You draw the line somewhere above this.

Because, in reality, these advertisements were never supposed to look this good -- that was a bug. Sometime in Q1 2012, maybe they'll update all of their promotional materials to reflect the reduced graphical fidelity that the players actually experience after handing over full retail price for a 2012 MMO.

If that's true, can we get a new Guinness entry under the voice acting one that reads: "Oldest new full-price MMO ever released"

People that say they aren't trolls... are usually trolls. "Not moaning like someone stole my lunch" "crying their asses off" "moan" "moan" sounds like trolling to me. Some characters in TOR look like they smeared dog puke all over themselves, due to this atlassing garbage that is forced on all players running any hardware. If some people can't run the game on high, the answer is for those people to put the game on medium, not remove high for every single player. If you're a developer and can't understand that, I guess nothing I can say is going to help you. These textures exist. They were in beta. They're in cutscenes. EAware is still using them in gameplay footage and stills to misrepresent the actual product. We're not asking them to do any more work this very instant, we're asking them to let how the game looks be up to the user's discretion instead of hardlocking us to the lowest common denominator -- something that no other modern MMO does to its users.

We don't have to do better -- EAware does. And did, in fact, at one point. Then they decided "You want higher textures? YOU CAN'T HANDLE HIGHER TEXTURES!" and turned them off for everyone.

At least Kotaku seems to be giving this proper attention. They even went so far as to mention it again when they later showcased the EAware false advertisement.

By "many" you mean yourself, right? It's a direct link to an image file with no privacy settings turned on. I have been posting many screenshots in this thread and its earlier iterations, and not once has anyone complained that the links didn't work. I've received at least 3 separate compliments on my signature, so I assume that's working, as well. Two of my screenshots have been edited into the original post. One of my screenshots from this thread was used by someone else to start an entirely different thread that ran for multiple pages and nobody there said they couldn't see it.

Yeah I won't be giving EAware any more money until this game looks at least as good as it did in beta and in their false advertisements.

TOR launched with its entire high-end set of graphical options missing or broken. Textures, shaders, shadows, reflections, etc. That's about as opposite of "polish" as you can get. WoW launch was in 2004. Unless we fell through a rip in time, the bar is considerably higher in 2012.

I don't even think it's a budgetary issue -- it's a competence issue. If you know what your engine can or can't handle, you design around that. You don't make high rez textures that you then compress to dogbarf in order to run the game -- you make simpler textures that can retain their original sharpness (or relative lack thereof) without this compression nonsense that's forced on us now. If it was cartoony and stylized (solid colors, limited detail, straight lines) it wouldn't look nearly as bad as it does now, where they went for a decent amount of detail and then just had to smear it all around on the canvas before letting us have it.

My character looks pretty damn close. Edit - Also, showing environment screenshots to support your argument when the issue is player-character (and most NPC) textures is laughable at best.

Did your higher-than-4th-grade English give you the definition of improve? Improve is relative. What we have now is crap. "Less-crap-like" is improved, but still crap. He doesn't promise "not crap", he only promises "less-crap-like". If he promised "not crap" then I think most of the people upset with the textures would be put a little more at ease.

Some people missed this link the first time, I guess. Don't tell me what the guy "actually" said because we can all plainly see what he "actually" said. You're putting words into his mouth, not me, and calling me the liar. Funny.

Because server load has anything to do with client rendering, amirite?

Proof of what part, exactly? If this thread doesn't include it (it does, promise you that) I can start listing evidence (in other words, reposting) to back up everything I've said.

49.999999999999% texture compression is better than 50% texture compression. That's essentially all BioWare promised you. Given that they lied about the texture options in the first place, then tried to cover it up, then gave us this 11th hour response after multiple 100+ page threads, I don't trust them to deliver on actual promises, but would be at least somewhat willing to because I genuinely like the game. Instead of apologizing and fixing the issue (or even saying they fully intend to fix it) they give us a vague promise that could ultimately result in next to nothing. I'm not going to feed money to that. It's kind of stupid to, honestly. I mean, if you like the game and don't hate the fact that it looks like dogbarf and worse than any other modern MMO, then that's one thing, but if you are upset or put off by the abysmal graphical presentation of this game, it's foolish to think throwing money at BioWare will eventually result in a significantly more polished product when, to date, they've given you nothing of substance to support that belief.

