The graphics, the graphics.

[Joote.4081]

@Dawdler.8521 said:

@Joote.4081 said:

@Redfeather.6401 said:

@Joote.4081 said:

@"Donutdude.9582" said:Guild Wars 2 has quite a number of faults. Bad graphics is

not

one of them. I have no idea what you're talking about dude.

I also play a lot of ESO and from playing ESO and then booting up GW2 says all am talking about. No ned to explain myself.

I play elder scrolls online too and gw2 has nicer looking areas for sure. I am not a fan of the loud/flashy gw2 character armours though! No sir.

Now this is down to if you like realistic or cartoon-ish graphics. Everyone has their own preference. I'm for the more realistic. One thing that we do agree on is the flashy luminous colour nonsense that always seems to creep into MMO's. Also I personally hate pet's in MMO's. You find yourself in a boss fight and it's more like a pet scrap.Maybe this was why you needed to explain yourself. So you dont like the style of GW2. That's fine. I dont like the style of ESO. In particular I found Cyrodiil poorly made with completely wrong scaling/proportions on pretty much all assets (its like the devs put a normal sized character next to a normal scaled bridge and said

"This doesnt look EPIC enough, make it BIGGER and GRANDER!"

sets scaling to 2.0

) and the overall visuals seem to vary between greyish brown to brownish grey. And that's before you get into janky animations and laggy combat ruining any kind of immersion.

Nope. My original post was about GW2 graphics in general. What you quote is a spinoff. I'm not saying GW2 should look like ESO, they are two different art styles and belong where they belong. My original post was basically saying that GW2's graphics are showing their age.

[Ayrilana.1396]

Showing their age compared to what? You’re not going to get anything close to the level of modded Skyrim.

[Dawdler.8521]

@Joote.4081 said:

@Dawdler.8521 said:

@Joote.4081 said:

@Redfeather.6401 said:

@Joote.4081 said:

@"Donutdude.9582" said:Guild Wars 2 has quite a number of faults. Bad graphics is

not

one of them. I have no idea what you're talking about dude.

I also play a lot of ESO and from playing ESO and then booting up GW2 says all am talking about. No ned to explain myself.

I play elder scrolls online too and gw2 has nicer looking areas for sure. I am not a fan of the loud/flashy gw2 character armours though! No sir.

Now this is down to if you like realistic or cartoon-ish graphics. Everyone has their own preference. I'm for the more realistic. One thing that we do agree on is the flashy luminous colour nonsense that always seems to creep into MMO's. Also I personally hate pet's in MMO's. You find yourself in a boss fight and it's more like a pet scrap.Maybe this was why you needed to explain yourself. So you dont like the style of GW2. That's fine. I dont like the style of ESO. In particular I found Cyrodiil poorly made with completely wrong scaling/proportions on pretty much all assets (its like the devs put a normal sized character next to a normal scaled bridge and said

"This doesnt look EPIC enough, make it BIGGER and GRANDER!"

sets scaling to 2.0

) and the overall visuals seem to vary between greyish brown to brownish grey. And that's before you get into janky animations and laggy combat ruining any kind of immersion.

Nope. My original post was about GW2 graphics in general. What you quote is a spinoff. I'm not saying GW2 should look like ESO, they are two different art styles and belong where they belong. My original post was basically saying that GW2's graphics are showing their age.What you're doing is deflecting. Your original post is saying

how you feel

and that post where you "dont need to explain yourself" says everything else.

Do you have any actual examples how GW2 graphics is showing it's age compared to eqvivalent things in ESO? I mean aside from the art styles being different since that obviously doesnt matter, as you say. Or the fact that ESO is a slightly newer game with a much larger studio backing it.

[Crono.4197]

I don't like realistic graphics in games but you don't see me posting about it on the forums of games that have realistic graphics. Also you expect a 2012 game to have 2021 games graphics?

[firedragon.8953]

I love the art direction in Guild Wars 2. One of the main reasons I enjoy this game is exploring all the interesting places, including the places in the core areas of the game. I also think the graphics range from fine to excellent, especially in terms of asset resolution. Some of the original assets seem "dated" but obviously if you want to have ray tracing, UHD textures, and all the modern graphical eye candy, an 8 year old MMO is not going to do that. I'd say give it a chance, and if your looking for something else, move along. There is a lot of eye candy to play with in the modern gaming market.

