I still don't know why they don't just slap in a hotfix that shows you, your companion, your group members, and your group members' companions in "not dogbarf" textures. The game already as to do drawcalls on those anyway, because you see all of those entities in dialogue cutscenes. That would be, at most, 4 high-rez texture sets being displayed at above-terrible quality at any given time. I can't imagine that would cripple this piss-poor engine any further. I could "settle" for everyone else looking like crap if at least my character and my friends' characters (and our companions) looked tolerable.

It's because of this atlas compression bulldung that they pulled. Whenever you take an image and compress or mask its texturing, it makes everything blur (kind of obvious but I'm building toward something). Say item A has a solid color, and 2 stripes on it. The compression won't hit it very hard, because the texture is relatively "plain" to start with. Then item B is this super-epic, highly detailed item with all these little colors and patterns. That's where the dogbarf textures come in, because when you compress that badboy all of those details and color variations are getting blended together to make a graphical mess. Right now, to be least-impacted by this insane design decision to destroy all of the textures that we see, you need to pick and choose gear that has the fewest details possible, that way it isn't slammed as heavily by the atlasing.

See, this is what I love, when people just make crap up, or stretch facts and reasoning to cling to their incorrect beliefs. Your first screenshot is features the Tabard of the Shattered Sun. If you look at the patch the item was added, and then line that up with the comments, it appears that that screenshot came from around 2008. If you want to go even further than that, if you look into the filename you see _011109_ in the middle. That would be the date of the screenshot. Congratulations, you just compared TOR's 2012 graphics favorably against something from three years ago. Now, since your second shot is renamed, I can't debunk it as thoroughly, but I can tell you that all of that equipment is using armor graphics from "vanilla" (pre-expansion) or "burning crusade" (first expansion) content. Again, stuff that's at least 3 years old. Any graphics that were included in Wrath or Cata included significantly improved texture quality, for example have a look at my character wearing a set of gear that was released about 6 months ago. You can keep comparing TOR favorably against stuff from years ago if you want, but the thing is TOR is bringing the least, graphically, to the table than pretty much any other modern MMO out there, including the often-dissed WoW.

Aww, someone mentioned WoW again, as if WoW was worse. Too bad that's false.

Scroll to the very bottom of this page. Read the small text there.

"BioWare is a label of Electronic Arts" There are 6 or 7 different "BioWare" studios now. Pretty sure that means 5 or 6 of them have nothing to do with BioWare except for the name on the front of the building.

Why should we pay them on a monthly recurring basis to implement the entire high-end visual settings for the game. This isn't "Oh we didn't have the legacy system finished yet" minor-ish thing to clean up. It's the full visual presentation of the game... a game that was sold with a completely and utterly fabricated set of videos and screenshots "showcasing" its visual presentation. I don't order a meal in a restaurant based off of a menu picture only for the waiter/waitress to bring all the raw ingredients out to my table and then ask to charge additional funds by the minute while I wait for them to cook it in front of me. Not only that, but I have yet to see any concrete proof that they will fix it. Maybe you're more trusting than I am. I've seen "we'll investigate it" and I've seen that "they'll improve visual fidelity" but these are weasel words. They could change the texture compression from 50% to 49% and say mission accomplished. Until I see an EAware employee or rep outright say "Our goal is to implement high-resolution (or "cutscene") textures back into the game within X-Y amount of months" I cannot possibly fund these guys, because the truth is they could do anything or nothing at all based on what they've actually said.

Uh, because WoW is graphically superior to TOR, and runs better, so I'm not complaining about how WoW looks? I'm saying Item A is demonstrably better than Item B, and complaining about Item B for being falsely advertised, and your rebuttal is to ask me why I'm not complaining about the superior product? Really?

I'd chuckle at that.

