[Official High Resolution Textures Post] Can we get a clarification on this?

[Idali]

I always found that people were complaining for nothing on these forums...

 

But now this is really unbelievable... I think i had better textures in SWG a couple years ago (and i was seeing alot more people around me than in this game)

 

Yes, SWG had nice and crisp gfx compared to this. Especially on a pc that could run all settings on max.

[Redorbz]

"I will quit playing" is something you learn first year, hardly is intimidating or true.

 

Why?

People comitted enough to speak up in the forums/ticket you wont lose.

 

The ones you never hear (wich is the community majority) are the ones to keep satisfied, and they are not represented by the ones speaking up.

 

77,243 views on just this one post, and its been truncated three times. So, yeah, people are noticing, the silent majority knows about this and I can tell you, they are very disappointed.

 

Everyone I know personally thought they were having technical problems on their own computer just like I did, but the truth is out now, and they arent satisfied.

Edited January 12, 2012 by Redorbz

[Aurelus]

Yes, SWG had nice and crisp gfx compared to this. Especially on a pc that could run all settings on max.

 

How are those rose-coloured glasses workin for ya

[Rophez]

How are those rose-coloured glasses workin for ya

 

Fan sites and gaming sites are picking up on this story as well. The silent majority who are on the fence about continuing with subscriptions will take notice. People are used to quality products, especially if they are paying monthly. In my book, blurry, muddy looking characters are NOT subscriptions quality.

[Ommm]

How are those rose-coloured glasses workin for ya

 

Maybe you should show screens of the two games on high setting side by side (cinematic mode in swtor dont count)

Edited January 12, 2012 by Ommm

[Redorbz]

How are those rose-coloured glasses workin for ya

 

Hmm, interesting. Never played SWG myself. Its apples and oranges, but worth checking out the old screenshots i suppose.

Edited January 12, 2012 by Redorbz

[Aurelus]

I've seen the screenshots of low/med/high and can see the difference. However claiming that Galaxies had better graphics/textures is a joke.

 

http://www.gameogre.com/reviewdirectory/reviews/Star_Wars_Galaxies.php

Edited January 12, 2012 by Aurelus

[Ommm]

I've seen the screenshots of low/med/high and can see the difference. However claiming that Galaxies had better graphics/textures is a joke.

yeah it certianly shows its age; i agree with that. but it is crisp. Edited January 12, 2012 by Ommm

[RyceTOR]

The ones you never hear (wich is the community majority) are the ones to keep satisfied, and they are not represented by the ones speaking up.

 

This is a very common and completely incorrect assumption. just because a player (or number of players) is not a "forum-going player", does not mean they are not as upset by and as interested in a solution for the problems discussed by the forum-going players. It simply means they don't use forums. Silence is not acceptance.

 

Some gamers lurk but do not post - confident that the multitude of posters have already voiced their concerns

 

Some gamers don't visit forums because they dislike the medium ... but that doesn't mean they aren't (like i was) spending 15-45 minutes every night trying to figure out what is wrong with their video card settings.

 

Some gamers don't visit forums because they don't acknowledge a larger community around their game/experience ... that doesn't mean they won't stop playing a game if their game experience is plagued by unresolved issues (which likely are being discussed on forums they don't visit).

 

Some gamers don't visit forums because they only have so many hours they can spend on game time and would prefer to use those hours gaming .. that doesn't mean they appreciate getting a game which CANNOT look like the GAMEPLAY walkthroughs that Bioware used to sell them said game.

 

 

A silent player is NOT NECESSARILY a happy player. They are simply silent.

 

Bioware can and will lose both silent and forum-going players if they fail to respond to the forum-going players ... after all they are the only player sourced method to represent the larger community, and they probably do that at a pretty reasonably representative distribution of concern/apathy.

Edited January 12, 2012 by RyceTOR

[Zezel]

Everyone I know personally thought they were having technical problems on their own computer just like I did, but the truth is out now, and they arent satisfied.

 

Interesting point I had not thought of until you said it. Think of all the hours players have spent trouble shooting systems, rolling back drivers, being told to redownload the client, buying new hardware etc for an issue that Bioware knew about all along.

 

More pissed now.

Edited January 12, 2012 by Zezel

[Segaki]

[...]