[Dawdler.8521]

@Crono.4197 said:Also you expect a 2012 game to have 2021 games graphics?Well to be fair on that part, ESO isnt a 2021 game. It is however a few years newer than GW2 vanilla and I would say that a more fair comparison is GW2 HoT vs ESO vanilla, or GW2 PoF vs ESO later expansions. ESO was definetly backed by more funding from the start too. Guesses has been somewhere around 50%+ more money than GW2 development pumped into it, I think.

[Joote.4081]

@"firedragon.8953" said:I love the art direction in Guild Wars 2. One of the main reasons I enjoy this game is exploring all the interesting places, including the places in the core areas of the game. I also think the graphics range from fine to excellent, especially in terms of asset resolution. Some of the original assets seem "dated" but obviously if you want to have ray tracing, UHD textures, and all the modern graphical eye candy, an 8 year old MMO is not going to do that. I'd say give it a chance, and if your looking for something else, move along. There is a lot of eye candy to play with in the modern gaming market.

No I wouldn't go that far. As soon as you start to apply stuff like raytracing things start to grind to a halt.You have probably not had time to read all of the threads, so to recap, I was more suggesting they add some better textures and sharpen up the image a bit. As it stand the textures are very basic and the overall graphics are smudgy. Most of the icons don't help as they look as if some kids have gone mad with a paintbrush.

[kharmin.7683]

@Dawdler.8521 said:

@Crono.4197 said:Also you expect a 2012 game to have 2021 games graphics?Well to be fair on that part, ESO isnt a 2021 game. It is however a few years newer than GW2 vanilla and I would say that a more fair comparison is GW2 HoT vs ESO vanilla, or GW2 PoF vs ESO later expansions. ESO was definetly backed by more funding from the start too. Guesses has been somewhere around 50%+ more money than GW2 development pumped into it, I think.

ESO wasn't built on its predecessors old code, either.

[SubLimation.3014]

Games graphics are quite bad in current state due to technical reasons, the sense of depth and clarity is quite abysmal, some of the worst I can think of, easily the worst out of AAA titles that I've played.  Of course a bunch of average gamers wouldn't know any better but world of warcraft looks insanely more clear. (youtube videos do little justice, but even in those if you strictly look at CLARITY and sense of depth even the most devout gw2 fan boy would be like oh I see.)  You can see whats going on more clearly in WoW from 5x as far as in gw2.

Not to write the average gamer off as being poor judge of graphics but you are.  I can't tell you how many tests I've down with friends showing 120hz vs 60hz or different resolutions and they can't even tell unless I literally point out specifics, I on the other hand instantly feel if I drop below 120 fps, and my girlfriends tv is set up next to mine, also 4k 120fps, and sometimes after updates her TV will drop to 60fps and she never notices.  I glance at her game and I'm instantly saying are you at 120hz? Alt tabbed and sure enough 60hz. This is a small sample of literally hundreds of examples.

FFXIV has same problem of really poor depth and clarity.

The art team is great, but the execution isn't.  I don't expect anyone here to agree but it's a constant issue for me and others I pull into the game (although they can't pin down why), we say almost every play session this game would be perfect if they would clean up graphics.

Also the UI is muddy (low res) so looks crap on 4k monitor further dulling experience.

Need to make all textures at least 4k resolution and seriously work on lighting and shadows.  Would do a ton for depth and clarity.  Even if you played at 1080p higher res textures will still benefit you.

I play on 4k lg oled hdmi 2.1 120hz rgb full with 12 bit color 3080 12700k ddr5 ram... Easily clearing 200fps with all settings maxed.

I hate games that go for realistic (because my minds eye will compare it to the real thing, and it falls far short), thats not the problem, everything just doesn't have good depth at all because of texture resolutions and lighting.

Ocarina of time has better depth, assuming it's running at 4k native, a modern game should be able to get depth better... it's especially important in an MMO with so much going on.

I repeat, it's not so much the art as it is the technical aspects of their implementation.  I'm sure starting development on an engine that was already ancient didn't help things and was an extremely stupid decision from a long term mmo perspective.  With them looking forward to a steam release and implementing dx11, I hope this is addressed.

I play old games on my pc all the time, everything from super mario 64 to maplestory and classic pc games like warcraft 3.  And they all (when set to modern resolution) have extremely better depth clarity than gw2, just trying to emphasize I'm not one of those kids who thinks "realistic" graphics are good.  I enjoy everything from 8 bit to pixar quality haha.  

