ravenshrike said:
I'm not even gonna point out that you were the one who brought up e-peen. Well, I suppose I just did.
I was trying to give you an out from a ridiculous statement, guy. I believe the only way someone could say TOR looks better than Rift, with a straight face, is if he/she plays on a mediocre computer. If you turn down all of Rift's settings, it starts to look more like Star Wars. At that point, if you prefer the TOR aesthetic, I can see how you might view it as the visually superior game. But that's the only instance, really.
More importantly, you showcase the nicest looking dungeon, even though gameplay wise it probably sucked the most, vs the first flashpoint where no one has any nifty abilities worth mentioning from a 6 month old beta vid, using a 7-8 month old beta build.
Gameplay-wise? Why do you keep injecting other factors into the discussion?
These videos were among the earliest high-res results I could find for both games using a random youtube search.
Course, there's the fact that constant floaty particle effects have little to do with the star wars universe and light constantly floating around your character would look stupid in the context of star wars.
As someone who never watched the Cartoon Network CGI animated series, I think the entire SWTOR aesthetic looks pretty out of place in the Star Wars universe. As someone else pointed out, The Force Unleashed is a far better example of what a current-gen SW game should look like - you know, actual texture work and detail, and character models that aren't woefully exaggerated and cartoonish.
I also won't mention that the The Old Republic's foliage looks nicer than that, as do the environments. Hoth from the top of Highmount looks better than anything I saw in Rift. Then there's the fact that if you look at individual animations, like the SCs lightning, it's not any better than than the Inquisitor's lightning. The engine could easily push that many particle effects, and in the heat of pvp warzones sometimes does, but they are not a common part of the game because they make zero sense context wise. Whereas in Rift you're a superzombie who when they were alive was at the top of their game already and get a big boost from eldritch forces. Well ,at least if you played Defiant, which had the only storyline worth a damn. The Guardian storyline made me want to kill myself. Fucking busybody gods.
You're bringing a lot of narrative elements into a graphics discussion...
I'm not talking about the raw number of particle effects. I'm talking about the fact that the light saber and lightning effects in TOR are simplistic and relatively weak. It's a very cartoonish aesthetic, which is great and all, but I'm not going to pretend it doesn't take loads of pressure off the texture design and the graphics in general. I also think it's a rather vanilla and boring aesthetic - especially when the character models are so plain.
No point debating this, I suppose. I just think there are way, way more people on my side of the fence here. And that's even with blind license-induced fanboyism coloring everything in favor of TOR.
