Low res models - Blue Tracker

#0 - Aug. 20, 2010, 10:35 p.m.

Dear Diablo III Devs,

After the recent flood of Diablo III news, I have dedicated most of my time playing through Diablo II again and scouring the official DIII website in hopes to finding something new.

I have played WoW from launch as well and so I see some similarities in character models and design which is both a blessing and a curse. For example, Human females in WoW look like a pile of playdough with some horrible textures slapped on for good measure. I've read articles that Blizzard "doesn't have the time or resources to redo those character models and textures"

I've noticed that some of the characters/models on the Diablo III site are the same low poly and low resolution textures that are more similar to WoW. Please tell me these are just placeholders and that we will see more detail in the final characters.

I mean no disrespect by this but I will never understand why most games nowadays have low resolution textures. On consoles, sure, you have space limitations but PC games? Look at Torchlight as well. Great game but some 3rd party modded in new textures that make the game look FANTASTIC.

Any thoughts on this?

Bashiok

#3 - Aug. 20, 2010, 11:38 p.m.

Blunt answer incoming, only because this has been addressed a whole lot.

There's no reason to pump up poly counts and texture res for a model you're going to see from a fixed camera 30 feet up in the sky. At that distance the detail is lost, and so essentially we'd be building a model so it looks pretty on the website.

Which might actually be cool to do, we would love for the close-up characters on the website to look better than they do, but that's allocating resources to what is essentially throw away material. So we haven't deemed it worth the effort.

In general we also want to keep graphic requirements low so that a wide audience can enjoy the game, and also so we can have a lot of enemies on screen.

Bashiok

#9 - Aug. 21, 2010, 1:40 a.m.

Q u o t e:
The only reason I am bringing up WoW is because it's a Blizz game and I see that inconsistency. Sylvanas has an AMAZING detailed model and textures but it doesn't disallow masses of people of playing the game on low end machines.

That's because it's one character that exists once in the entire game. You're only going to see one of her, and being a faction leader she's purposefully a ways away from where large groups of player congregate. We can get away with bumping up poly counts and texture res for bosses, some special NPCs too.

Q u o t e:
Also, Starcraft II has ULTRA settings for high end machines and LOW for low end machines. So why not apply the same principle for Diablo III instead of just "aiming for low end settings" across the board?

Once again, I don't bring it up to disrespect but I for one, LOVE the new art style while many have said "It's not dark enough". I don't need Uber amazing Crysis graphics but I think having a wide range of graphics options a la Starcraft II and everyone wins...

We have scaling options too.

Ultimately I recommend you stop looking at the zoomed in version on the website and instead look at movies and screenshots of the game play.