Edited June 11, 2022 by SubLimation.3014

[AliamRationem.5172]

26 minutes ago, SubLimation.3014 said:

Games graphics are quite bad in current state due to technical reasons, the sense of depth and clarity is quite abysmal, some of the worst I can think of, easily the worst out of AAA titles that I've played.  Of course a bunch of average gamers wouldn't know any better but world of warcraft looks insanely more clear. (youtube videos do little justice, but even in those if you strictly look at CLARITY and sense of depth even the most devout gw2 fan boy would be like oh I see.)  You can see whats going on more clearly in WoW from 5x as far as in gw2.

Not to write the average gamer off as being poor judge of graphics but you are.  I can't tell you how many tests I've down with friends showing 120hz vs 60hz or different resolutions and they can't even tell unless I literally point out specifics, I on the other hand instantly feel if I drop below 120 fps, and my girlfriends tv is set up next to mine, also 4k 120fps, and sometimes after updates her TV will drop to 60fps and she never notices.  I glance at her game and I'm instantly saying are you at 120hz? Alt tabbed and sure enough 60hz. This is a small sample of literally hundreds of examples.

FFXIV has same problem of really poor depth and clarity.

The art team is great, but the execution isn't.  I don't expect anyone here to agree but it's a constant issue for me and others I pull into the game (although they can't pin down why), we say almost every play session this game would be perfect if they would clean up graphics.

Also the UI is muddy (low res) so looks crap on 4k monitor further dulling experience.

Need to make all textures at least 4k resolution and seriously work on lighting and shadows.  Would do a ton for depth and clarity.  Even if you played at 1080p higher res textures will still benefit you.

I play on 4k lg oled hdmi 2.1 120hz rgb full with 12 bit color 3080 12700k ddr5 ram... Easily clearing 200fps with all settings maxed.

I hate games that go for realistic, thats not the problem, everything just doesn't have good depth at all because of texture resolutions and lighting.

Ocarina of time has better depth, assuming it's running at 4k native, a modern game should be able to get depth better... it's especially important in an MMO with so much going on.

I repeat, it's not so much the art as it is the technical aspects of their implementation.  I'm sure starting development on an engine that was already ancient didn't help things and was an extremely stupid decision from a long term mmo perspective.  With them looking forward to a steam release and implementing dx11, I hope this is addressed.  If not, I may shelf this game and never come back.

I play old games on my pc all the time, everything from super mario 64 to maplestory and classic pc games like warcraft 3.  And they all (when set to modern resolution) have extremely better depth clarity than gw2, just trying to emphasize I'm not one of those kids who think "realistic" graphics are good.  

Whatever, buddy.  GW2 has awesome graphics!   You're just mad 'cause you haven't been visited by Rytlock Trombone.  Too bad for you.

[Taclism.2406]

Beauty is subjective, but visual noise isnt, and gw2 is full of those.
Team lowest graphic, screw your particles, I wanna see aoe circles on the ground. 

[kokocabana.8153]

I use Reshade with Tekkit's presets and it makes the game look more detailed and much sharper. Whenever I turn off Reshade to compare, it feels that the game's graphics or art style has a "softness" that makes everything look a little blurry at a distance. Note that I don't have depth blur enabled.

[Fuchslein.8639]

I personally am a big fan of this Game-graphics. Sure a few rocks and landscapes, especially on the old maps are a bit washed out.

I also think it's personal reference and how you see stuff. I'm personally love to take screenshots in gw2, here are a few examples of the beautiful sites of this game

 https://ibb.co/Qp5h2y9
https://ibb.co/W2JxNWX
https://ibb.co/4ZDCk2G
https://ibb.co/CPS0ZBs

My graphics are not on Ultra because my PC can't run gw2 with such high graphics. But even then. I don't know, you eventually find these pics i posted absolutly ugly . But for me, GW2 is beutiful~ and outperformes a lot of new games in thema aesthetic in my eyes.
But i'm not a fan of super realistic Graphic, esspecially not in charakterdesign. I hate these games who try to replicate super realisticly human and animals. It just looks creepy in the end for me. Like Cyberpunk. Sure, the photoshop pictures seen on Promos and all look great, but ingame? ... uff xx

 

And yeah, like above. I discovered reshade a while ago and with this you can form a lot of the game graphics the way you like it.

Edited June 11, 2022 by Fuchslein.8639

[Stormcrow.7513]

I agree with some things that you are saying but don't forget GW2 is older and as MMO's go the graphics are actually not bad. I have a few tricks to help you though if you like. 