TOR looks half a dozen years old, and it just came out. They said it would be fixed. It wasn't fixed, and then they attempted to cover it up. We called BS, they said "oh that's a bug and we intended it this way all along." Characters in this game look like crap. Crap. Crappity crap crap crap. BioWare actually had the stones to say that my screenshot, that right there, was the game "working as intended" at maximum available graphics settings while they continue to market the game using fake screenshots and materials showcasing texturing, lighting, and shading that is not at all available in the retail product. Then when we expose all this, they release new screenshots of the new content, all still fake, and say they'll "improve graphical fidelity" sometime within 3 months, maybe. They don't even say "we're going to fix high rez textures" -- they give us a bunch of weasel wording that really means nothing -- 49% texture compression is "improved fidelity" when we're playing at 50% compression. I'd say that's a better hill than most choose to die on.

You're mixing facts to support your own false claims. People that are upset with WoW's graphics are primarily upset at the character models and facial textures. Because, yes, those are 8 years old, and they look like crap. The original 8 races all look pretty bad because they are low poly-count models with low-rez, painted on face textures. The newer races fare much better, and all of the armor that's come out in the last 2+ years has a texture resolution (what this thread is about -- armor texture resolution) that pisses all over what BioWare is giving us at retail. Edit: Gah, misued "Your" in place of "You're" -- I hate myself a little now.

I wonder if the forum mods will include these links in the press stickies at the top of the boards.

If you're going to say that TOR's textures are better than WoW, you should probably have proof. For example, I have proof that you are wrong. Anyone can hate on WoW's art style, I'm not a huge fan of it myself. Technically, visually, and mechanically, it is superior to TOR. Go ahead and kid yourself that it's not, though. TOR has story and RP. That part is good. The rest of the game is an inferior WoW.

Textures OR a game? Then I'll give them 7.50$ a month for the game part, since the graphics part isn't there.

Because false advertising (before the audience realizes it's false) attracts more positive attention than displaying the game with the dogbarf textures it actually has. Because putting EAware's "It looks like turds on purpose because we don't know what our competition in the genre is capable of and we can't program our way out of a paper bag, eat up, ladies!" on the marketing materials won't attract as many players as lying to them about this game's "visual fidelity" will.

And for ones that refuse to pay any more until it is fixed, or at the very least band-aided. I'd settle for my character, my companion, and my group members to render in not-dog-barf while they worked on making their engine not completely suck. MMOs, at end-game, are typically gear driven. It's hard to get excited about my character when he looks like this at maximum available graphics settings.

Stills of characters in this game look like absolute garbage compared to pretty much any other MMO you can pay for, and a lot of the ones you don't have to. It's a matter of taste. If dogbarf graphics don't bother you, cool. There are plenty of other people out there willing to take the same (or less!) amount of my money for a product with a demonstrably superior quality.

A well-made game looks good both close up and far away. On top of that, it runs well under a variety of stresses. The Blurry Republic is not a well-made game.

I don't disagree with what you said, but I was responding to an argument where participant A kept insisting that SR's comment directly stated "High rez textures in Q1" while participant B kept insisting that he didn't use those exact words, so you can't draw that conclusion.

Aion. Sorry if someone beat me to the answer, I went to eat dinner and fell behind 30 pages on this thread.

That is indeed an interesting question -- I wonder if reviewer-distributed builds included support for high rez ingame. Hmm...

It's simple, really, he didn't come out and say "high rez textures", he didn't come out and say "cutscene-quality textures" he said "greater visual fidelity" If we have 50% texture compression now, "greater visual fidelity" could be 49% texture compression, 25% texture compression, textures even better than what we have in cutscenes now, it could be bloody anything. I think the terminology for this is "weasel word". It was a promise of some liquid, intangible amount of improvement, rather than a cut-and-dry "this is our intended goal".

Yeah, the textures look great.

Would be nice, will be the only way I log back into The Blurry Republic until when this magical "Hey our game isn't garbage" 1.2 patch goes live and if I deem its fixes satisfactory.

Are you a doctor?