Guild Wars 2 Graphics

[Zeusx.2906]

I recently watched a YouTube video on GW2 graphics and it prompted me to start fantasizing about what they could realistically do to improve the graphics.

I did agree with the video in that GW2 is starting to show its age quite heavily and slowly but surely the graphics not being what I'd like them to be started bugging me.

 

I then got into using Reshade (GShade) and I have now gotten so used to the improved look of the game that I literally couldn't go back to vanilla.

The disgusting hue that postprocessing causes, the washed out colours, the lack of sharp textures (texture option needs about two or even three more steps after high) etc. Whenever I toggle GShade off I am surprised at just how and I hate to say it, bad it looks. 

 

Now you could say that the game doesn't need a graphics upgrade because there are mmos older than GW2 that are still around like WoW. Thing is WoW has upgraded it's graphics (several times I was told) and GW2 is just about 10 years old now, I think now would be the time. Especially considering that we are about to start seeing UE5 mmorpgs.

This isn't a thread meant to bash the game in any way only to promote ideas and discussion. 

Edited June 23, 2022 by Zeusx.2906

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

As you said, the problem isn't the actual graphics in the game, but the post-processing shader pipeline that is extremely outdated. It was heavily tuned to make the game look like what other games looked like in 2012 (faded out, brown, lots of bloom, etc.), and the actual beauty of the game is literally washed out by it.

 

Play through the Central Tyria maps, then play the same maps in DRMs. Despite no change in textures, only shaders, the entire area looks completely different--much more modern, and refined.

 

They tried to fix it a bit in Cantha but because they haven't changed the actual post-processing pipeline and can only change the settings of the individual maps, it doesn't do much good in the grand scheme of things.

 

They really need to do something about this outdated tech.

 

Side note: The biggest turn off of the game, for me, is the blurriness. It was alright when I was ten years younger, but now that I'm older my vision isn't what it used to be and this game is extremely blurry compared to other games. The textures are low-resolution, there's no filters to enhance texture quality with smart upscaling, and there's no sharpening filters whatsoever. Pretty much everything in graphics options just makes the game blurrier, too.

 

The biggest difference you see with people who use ReShade, etc. is they have tried to make the game less blurry, muddy, and soupy, and I think it makes a huge impact. This should be built-in.

Edited June 14, 2022 by Hannelore.8153

[kokocabana.8153]

I personally use Reshade with Tekkit's presets and it makes everything look sharper. I recommend it if you don't like the "softness" of the graphics.

On the technical side, there is not much the devs can do to improve the graphics of the game beyond what they are doing now due to the age of the engine. Remember that GW2's engine is a modified version of GW1 which came out in 2005 so the engine is more than 15 years old.

Updating the renderer to DX11 was more about improving the performance of the game than anything graphics related. As mentioned above about tweaking post-processing/shaders, this will have the biggest impact. This would be no different than what Reshade does except it will be done by the devs instead of a 3rd party.

When people suggest upgrading graphics such as using newer engines, they don't think about what that actually involves. You can't just port everything over to a new engine. Graphics is just one part of a game engine amongst many and the engine needs to be customized for MMOs which would take years. There are many examples of games going through development hell like EA forcing many of its studios to use the Frostbite engine for Anthem and Mass Effect Andromeda when it was designed for first person Battlefield games. Or Star Citizen using Crytek and then switching over to Amazon Lumberyard which wasted years of development because they used a first person shooter engine for a space sim. For the cost of moving to a new engine, they might as well start making a brand new Guild Wars game instead.

Edited June 14, 2022 by kokocabana.8153

[Zeusx.2906]

46 minutes ago, Hannelore.8153 said:

As you said, the problem isn't the actual graphics in the game, but the post-processing shader pipeline that is extremely outdated. It was heavily tuned to make the game look like what other games looked like in 2012 (faded out, brown, lots of bloom, etc.), and the actual beauty of the game is literally washed out by it.

 

Play through the Central Tyria maps, then play the same maps in DRMs. Despite no change in textures, only shaders, the entire area looks completely different--much more modern, and refined.

 

They tried to fix it a bit in Cantha but because they haven't changed the actual post-processing pipeline and can only change the settings of the individual maps, it doesn't do much good in the grand scheme of things.

 

They really need to do something about this outdated tech.

 

Side note: The biggest turn off of the game, for me, is the blurriness. It was alright when I was ten years younger, but now that I'm older my vision isn't what it used to be and this game is extremely blurry compared to other games. The textures are low-resolution, there's no filters to enhance texture quality with smart upscaling, and there's no sharpening filters whatsoever. Pretty much everything in graphics options just makes the game blurrier, too.

 

The biggest difference you see with people who use ReShade, etc. is they have tried to make the game less blurry, muddy, and soupy, and I think it makes a huge impact. This should be built-in.

