axis. That's why we have 'bridge problems'.

no its quite fully 3d, it doesnt matter that you cant jump.

if it wasnt 3d, then you wouldnt be able to rotate the camera in all those angles

I think many believe GW is a 2.5D game (like KOTOR, Neverwinter Nights, Doom...) where the world is not true 3D (like, say, a box) but pseudo-3D (like a crinkled paper). In a 3D world you can walk over a bridge, then go around and walk UNDER the bridge, in a 2.5D bridge you can either walk over the bridge or under, but not both.

So GW is a true 3D game. It doesn't always take z-axis into account at combat, which is why a melee monster can stand far below, under a bridge, and attack the player up on the bridge. However it does take z-axis into account for archers.

I'm guessing they did it this way to lower the amount of calculations needed, basically to make it run faster.

WRT the original question, each update has had more higher polygon count and better textures (compare the oldest area, around Lions Arch, to the newest PvE areas: pre-searing & Sorrows Furnace/Grenths footprint. The difference in polygon count & textures is quite obvious), and there's no reason to think they'll not continue that trend with Factions.

At some point in time they'll hit the limitations of the engine but clearly the engine supports higher polygon counts & higher detail textures than we've seen yet. The graphics quality of new areas is probably mainly a question of what ANet thinks our machines can handle.

Graphics engine is 3D but game logic calculations don't include Z-axis in some parts. Bow damage calculations seems to include Z-axis because you do more damage if you are higher than the target. Pretty weird that third dimension has been implemented partially.

Most likely because the game itself was partially implemented. If you think about it.

For example: World Of Warcraft(As a comparison)

...Has 4gigs of data. That includes a ton of graphics and detailed information in a completely 3D space.

Guild Wars has 1gig of data when put beside WoW in terms of content is ultra small with a number of missing features and options.

Now put in to account that the plan was to implement Guild Wars as an EXPERIMENT to see how well it would do as a Free-To-Play MMO(whether they want to admit it, it actually is a MMO). They didn't want to spend vast amounts of time giving out bells and whistles of the game until THEY WERE POSITIVE that the Experiment was a success.

Now they know that the experiment was a success, they commit to a twice a year release schedule with tons of content blasting us every 6 months or so. With it comes all new features and balanced elements which would be a more refined feature set similar to most MMOs. Which would be most likely implementing the Z-axis in most aspects instead of just projectiles. The end result would be more varying content, gameplay and mechanics that would eventually could be on par with or surpass even WoW.

Well, that's my theory anyway.