 

1. Set that resolution high. If you are using Nvidia, DSR GW2 to as high as it can go. 2k, 4k, 5k. with a 3080 you should be able to oversample with ease. This will make the textures a bit more bearable. You can turn AA off as well at that high of a resolution. 

 

2. Get reshade and enjoy. There is a DoF sharpener that works wonders. Play with what shaders you like and profit.

 

 

 

[kokocabana.8153]

2 minutes ago, Stormcrow.7513 said:

 Set that resolution high. If you are using Nvidia, DSR GW2 to as high as it can go. 2k, 4k, 5k. with a 3080 you should be able to oversample with ease. This will make the textures a bit more bearable. You can turn AA off as well at that high of a resolution. 

 

 

 

I have a 1080p monitor and use Nvidia DSR to render the games at 1440p or 4k for many of my games. Unfortunately with the way that they implemented dx11, DSR does not really work well.The game doesn't look any different and the UI is smaller which can be enlarged in settings. Cutscenes are messed up because there is no scaling on text.

After reading the dev post on dx11 in the forums, it looks like they made both fullscreen and windowed fullscreen settings both act as windowed fullscreen. Nvidia DSR needs exclusive fullscreen mode to render the higher resolutions which it can't do anymore of dx11 is enabled.

[ASP.8093]

6 hours ago, SubLimation.3014 said:

Not to write the average gamer off as being poor judge of graphics but you are.  I can't tell you how many tests I've down with friends showing 120hz vs 60hz or different resolutions and they can't even tell unless I literally point out specifics, I on the other hand instantly feel if I drop below 120 fps, and my girlfriends tv is set up next to mine, also 4k 120fps, and sometimes after updates her TV will drop to 60fps and she never notices.  I glance at her game and I'm instantly saying are you at 120hz? Alt tabbed and sure enough 60hz. This is a small sample of literally hundreds of examples.

Good for you but my brain doesn't explode if I see something at a lower frame rate, so I am happy not to spend thousands of dollars just to fill up the rendering buffer faster and faster.

[Nephalem.8921]

14 hours ago, SubLimation.3014 said:

Games graphics are quite bad in current state due to technical reasons, the sense of depth and clarity is quite abysmal, some of the worst I can think of, easily the worst out of AAA titles that I've played.  Of course a bunch of average gamers wouldn't know any better but world of warcraft looks insanely more clear. (youtube videos do little justice, but even in those if you strictly look at CLARITY and sense of depth even the most devout gw2 fan boy would be like oh I see.)  You can see whats going on more clearly in WoW from 5x as far as in gw2.

Not to write the average gamer off as being poor judge of graphics but you are.  I can't tell you how many tests I've down with friends showing 120hz vs 60hz or different resolutions and they can't even tell unless I literally point out specifics, I on the other hand instantly feel if I drop below 120 fps, and my girlfriends tv is set up next to mine, also 4k 120fps, and sometimes after updates her TV will drop to 60fps and she never notices.  I glance at her game and I'm instantly saying are you at 120hz? Alt tabbed and sure enough 60hz. This is a small sample of literally hundreds of examples.

FFXIV has same problem of really poor depth and clarity.

The art team is great, but the execution isn't.  I don't expect anyone here to agree but it's a constant issue for me and others I pull into the game (although they can't pin down why), we say almost every play session this game would be perfect if they would clean up graphics.

Also the UI is muddy (low res) so looks crap on 4k monitor further dulling experience.

Need to make all textures at least 4k resolution and seriously work on lighting and shadows.  Would do a ton for depth and clarity.  Even if you played at 1080p higher res textures will still benefit you.

I play on 4k lg oled hdmi 2.1 120hz rgb full with 12 bit color 3080 12700k ddr5 ram... Easily clearing 200fps with all settings maxed.

I hate games that go for realistic (because my minds eye will compare it to the real thing, and it falls far short), thats not the problem, everything just doesn't have good depth at all because of texture resolutions and lighting.

Ocarina of time has better depth, assuming it's running at 4k native, a modern game should be able to get depth better... it's especially important in an MMO with so much going on.

I repeat, it's not so much the art as it is the technical aspects of their implementation.  I'm sure starting development on an engine that was already ancient didn't help things and was an extremely stupid decision from a long term mmo perspective.  With them looking forward to a steam release and implementing dx11, I hope this is addressed.

I play old games on my pc all the time, everything from super mario 64 to maplestory and classic pc games like warcraft 3.  And they all (when set to modern resolution) have extremely better depth clarity than gw2, just trying to emphasize I'm not one of those kids who thinks "realistic" graphics are good.  I enjoy everything from 8 bit to pixar quality haha.  