Completely agree, the graphics options need to be extended. Also I have read somewhere that you have to have that godawful postprocessing on in order to even see certain effects in the game effectively. If this is true then that is just abysmal. I have postprocessing on now but only because I tuned the image through GShade so now the obnoxiously bright spots that postprocessing causes cant come through as much. Before I started using GShade I couldn't have postprocessing on, no way that I could play with it on absolute eyesore. 

[Zeusx.2906]

31 minutes ago, kokocabana.8153 said:

I personally use Reshade with Tekkit's presets and it makes everything look sharper. I recommend it if you don't like the "softness" of the graphics.

On the technical side, there is not much the devs can do to improve the graphics of the game beyond what they are doing now due to the age of the engine. Remember that GW2's engine is a modified version of GW1 which came out in 2005 so the engine is more than 15 years old.

Updating the renderer to DX11 was more about improving the performance of the game than anything graphics related. As mentioned above about tweaking post-processing/shaders, this will have the biggest impact. This would be no different than what Reshade does except it will be done by the devs instead of a 3rd party.

When people suggest upgrading graphics such as using newer engines, they don't think about what that actually involves. You can't just port everything over to a new engine. Graphics is just one part of a game engine amongst many and the engine needs to be customized for MMOs which would take years. There are many examples of games going through development hell like EA forcing many of its studios to use the Frostbite engine for Anthem and Mass Effect Andromeda when it was designed for first person Battlefield games. Or Star Citizen using Crytek and then switching over to Amazon Lumberyard which wasted years of development because they used a first person shooter engine for a space sim. For the cost of moving to a new engine, they might as well start making a brand new Guild Wars game instead.

Oh no I wouldn't expect them to move engines but I just think that what I was able to do through a fan made overlay essentially should be possible through in-game settings. If not then that's honestly just sad. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way, genuinely sad that our game is built on such old technology that a fan made overlay beats it.

 

And i have tried Tekkit's preset, way too dark for my taste and inconsistent. It can look amazing in one area and then not work at all in some other area. I think trying to make GW2 look like BDO is a mistake, its a cartoony game and it should be embraced otherwise like I said you create something inconsistent. With my preset I was trying to preserve the overall look of the game in order to not have to tweak based on where I am which has been the case with every preset I have tried.

Edited June 14, 2022 by Zeusx.2906

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

27 minutes ago, kokocabana.8153 said:

I personally use Reshade with Tekkit's presets and it makes everything look sharper. I recommend it if you don't like the "softness" of the graphics.

On the technical side, there is not much the devs can do to improve the graphics of the game beyond what they are doing now due to the age of the engine. Remember that GW2's engine is a modified version of GW1 which came out in 2005 so the engine is more than 15 years old.

Updating the renderer to DX11 was more about improving the performance of the game than anything graphics related. As mentioned above about tweaking post-processing/shaders, this will have the biggest impact. This would be no different than what Reshade does except it will be done by the devs instead of a 3rd party.

When people suggest upgrading graphics such as using newer engines, they don't think about what that actually involves. You can't just port everything over to a new engine. Graphics is just one part of a game engine amongst many and the engine needs to be customized for MMOs which would take years. There are many examples of games going through development hell like EA forcing many of its studios to use the Frostbite engine for Anthem and Mass Effect Andromeda when it was designed for first person Battlefield games. Or Star Citizen using Crytek and then switching over to Amazon Lumberyard which wasted years of development because they used a first person shooter engine for a space sim. For the cost of moving to a new engine, they might as well start making a brand new Guild Wars game instead.

The biggest reason the game's graphics seem dated is the low-resolution textures, which they use to keep the game under ~10GB per expansion, or about 50GB in total by now compared to 20GB at release. Its a decision that keeps the game accessible to everyone (some would even consider this size excessive), but hurts the game's longevity.

 

Texture resolution and shader quality have nothing to do with either the engine or graphics API being used. It does mildly affect the quality of postprocessing but not much, since almost everything was already possible in DX9/OpenGL2 (just without threading, which is why the game runs so slowly without DX11 mode).

 

Smart upscaling has existed for nearly two decades now, and has been put into widespread use for a decade. These are technologies that enhance texture quality on the client-side by "guessing" mission information, either through intelligent algorithms or by using simple AI neural networks, and various other means.

 

Sharpening is another technology that has radically improved over time and stabilised by the time the game was released; the devs just chose not to include any sharpening filter for some reason.

 

These decisions that players are complaining alot like blurry textures, faded colors, over-use of bloom, etc. aren't limitations of the engine, but rather intentional dev decisions that were made throughout the years. There's never been anything stopping them from improving the postprocessing pipeline, they just don't seem to want to.