 

Don't pick a single sentence and think you understand the bigge picture, read the whole post and subsequent ones to understand what I'm saying.

[Kraylessa]

Interesting point I had not thought of until you said it. Think of all the hours players have spent trouble shooting systems, rolling back drivers, being told to redownload the client, buying new hardware etc for an issue that Bioware knew about all along.

 

More pissed now.

 

Yeah, I read a post by a guy who had downloaded and reinstalled three times, thinking that the issue was on his end. I only knew better because I am a regular forum reader and saw complaints about medium and high settings being the same from the end of Beta. There are probably hundreds of thousands of players who don't frequent the forums and don't know about this issue thinking there is something wrong with their machines or their installation.

[MasterDurron]

Thanks for the response Mr. Reid.

 

To all of you complaining, this is the largest MMO to date, graphics are just one component. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the graphics are amazing, what are you talking about, etc. because they aren't, but they aren't bad.

 

Before I go on

My computer system has a Core i7 2600K processor with a EVGA GTX 570 HD Graphics card, 8 GB of RAM, and an SSD.

 

I am also a software engineer that works with 3D Graphics and has worked with game development.

 

Main Point: As stated before, Graphics are just one component of the game.

 

This game is huge, with multiple systems running behind the scenes. Being able to get an MMO out the gate with all its system in place and relatively few bugs, and amazing gameplay was awesome for BioWare. The graphics systems can and will be updated. It's not a simple process of changing the setting to high in the code and going for it. They have to make very specific changes that won't break anything else and will let people run the game smoothly.

 

To those of you saying let us decide, we know what we're talking about, you don't. Unless you worked for BioWare and wrote and tested the code, you don't know how well your computer's going to handle it, no matter how high end it is. If BioWare just gave us high res textures, people would enable them and start complaining their FPS is too low to actually play the game, which is worse than dealing with graphics that aren't high res.

 

MMO's take time to get into the swing of things. It doesn't matter if it was an MMO released in 2004, 2007, 2011, or 2016. When you have over a million players using your game, there are going to be things that happen that you never thought of, or bugs you never found. Graphical displays are one of those things. The fact that the development team is looking to make changes in Patch 1.2 is amazing, First Quarter ends in March, so that means we'll see the changes soon. In the meantime, the game is still amazing, awesome story lines, and great systems.

 

More and more is going to be put into the game. It doesn't happen magically, and BioWare takes extra time to make sure they give us something that is going to work

[veevito]

From my gaming experience across both multiple mmo's and countless SP games, it certainly is odd to completely remove a high graphical setting as an option (and no, high isn't really high as has been established). Everyone knows that when you enable "ultra" or "high" graphical settings that there is a potential performance hit. Gamers know this and back off on various settings until they get that combination of performance and visual quality that they are happy with.

 

Bioware's position is also somewhat inconsistent in that shadows are still an option even though they cripple the framerate for some folks. Even though the shadows are of questionable quality at present.

 

Following the high res texture logic, shouldn't shadows be removed as an option for everyone then? Although I suspect the response would be that high res textures are suspected to impact many more people than high shadows do.

 

That then begs the question of what type of measuriong stick is BW using to determine what is acceptable to put in as an option and what isn't. X% of our test rigs can't handle it so leave it out as an option? Even then, ultra settings have always been "user beware".

 

The graphical options in TOR are very limited. Which is a disappointment and frankly quite surprising given the competitons options, even wow. It's really the first time that i've seen a developer basically tell a playerbase that they know better what can and can't be run on their own machines. And that they aren't even going to give them the option to try.

 

I believe lots of people couldn't run AoC on ultra when it first came out, but I don't believe Funcom decided that was a reason to totally remove the option.

 

There's gotta be something else going on here for them to literally yank the option out or not even have some basic LOD settings in place that would allow HR textures.

[RyceTOR]

Don't pick a single sentence and think you understand the bigge picture, read the whole post and subsequent ones to understand what I'm saying.

 

Don't assume I've done so. I read your whole post. It was simply that particular piece of nonsense I wanted to debunk.

 

• The Forums DO represent the larger player community.
  
• Non-forum going players should not be assumed to be satisfied just because they are non-forum going players.
  

[Strayth]

What bothers me, is that in game, out of cut scenes, there are both amazing looking textures, and absolutely horrible ones.

