WHY so JAGGED? - Blue Tracker

#0 - June 3, 2009, 8:16 p.m.

Has anyone seen this video on the official D3 website? http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3/world/bestiary/thefallen.xml

The characters in motion look like 16 bit, maybe 32-bit. They all remind me of Abobo from Double Dragon on the NES.

I can already hear it: "The video is not in HD" ..... Well WHY NOT? Why would you not want to represent your product in a low quality way?

And even when watching the blizzcon video of the barb/WD in HD all those characters look 16 bit to me too. The edges of the characters look jagged to the touch and all thin/boney mobs look jagged as well. And again I can hear it "That was not with the graphics turned all the way up." .... and again WHY NOT?

The NUMBER ONE reason i did not play diablo II for the first year or 2 was because it was behind its time in graphics, i could not get past that fact for the longest time. Please, please, please, don't let this happen again! This is the NextGen era, I dont even know what bit we are on anymore 256? 512? 1024? More? Why is everything looking 16/32-bit? This is post MGS4, will be post FFXIII, post Killzone 2, ect. you should not only be competing with these games graphically but surpassing them.

And finally, I can already hear you thinking: "Gameplay is the most important" Yes, I agree, but that is no excuse for low definition Characters and mobs. And yes gameplay is most important, but if i cant visually tell what is going on and cant tell where one thing begins and the next thing ends, or am nauseous while playing due to over pixilization, that WILL affect gameplay.

#4 - June 3, 2009, 9:38 p.m.

Q u o t e:
The characters in motion look like 16 bit, maybe 32-bit.

The bit numbers are indeed helpful when referring to certain era's of console gaming, but they were essentially marketing numbers. They're no more useful than hertz ratings for modern processors. You have to understand the performance as a whole, not just one number. In any case, I guess you're saying our game looks like an SNES title. Which I would take offense to if it wasn't so ridiculous.

Q u o t e:
The edges of the characters look jagged

What you're probably referring to is called aliasing. It's the jagged appearance on the edges of (generally) polygons. It's usually resolved through use of processes collectively referred to as anti-aliasing, which we don't have implemented.

Q u o t e:
The NUMBER ONE reason i did not play diablo II for the first year or 2 was because it was behind its time in graphics

That period of time was probably the worst of what I'd call graphical discrimination. People were buying these new-fangled 3D add in cards, and if you were going to play a game it damn well better use it! Technically Diablo II was (and still runs best) in Glide (the 3dfx API) but if it didn't have polygons... pshhh! My friends aren't going to be jealous of that, forget it!

Still, the Diablo franchise has managed to sell approximately 20 million copies.

So maybe there isn't as much graphical discrimination as there seems, maybe it's just the people and communities we immerse ourselves in that makes it seem like there is.

Maybe if your friends were all amateur or semi-pro race car drivers, you hung out on car racing forums and chat rooms, and worked on and drove your own hobby race car, you'd think pretty poorly of the Toyota Camry... no matter that it was the third best selling car in 2008. After two pick-up trucks.

Q u o t e:
This is post MGS4, will be post FFXIII, post Killzone 2, ect. you should not only be competing with these games graphically but surpassing them.

Those are console games. Without going in to it too much, they have one hardware spec to develop for which allows for games that really push the hardware to its limit because they know for a fact that no one is going to have a machine that is any less or more powerful than the one they're developing for.

We're developing a PC game, which has the one downside of an almost infinite number of hardware configurations. We have good guesses as to what most people have in their computers, and we develop our games for a wide range of scalability.

While we're not developing a cutting edge game, I look at the screenshots and videos and I hope and wait for a time when everyone can play it in person. Because no matter what quality they're released in it's just nowhere near as good as seeing it and playing it for yourself.