 

And they did radically improve the game's graphics, Central Tyria maps, though beautiful vastly inferior in every way to maps from the expansion zones; even  Heart of Thorns from 2015.

Edited June 14, 2022 by Hannelore.8153

[Silent.6137]

28 minutes ago, Zeusx.2906 said:

And i have tried Tekkit's preset, way too dark for my taste and inconsistent. It can look amazing in one area and then not work at all in some other area.

I used it as a starting point and then tweak it to my liking since my display and display settings are not be the same as his. Also, add effects that suits me.

After using ReShade for so long, it's almost painful to play without.

[Zera.9435]

I've used reshade and such. The difference was honestly so minuscule that it's hardly worth calling it an 'improvement'. GW2 graphics are fine as they are.

[Zeusx.2906]

30 minutes ago, Silent.6137 said:

I used it as a starting point and then tweak it to my liking since my display and display settings are not be the same as his. Also, add effects that suits me.

After using ReShade for so long, it's almost painful to play without.

Ah okay yeah I always end up changing peoples presets to the point where I may as well just make my own from scratch. 

But yes when I look at the game without GShade I almost cant believe that I could ever play like that. 

[Zeusx.2906]

31 minutes ago, Zera Allimatti.2541 said:

I've used reshade and such. The difference was honestly so minuscule that it's hardly worth calling it an 'improvement'. GW2 graphics are fine as they are.

Huh that's interesting. The setup I have right now makes a HUGE difference. Structures and foliage in particular look much better. Armor and clothes are significantly improved as well because there are shadows in the crevices between armour/clothing and skin.

 

I think you may just not have had a preset that makes that big of a difference. Go for GShade over Reshade. You can have things like MXAO in gameplay with GShade whereas with Reshade you can only really use it for screenshots due to it flickering under movement. 

[notebene.3190]

Invariably leads to the opportunity to 'fix' things, which makes me nervous. Having said that, I'm not anybody. Carry on.

Oh, if you do 'fix' things, please consider selling your server tech. Some games out there could really use some help in that area.

[Zeusx.2906]

8 hours ago, Zera Allimatti.2541 said:

I've used reshade and such. The difference was honestly so minuscule that it's hardly worth calling it an 'improvement'. GW2 graphics are fine as they are.

Here is a comparison of my current GShade setup. I think there is a very noticeable difference and the pictures don't even do it justice, when I toggle GShade off and on the difference is massive.

 

https://postimg.cc/gallery/QHdH9Cp

If you want to get a proper understanding of what changed then download the images and switch between them back and forth. 

 

WARNING however, the things I'm running drops fps by like 100 and I'm not even kidding. It's manageable though because I have like 200+ fps without GShade. 

Edited June 15, 2022 by Zeusx.2906

[HowlKamui.5120]

There’s really no need to overhaul a game’s engine to make it look better… It’s the assets that we want to be updated. Assets are the texture resolutions and model qualities that we see. The higher the resolution, the nicer it looks to our eyes, and the higher the model quality, the less blocky it looks. 

A huge downside of improving these is that the game’s file size would increase dramatically and it would lock some of the playerbase out of the game. 

I wish there was a better high resolution texture pack available.

[Zeusx.2906]

6 minutes ago, HowlKamui.5120 said:

There’s really no need to overhaul a game’s engine to make it look better… It’s the assets that we want to be updated. Assets are the texture resolutions and model qualities that we see. The higher the resolution, the nicer it looks to our eyes, and the higher the model quality, the less blocky it looks. 

A huge downside of improving these is that the game’s file size would increase dramatically and it would lock some of the playerbase out of the game. 

I wish there was a better high resolution texture pack available.

Honestly I don't see that as a downside unless we are talking an astronomical increase in size which it wouldn't be I don't think. Many games nowadays easily surpass 100gb.

[Freya.9075]

No graphic upgrade needed. I do not want the amazing low poly pigeons in divinity’s reach to be gone 👀 low poly pigeons lives matter

[Sahne.6950]

meanwhile in WvW:

People playing with standardized playermodels and everything on very low to squeeze out even the last frames during a zerg fight.

 

now serious.. do these gwshaders result in a performance loss?

[Zeusx.2906]

10 minutes ago, Sahne.6950 said:

meanwhile in WvW:

People playing with standardized playermodels and everything on very low to squeeze out even the last frames during a zerg fight.

 

now serious.. do these gwshaders result in a performance loss?

Yes there is performance loss. How big it is depends on the shaders you use. Things like HBAO and MXAO induce a significant fps loss. You can use milder shaders and only suffer a 3-10 fps loss while making your game look a decent amount better. 