 

Aspiring Knight's vest looks amazing (and no difference with high rez), while any Jedi robe will just look like vomit.

 

Any explaination ?

[Redorbz]

Yeah, I read a post by a guy who had downloaded and reinstalled three times, thinking that the issue was on his end. I only knew better because I am a regular forum reader and saw complaints about medium and high settings being the same from the end of Beta. There are probably hundreds of thousands of players who don't frequent the forums and don't know about this issue thinking there is something wrong with their machines or their installation.

 

I would agree that 1-300k+ ,in a game with 2 million+ subs, is a conservative estimate, and probably accurate or even less than the total number who have noticed. People have def. noticed, weather they know about this issue or not, and will talk about it and perhaps learn about this problem from the third party news coverage its now getting on multiple sites. Then its gonna hit the fan.

 

So, I hope Bioware or EA (I personally believe this is all EAs fault) can rectify this in a patch this or next week. They need to take swift (like yesterday) action on this to avoid the fallout. I cant back up my claim against EA with any evidence, but given my history with EA, I dont doubt it probable.

 

I have really enjoyed the game thus far, despite 3 or 4 pretty glaring issues. I sincerly hope for its future that they do not keep making these kinds of decisons, or its all downhill from here.

Edited January 12, 2012 by Redorbz

[-sasori]

That screenshot is from a cinematic in-game. As stated, cinematic scenes use high resolution textures because we have control over how many characters are rendered on-screen at once. This is how the game was always intended to look in cinematics. We did not 'remove' high resolution textures - they were always in the game for use in cinematics.

 

With that said, thank you for all of your responses. We understand everyone's desires around this issue, and although it's not going to be an overnight fix, as mentioned we're working on addressing this. Many of the suggestions you have made are similar to potential changes the development team is investigating.

 

I rounded up the development team once more and had another discussion, and wanted to update you with a better timeline and some more precise details on what we're doing right now.

 

The first major changes will be in our next major Game Update, which will have the version number of 1.2. Those changes will bring greater visual fidelity to your character and those around you, but will still allow for good performance in situations where a lot of characters are on-screen at once. In other words, for those screenshots of your character in their best gear, you should see a marked improvement.

 

Other potential changes are being discussed right now – as I said, many of which are similar to changes suggested by many of you. As usual, you’ll see these sorts of changes on our Public Test Server before they make it into the live game. Right now we cannot commit to a live date for the 1.2 Game Update, but it will be within Q1 2012.

 

 

 

 

Sadly the official response was very....vague.

 

It sounds like they removed the so called "High" Textures because they thought they would not run well as soon as players amass and may result in fatal errors in some cases.

 

Which demonstrates a few things.

 

1. This is a good thing to disable them instead of letting people blindly crashing.

2. They forgot to add a slider to let people control it and adjust it for their systems. (Actual a lot of graphic options are missing, and more than just Textures are not working properly - basically everything you can adjust with sliders - and those are missing here, does not work)

3. They forgot they may be more than 5 Characters at once during gameplay while testing the engine in early stages.

 

But that's nothing you can't fix fast, errors do happen it's ok. There is a variable for the LOD system which is hard coded and you just have to make it dynamic controllable by the user interface (Graphic options) and so the .ini file where it gets saved. This should have been a given when creating PC games, and the lack of many detailed Graphic options and Sound options speaks a lot about the basic concept behind the engine and it's adjustment for SWTOR.

 

Would this be the case, this would have triggered a very different response and handling from BW's side. First and foremost it would have resulted in an open communication like they have been proving so many times, see the ADDON Topic for example. This handling builds a lot of justified faith into BW.

 

 

 

What's more likely is the second scenario. Something, somewhere major funked up.

And they disabled it, because the engine can't handle the amount of streaming of those textures. No matter your GPU and CPU and HDD (SSD) power.

 

 

You just don't suddenly realize your OK Texture Level Rendering called "High" does not run on modern and even high end PCs. And by no means the now deleted old "High Texture Rendering" from beta and promotion screenshots is state of the Art 2012, it was OK for a new MMO.

 

You just don't suddenly claim to call Textures down-rendered to a level of 2002 medicore MMO Graphic level "High" in your Options.