WoW graphics are so far worse its insane. Everything in that game is low res and low polygon count. No idea what you mean with depth clarity. field of view? anti aliasing? wow has a lot of limitations like not being able to handle fast movement without issues or lack of details. 

Wow has a very clean look. most likely due to the comic look that doesnt have any details. you can clearly see whats going on because there is barely anything to look at or render.

Out of all mmos with better graphics you've chosen one with inferior graphics thats still tricking players via artstyle. Look at wow character limbs, armor, weapons etc. far fewer details and a very bulky design which looks low poly.

 

[Labjax.2465]

I would like to see armor skins given a texture res pass. It's evident GW2 has the same problem some other older games do, in that the newer stuff tends to look better. The result is it's harder to mix and match stuff in a way that looks appealing and the contrast makes some of the older stuff just look unappealing in general. It should be possible to do this as an optional higher res setting, while keeping the old textures for those who want them or whose machines can't run them well.

[Valfar.3761]

I don't know GW2 fans get upset when people say that the visuals look poor. They do. Low draw distance (I avoid using Tekkit's reshade for this reason, as it removes the fog and draws attention to the the atrocious pop in), human characters that look like they are made out of shiny plastic, an overall smudgy image quality, etc. The game does look in certain setpiece areas, like Aurene's chamber below Tarir, but those places are the exception and not the norm. 4k resolution and supersampling does not make the game look better.

 

As for the competition, WoW has aged really gracefully with its stellar art direction. Genshin Impact also somewhat emulates WoW's look, but has slightly less detail and the character models go for generic anime waifus with only 2 bodytypes. SWTOR and ESO suffer from the ugly plastic look that plagues GW2. FFXIV has nice looking spell effects but is plagued with awful lighting/shadows outside of the big budget cutscenes and pixelated textures.

 

The one thing GW2 really has going for it is that each map takes you to a new high fantasy environment, such as an airship fleet crashed into treetops, a living jungle, floating bloodstone islands, or a crashed dragon that is a map. FFXIV (and from my limited experience playing SWTOR and ESO), you don't really get to go to any such imaginative locations on a regular basis like in GW2.

[AliamRationem.5172]

4 hours ago, Valfar.3761 said:

I don't know GW2 fans get upset when people say that the visuals look poor. They do. Low draw distance (I avoid using Tekkit's reshade for this reason, as it removes the fog and draws attention to the the atrocious pop in), human characters that look like they are made out of shiny plastic, an overall smudgy image quality, etc. The game does look in certain setpiece areas, like Aurene's chamber below Tarir, but those places are the exception and not the norm. 4k resolution and supersampling does not make the game look better.

 

As for the competition, WoW has aged really gracefully with its stellar art direction. Genshin Impact also somewhat emulates WoW's look, but has slightly less detail and the character models go for generic anime waifus with only 2 bodytypes. SWTOR and ESO suffer from the ugly plastic look that plagues GW2. FFXIV has nice looking spell effects but is plagued with awful lighting/shadows outside of the big budget cutscenes and pixelated textures.

 

The one thing GW2 really has going for it is that each map takes you to a new high fantasy environment, such as an airship fleet crashed into treetops, a living jungle, floating bloodstone islands, or a crashed dragon that is a map. FFXIV (and from my limited experience playing SWTOR and ESO), you don't really get to go to any such imaginative locations on a regular basis like in GW2.

You're always going to find some fanbois.  For instance you, referring to WoW "aging gracefully".  That's a nice way of saying it looks like a game with graphics from 20 years ago, which of course it is.  Much like GW2 looks like a game with graphics from 10 years ago.  They're both worse than they could be because they're also MMOs, which sacrifice graphics for large scale playability.

Personally, I don't care what you say about it.  I've always liked WoW's art style, but it looks dated af.  I also like GW2's art style, but it also looks dated af.  They're old games.  At this point I concern myself with the gameplay, which is why I play GW2 and not WoW.  I just can't deal with the lack of action combat anymore.  You at least have to give me a dodge mechanic and animation-based combat rather than GCDs!

[deadsyeren.9583]

I think they should definitely go back to a few areas and upgrade the texture resolution, especially most stone textures. Past that I think the game is pretty nice, especially considering how long it has been out. It would be nice if they made upgrades here and there though to some models and such too, just depends how many people are on their team and what they can handle.