I'm not lying. He never, not once, ever said anything remotely close to "we're working to get high resolution/cutscene textures back in normal gameplay." Not once. "Improved graphical fidelity" does mean "better graphics" -- I never argued that. What I will argue is this: Say we're playing at 50% texture compression right now. 49% texture compression is "improved graphical fidelity." We're saying: "We saw these textures in beta, we see them still in press release screenshots and videos, we want these textures." BioWare response: "Those textures aren't possible because this is a MMO, but in 1.2 the game will look less bad." That's miles of difference. Miles.

Where does he say that? I don't see him say that, anywhere. "Improved graphical fidelity" is weasel wording. I'm sorry that you can't recognize that.

WoW released in, what, 2004? This is 2012, TOR released in the last handful of days of 2011. LOTRO did release with super-high resolution textures. In fact, they had at least 4 settings: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. You had to check a box in the launcher to even download the Ultra textures, and at the time of release they killed just about any computer. But, as hardware got better, more and more people could turn that setting on. LOTRO's graphics destroy what is available in TOR, and they have since day1 of LOTRO. As others have said, in many cases the cutscene textures in TOR aren't fantastic by today's standards, they're merely acceptable. And they didn't say they are working on giving us cutscene textures. They are working on "improving graphical fidelity" which could mean bloody anything.

This has fallen to the third page? That's not good. [Removed comment about being unable to search the forums, because apparently you can] and this affects everyone to a degree this should probably be stickied, but I know they won't sticky bad publicity. I think I'm down to 4 days now. I want to like this game -- hell, I do like this game, but I simply can't justify handing money over to people this inept, people that then have the stones to lie about the whole ordeal, attempt to cover it up, and insist that this is the best the MMO genre can offer. I could feel decent about giving them my money if they come out and say "high resolution (or cutscene) textures are among our top priorities, and we will implement them as soon as we can" but they can't even give that. Instead we get, "Oh, you caught us with our pants down and our hideous junk (this game's graphics) flapping in the breeze, we'll work on increasing the fidelity for you" when in reality they could reduce the texture compression by 1% and say they delivered as promised. Given the way this was already handled, I won't accept placation in the form of weasel words that guarantee nothing.

So I guess a day or two ago, advertising and marketing materials for the new content were released to media outlets. Those materials relatively match the quality of the game you actually pay for, and aren't rendered using lighting, shaders, and texture quality vastly superior to what the customer actually gets when they buy the DVD case, right? No? That's not the case yet? The promo screens and videos still look like a completely different game? That's legal now? When are they just going to start releasing all of their previews as the CGI scenes that accompany the intro to the game, and pretending that it's in-game footage? Cause the night and day difference we have now isn't that far off anyway. <sigh>

This. I'd go for a full refund but I'd want access to my account in the future, if they ever do bother to fix the game. I just won't be handing them a monthly fee to play their blurry beta.

I'd settle for this if it also applied to my group and their companions. That's still 4 characters maximum and the game has to drawcall all those textures as soon as you enter dialogue anyway. Even then, I'd only accept that as an interim fix. It's disgusting how lowly BioWare has set the bar for visual presentation and performance, and outright refuses to let customers even try to run the game without these forced bottlenecks. "95% of people are playing TOR with no problem at all!" How about "100% of people aren't playing the TOR we actually developed, because we had to hide that from customers"?

Because if they don't lie about what their game actually looks like, they will trick fewer people into buying it.

Welp, 6 days of game time remaining. Wonder if BioWare will pull their heads out long enough to hotfix in some kind of compromise so their game starts to remotely resemble their false advertising for 1.1.