 

You just don't suddenly have TWO in contrary to THREE or MORE Setting levels for Texture Quality Rendering in the industry and act like this is normal.

 

This is clearly DAMAGE Control. And that is by no means BAD. It's not acceptable to speak the utter truth in this issue - no one does in a corporate world. We Players can't really blame our CM for that or BW. We can't blame them for disabling it either, it's actually a good choice.

 

Thre real mess is not how BW downplays and stalls everything. It's about the result.

 

 

 

 

However they made the same mistake some other predecessors did make.

They underestimated the combined force of mistreatment to their customers, we players, are willing to swallow.

 

Corporate silence and ignoring of an issue which arises are to be expected.

Corporate level of downplaying and vague misleading are to be expected.

Not being able to hold deadlines and issues along the way are to be expected.

MMO releases are always over rushed.

 

BUT:

 

 

NEVER being able to get the PROMISED Level of Detail (Screenshots, bre Open-eta builds), misleading labeling to cover it up till RELEASE(2002 Tex Render Quality is HIGH?), in short not being able to _deliver_ combined with the above three things is what plays really ILL for you BW.

 

 

Don't go down the road of

 

Warhammer Online

Age of Conan

Final Fantasy XIV

 

They all did this mistake.

 

 

If you can't deliver, start working on it, and be CLEAR about it, not vague and don't try to spin obvious faults as Working as Intended. Seriously "MEDIUM" Texture Render Quality being a bug is a classic already. Especially when your new "HIGH" is considered [VERY LOW] by the industry.

 

 

I doubt this post will "reach" many players or even you BW, this thread is even filled with a lot of unnecessary drama, Trolling in both directions. It's doubtful many will react now and really cancel. After all this is just "Graphic".

 

 

But make no mistake, there is still ability delay, strong imbalance, and many other issues which can and will accumulate. If you, BW, thinks you did handle the situation "well", you should do some research on said "other" MMOs.

 

This is not the way. You will lose subs faster than you can count, and those are not the obvious "you can't please everyone" players who are leaving.

 

 

Now let's look forward, shall we?

Since i strongly believe BW does not want deliberately end up where those MMOs did.

I very much would prefer an official Response which is more detailed about what we can expect in Q1 of 2012 on behalf of this issue. Clearly not what they did promote and could not deliver, but how much of it?

 

Thank you for your time.

Edited January 12, 2012 by -sasori

[Segaki]

Don't assume I've done so. I read your whole post. It was simply that particular piece of nonsense I wanted to debunk.

 

• The Forums DO represent the larger player community.
  
• Non-forum going players should not be assumed to be satisfied just because they are non-forum going players.
  

Well obviously you know better on the first topic, yet I fear you should re-read my posts concerning the second one.

 

I did state nothing that is even close to that, only that not everyone might feel this to be his top priority.

For example I am sure german bounty hunter players will have this ranked very low once they hit Voss and another thing pops to prio 1 on their list.

[Poofighter]

What bothers me, is that in game, out of cut scenes, there are both amazing looking textures, and absolutely horrible ones.

 

Aspiring Knight's vest looks amazing (and no difference with high rez), while any Jedi robe will just look like vomit.

 

Any explaination ?

. I Agree, thats freaking annoying.

[Dasthug]

I am still really enjoying playing the game, but honestly this is just embarrassing on Bioware's part, and the fact that they apparently expected the playerbase at large to be fine with substandard graphics when we should absolutely be able to experience something better is actually a bit insulting. We know the textures exist, and people with gaming PC's should have the option to use them.

 

If the game engine is so poorly optimized that it can't handle good textures on a quality gaming PC without a severe performance hit, then I'm really just dumbfounded at how Bioware was unable to accomplish something that virtually every other major developer does as standard practice.

[BeeblesTV]

Give us a high-res texture option. Let us decide if we can handle it.

 

Honestly if it truly crashes my game on the fleet, I'd just toggle it off when there, and toggle it back when I left, so while playing the game I can enjoy good graphics.

 

Same applies to terrain draw distance, grass radius, all these things should be sliders for us to adjust.

 

This is a PC game. We want graphics options.

Edited January 12, 2012 by BeeblesTV

[Stigas]

Thanks for the response Mr. Reid.