[Silent.6137]

17 hours ago, Zera Allimatti.2541 said:

I've used reshade and such. The difference was honestly so minuscule that it's hardly worth calling it an 'improvement'. GW2 graphics are fine as they are.

A couple of screenshots placed side by side: https://ibb.co/dQF100M.

Look at the clarity and details of the rock, wall designs and the ground/grass. As Zeusx.2906 mentioned above, the differences are more prominent when viewed ingame on your monitor as opposed to just screenshots.

 

Edited June 15, 2022 by Silent.6137

[Gilosean.3805]

1 hour ago, Silent.6137 said:

A couple of screenshots placed side by side: https://ibb.co/dQF100M.

Look at the clarity and details of the rock, wall designs and the ground/grass. As Zeusx.2906 mentioned above, the differences are more prominent when viewed ingame on your monitor as opposed to just screenshots.

 

 

Not much difference to me. If I look closely I can see small changes, but tbh it's just not that big a deal.  Some people don't view about graphics as a make or break feature. GW2's graphics get the important points across. I would like it if things were sharper, but not enough to lose significantly more space or suffer an FPS drop. 

 

In every thread like this I've seen, the pro-updates people always seriously overlook the access issues caused by FPS drop & larger texture sizes.  I'm gaming on a laptop from 2018.  100 FPS drop? I have never gotten 100 FPS total!  The game going larger than 50 GB?  Well, I only have 20 spare GB on my computer right now, so that would probably mean uninstalling something else I'm using. I know I'm not the only one who hasn't updated in the past few years, given all the people I know who couldn't afford high PC prices or lost work. 

 

Would it nicer to have sharper lines? Yeah, I'd really like that, but not at the cost of being able to play the game. 

 

Also, some people have entirely switched to Geforce Now for GW2 because they're on Macs, or their computer broke, etc, so bandwidth to stream has to be taken into account for texture sizes. 

[the krytan assassin.9235]

Many people struggle nowadays with their pc (Thanks to the gpu prices). I doubt that there are many players playing fully maxed out settings since many people limit their settings to reduce possible frame drops/lags. 

Sure the graphics could be abit better, but i'd say that gw2 can easily stand its ground against the mmo's released in the last couple of years. 

I would like an UE5 remake for GW3, but honestly think the graphics are completely fine for it's current state.

[Gilosean.3805]

Yeah, whenever they make a GW3 I would expect an update.  But frankly, I also hope that's a long way off. 

 

If there's something they could do to make things clearer and higher def now that wouldn't tank my FPS I'd be all for it. Unfortunately, nobody seems to know what that could be. 

[Silent.6137]

45 minutes ago, Gilosean.3805 said:

Not much difference to me. If I look closely I can see small changes, but tbh it's just not that big a deal.  Some people don't view about graphics as a make or break feature. GW2's graphics get the important points across. I would like it if things were sharper, but not enough to lose significantly more space or suffer an FPS drop.

Definitely not for everyone, Just showing the possibilities if we're able to adjust some graphic settings ingame. For those of us who has used it for a while, it feels as if something's wrong without it.

https://ibb.co/5hNTst8  The screenshot on the left shows a reduction in the fog effect as compared to the right screenshot without ReShade. Also, the image is quite a bit sharper.

[SinisterSlay.6973]

Every time someone brings up reshade and I look at their pictures. All I see is contrast and saturation turned way up to cartoony levels.

And the trend continues in this topic.

 

Also your losing 100fps from this? What?

Man I struggle to break 60fps most days. Gw2 is like a 20fps game most of the time, with my GPU barely doing anything because it's so ridiculously bottlenecked by what I assume is network IO and player ghost calculations.  Even my CPU is barely busy in this game.

Edited June 15, 2022 by SinisterSlay.6973

[kokocabana.8153]

I don't know what settings they are using, but I get similar results with Reshade and lose maybe 5 FPS even with all settings maxed out in-game.

Edited June 15, 2022 by kokocabana.8153

[Silent.6137]

53 minutes ago, SinisterSlay.6973 said:

Every time someone brings up reshade and I look at their pictures. All I see is contrast and saturation turned way up to cartoony levels.

The adjustments I made were rather small, just enough for my taste. If it looks cartoony to you, it's probably your display settings.

55 minutes ago, SinisterSlay.6973 said:

Also your losing 100fps from this? What?

Man I struggle to break 60fps most days. Gw2 is like a 20fps game most of the time, with my GPU barely doing anything because it's so ridiculously bottlenecked by what I assume is network IO and player ghost calculations.  Even my CPU is barely busy in this game.

Never seen 100 fps dropped when it's on. Maybe +/-5 fps.

If your game is at 20 fps most of the time, then it's a combinations of your PC, game settings and network on your end. Only time I'll see anything approaching that low number is during very busy full-map metas such as Ley Line Anomaly..