Will PlanetSide 2 ever look better?

[TGxCraig]

Originally Posted by Riekopo

That was my main gripe with the graphics too. Now that I changed to TextureQuality=0 everything looks much better.

Yea, not too many people know of the .ini changes you can make, and those that do don't know that the texture change is reversed from the others.

[TGxCraig]

Originally Posted by Loban

The only thing that looks good in PS2 is the lighting, and even that isn't on par with many bleeding edge modern PC games. The explosions and textures look pretty terrible. PS2 looks pretty good from a distance at night and at dawn and dusk, but overall it's looks pretty old school. I really wish it was DX11.

I gotta disagree with the explosions. They look great and with Physx they look epic. As for textures, there are some really good textures in the places that matter to me, but there are a lot of bad textures for sure, but with a game of this scale, that should be expected.

[Morsong]

I remember 10 years ago playing Ghost Recon and other games around that time period thinking to myself, "man, can it really get better than this?". I can't wait to see what the next 10 years will bring. PS2 looks beautiful, BF3 is beautiful. I wish I had Skyrim because I heard that is a very atmospheric game..

[Silent Thunder]

Dont forget that you need to set your texture detail to "0" in the ini to get the actual high quality textures. God knows how many of my buddies keep complaining about the textures while still set to a gimped setting.

Also Skyrim was atmospheric in the way a taxidermized bear is. Sure its very lifelike, but something just feels.. off. And It's somewhat unsettling. Then again, at least it wasn't as bad as Oblivion's faces. THOSE could keep a man up at night!

[Chaff]

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Skyrim is unique in its modding aspects. Via Nexus or Steam you can add almost endless mods to your game. It is pretty cool. I don't know of any other (popular) game(s) that the player community adds content to the game itself.

To get a full Skyrim experience requires every bit the power you need for PS2. If you have a high-end rig and are open to adding numerous mods - it becomes visually impressive. Skyrim's RPG elements grow boring too quickly for my taste. Of course, you can make your own game mods. Hell, there's even mods to add porno scenes into Skyrim.

I only added Skyrim to my PC recently. It quickly became boring. I went the heavy-mod route. The environment is great. The content needs major expansion. Character levels out at 81. By the time I got to LVL-40 I and expolred everything on the map, killed everything (repetedly), and finished all the quests. Without quests, there's little reason to open the game - I have it running at R (almost NC-17) mods, but T&A eye candy ain't enough to spend time on it.
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[Loban]

Originally Posted by TGxCraig

I gotta disagree with the explosions. They look great and with Physx they look epic. As for textures, there are some really good textures in the places that matter to me, but there are a lot of bad textures for sure, but with a game of this scale, that should be expected.

I really think the explosions look rather terrible compared to other modern games (Far Cry 3, BF3). They're very generic and the pieces of a vehicle just sort of break into big chunks. There is no dynamic fire, or wreckage or sense of a shockwave. It's like they took stock footage of an explosion from a made for TV movie on sci-fi and apply it to every vehicle.

[Maidere]

In all honesty, graphics are pretty average in PS2. On par with the few years old UE 3.0 based games.

[Tatwi]

Originally Posted by Maidere

In all honesty, graphics are pretty average in PS2. On par with the few years old UE 3.0 based games.

Which is pretty good for an mmo. Aion uses the CryEngine, yet it environments are not as lush abd detailed as Crysis or Far Cry. They must have to make some trade offs to avoid setting their system requirements beyond the market that will make their product viable.

[MurderBunneh]

Originally Posted by Koadster

Go watch alpha videos. They removed so so much graphical content before release. Biolabs actaully were complete jungles.. But as Adam the level dev said, as soon as you went in one even with their well optimized PCs it would be single digits.

Another thing that devs have said numerous times. There current is NO tech available that can handle the forgelight at max graphics.. Even in 10 years time the engine will still compete with future engines.

Lots of game engines can look amazing while running at single digit fps. The key is doing it efficiently and maximizing pc resources.

[TGxCraig]

Originally Posted by Loban

I really think the explosions look rather terrible compared to other modern games (Far Cry 3, BF3). They're very generic and the pieces of a vehicle just sort of break into big chunks. There is no dynamic fire, or wreckage or sense of a shockwave. It's like they took stock footage of an explosion from a made for TV movie on sci-fi and apply it to every vehicle.

Hmm... Do you have Physx on? My explosions look crazy and chunks of the ground go everywhere. When a Lib w/ a Zephyr shoots down at me, there is stuff going everywhere. When a Sundy explodes, there are parts all over the place, big and small, and they get pushed around as other explosions are going off as well as vehicles driving over the parts.

[Ironside]

I'll take performance over eye candy anyday

[artifice]

SOE made a mistake going with PhysX. It is entirely inefficient running on the CPU by design. There are far better physics engines that are CPU optimized and offer overall better physics than PhysX. I know they made a deal with NVIDIA, but it does more than hurt people with AMD graphics cards. It hurts anyone who doesn't have a top of the line CPU or NVIDIA GPU that can handle it.

[TGxCraig]

Originally Posted by Ironside

I'll take performance over eye candy anyday

Physx has no effect on my framerate that I can tell. My bottleneck is always my CPU, not my gpu.

Originally Posted by artifice

... I know they made a deal with NVIDIA, but it does more than hurt people with AMD graphics cards. It hurts anyone who doesn't have a top of the line CPU or NVIDIA GPU that can handle it.

I'm sorry, but that is one of the dumbest things I have heard from a PC gamer in a while. So should we just stop coming out with advanced graphical effects because some, or even most, people don't have the hardware to handle it? Developers should always be trying to create more and more demanding graphical effects every chance they get. Otherwise our games will be stagnant.

[Maidere]

Originally Posted by Tatwi

Which is pretty good for an mmo. Aion uses the CryEngine, yet it environments are not as lush abd detailed as Crysis or Far Cry. They must have to make some trade offs to avoid setting their system requirements beyond the market that will make their product viable.

We are not talking if PS2 looks great for an MMO or whatever. We are talking about if it looks great or not. Aion is built on modified original FarCry engine btw.
Check out Archage videos on youtube, Korean sandbox mmo.

[typhaon]

Originally Posted by Maidere

We are not talking if PS2 looks great for an MMO or whatever. We are talking about if it looks great or not. Aion is built on modified original FarCry engine btw.
Check out Archage videos on youtube, Korean sandbox mmo.

I'm not sure that's a reasonable discussion, then.

Everything has to be evaluated given the performance requirements


I do think the game looks excellent... my biggest complaint, though - would be that it feels a bit sterile... especially inside the buildings.

I don't know if additional objects and textures would cause significant performance hits... or if development just doesn't feel it would be a good way to spend more effort -but, I'd love to see a bit more detail added.