 

To all of you complaining, this is the largest MMO to date, graphics are just one component. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the graphics are amazing, what are you talking about, etc. because they aren't, but they aren't bad.

 

Before I go on

My computer system has a Core i7 2600K processor with a EVGA GTX 570 HD Graphics card, 8 GB of RAM, and an SSD.

 

I am also a software engineer that works with 3D Graphics and has worked with game development.

 

Main Point: As stated before, Graphics are just one component of the game.

 

This game is huge, with multiple systems running behind the scenes. Being able to get an MMO out the gate with all its system in place and relatively few bugs, and amazing gameplay was awesome for BioWare. The graphics systems can and will be updated. It's not a simple process of changing the setting to high in the code and going for it. They have to make very specific changes that won't break anything else and will let people run the game smoothly.

 

To those of you saying let us decide, we know what we're talking about, you don't. Unless you worked for BioWare and wrote and tested the code, you don't know how well your computer's going to handle it, no matter how high end it is. If BioWare just gave us high res textures, people would enable them and start complaining their FPS is too low to actually play the game, which is worse than dealing with graphics that aren't high res.

 

MMO's take time to get into the swing of things. It doesn't matter if it was an MMO released in 2004, 2007, 2011, or 2016. When you have over a million players using your game, there are going to be things that happen that you never thought of, or bugs you never found. Graphical displays are one of those things. The fact that the development team is looking to make changes in Patch 1.2 is amazing, First Quarter ends in March, so that means we'll see the changes soon. In the meantime, the game is still amazing, awesome story lines, and great systems.

 

More and more is going to be put into the game. It doesn't happen magically, and BioWare takes extra time to make sure they give us something that is going to work

 

While I applaud your patience, you're missing the bigger picture. They were misleading. Intentionally. People have been saying since the Weekend Stress Tests that something funky was going on with textures.

 

Here's the timeline of events:

 

- Beautiful footage shown throughout development

- Long term Beta testing with high res textures

- High Res textures disabled/removed/whatever

- Weekend Stress Tests Begin

- People say "What's going on? Game looks like crap? HELLO?! Anyone out there?!?"

- Game launches, credit cards are charged

- 25 of the free 30 days go by

- Some bullsh*t post completely lacking any form of apology comes out a week before the free month is up saying, essentially "Yeah, there's no hi res. Sorry. We'll work on that."

 

This would be acceptable if the entire world wasn't in HD. Even American cable has a mandatory number of HD channels available. Low Res is not acceptable at all. Not on any medium that you're being charged for.

Edited January 12, 2012 by Stigas

[Tiaa]

The user should decide what PC performance is enjoyable for them, not have Bioware dictate what is good for them. This and withholding the textures you advertised with the game is strictly treading on the grounds of false advertisment.

 

I personally consider this to be on terms with deceptive practices and this is why there are laws for consumer protection.

 

As such:

 

If you [bioware] were aware you would not be able to provide the high-resolution textures (and if you expect me to believe you were not, think again.) but still showed these high-resolution textures at gaming conventions, magazine articles and the likes etc., then you purposely have been deceiving users.

 

You can try to "talk" around the issue and make empty excuses and/or promises, but that will only get you so far as you have been notorious for "talk".

 

On a side note:

 

Stephen Reid has already told those of us on Reddit he has no power, control or authority whatsoever in regards to how this game is developed so his input is voided completely.

 

He is only here to sit in the hot seat, which I hope everyone understands is not fair to him also.

Edited January 12, 2012 by Tiaa

[nilssen]

To those of you saying let us decide, we know what we're talking about, you don't. Unless you worked for BioWare and wrote and tested the code, you don't know how well your computer's going to handle it, no matter how high end it is. If BioWare just gave us high res textures, people would enable them and start complaining their FPS is too low to actually play the game, which is worse than dealing with graphics that aren't high res.

I'm sorry bud, but the fact that you're buying this and defending their statement discredits you in every single way.

 

There's a reason we're all playing on computers and not consoles. It's due to the freedom of choice, and tinkering with the graphics plays a big part in that.

 

And when a game promotes decent graphics throughout the entire beta, then dumbs it down and strips you of the choice to utilize them once the game goes live, surely you understand why we feel cheated. Come on now, drop the fanboi act, we're well past that now.

Edited January 12, 2012 by nilssen