Guild Wars 2

GW2 needs a new graphics engine, as the current one is looking very old and dated. I really want to see cleaner sharper lighting and the addition of ambient occlusion shadows. Overall, I want it to look more like an Unreal Engine 4 game—something next gen looking .

Also, on a related note, I want to see the current messy UI graphics get overhauled and be replaced with a cleaner sharper one. I know it was orginally trying to go for a unique style, but in reality it just looks lazy and low budget. Even GW1 did the UI graphics better.

I hope we can see such an update after the GW2 Heart of Thorns expansion.

NOTE: I already run GW2 on max graphics at 1920×1200 on a pro IPS monitor.

Then you might just wanna go on Elder Scrolls Online.

i think you need a good GPU
i run a Radeon R9 270x iceQ2 turbo and the game looks amazing on full

here a vid for any that have a GTX 970
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNj5p_Ocd7g

but sure there will be always mmorpg with better graphics ea year more powerful eng are made but it cost to much time and money for Anet to build 1
but GW2 can easy go face to face lets say tera online np

i dont see GW2 as a low buget mmorpg

Bloodlust.3672:

GW2 needs a new graphics engine, as the current one is looking very old and dated. I really want to see cleaner sharper lighting and the addition of ambient occlusion shadows. Overall, I want it to look more like an Unreal Engine 4 game—something next gen looking .

Also, on a related note, I want to see the current messy UI graphics get overhauled and be replaced with a cleaner sharper one. I know it was orginally trying to go for a unique style, but in reality it just looks lazy and low budget. Even GW1 did the UI graphics better.

I hope we can see such an update after the GW2 Heart of Thorns expansion.

NOTE: I already run GW2 on max graphics at 1920×1200 on a pro IPS monitor.

Updating the graphics engine is usually so costly in terms of resources it usually only happens when there’s a new game (and even then, some sequels reuse the previous engine). The game is 3-years old; I expect it to have 2012 graphics, not 2015.

I heard real life has a pretty good graphics engine. I personally play games for gameplay. Not graphics. Almost anyone does, that’s why cs:go, lol, wow, etc.. are the most popular games.

I however do agree that the UI is a bit messy if you compare it to gw1.

anet needs to at least tweak the lighting on some maps, of which look atrocious with excess bloom, such as the heart of the mists. on the other hand, there are some good maps with nice balanced lighting, such as the lion’s arch [after the destruction]. GW2’s lighting on all maps needs to look more consistently good like lion’s arch.

Dawnbreaker.6215:

Then you might just wanna go on Elder Scrolls Online.

I played ESO and I think the results of the graphics engine are much better than in GW2. However: For “artistic quality” and the “rest of the game” I like GW2 much more.

The wish to have a better graphics engine in GW2 is legit. But the chances that GW2 gets a new or better graphics engine or that the existing graphics/game-engine will support DX11 etc.. are not very high in my opinion.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

The game is 3-years old; I expect it to have 2012 graphics, not 2015.

Even when the game was new the graphics engine was not “state of the art” or “best in slot”.

The “artistic quality” of the environment/maps/etc was and is great. But not the graphics engine itself.

GW2 character details do look great, but the environment details are very weak and are a major visual drawback

Maybe it’s just that I came from WoW to GW2, but I find the environment gorgeous and well detailed here. Not the same as in ESO, no, but I believe it’s an aesthetic choice on the part of ANet to go for a more painted, mildly impressionistic look instead of hard edges and stark contrasts.

The Tyrian landscape looks plenty real to me. Maybe since the real world is also generally a bit fuzzy to my myopic eyes, glasses notwithstanding?

The game like GW1 was designed for very low system specs, so people with older computers could run it still.

I actually prefer the GW2 UI over the GW1 UI. The GW1 UI looks amateurish in comparison.

As for GW2’s graphics. I think they look fine. The only thing I’d like to see added is SSAO. Right now I’ve added SSAO through the Nvidia control panel, but the SSAO added by Nvidia is barely noticeable.

This entire thread is just an “i want” thread based off your own opinion, which not that many people share to be honest.

Does it need it? no

Will it get one? probably not

does anyone really care? just you…

Donari.5237:

Maybe it’s just that I came from WoW to GW2, but I find the environment gorgeous and well detailed here. Not the same as in ESO, no, but I believe it’s an aesthetic choice on the part of ANet to go for a more painted, mildly impressionistic look instead of hard edges and stark contrasts.

The Tyrian landscape looks plenty real to me. Maybe since the real world is also generally a bit fuzzy to my myopic eyes, glasses notwithstanding?

That may be because going WoW→GW2 is like going from Doom to Crysis in terms of technology, lol.

GW2 doesnt need a new graphics engine.
GW3 certainly does though.

With a modern engine we could have quite amazing stuff, such as full vehicle-on-vehicle physics. Think Charr tanks, airships with 20+ players on them and regular ships with even more players blasting their cannons at each other on a physically modeled sea. All the zones could be just a single map, no loading areas. You could see from LA to DR if you climbed high enough. They could make the game on a whole different scale.

But seriously, its not going to happen in GW2. Because you know what would happen if they made GW2 with a new graphics engine? Absolutely nothing at all. It’d look exactly the same. Best case scenario, you’ll get better performance. Because the engine only drives the game. An engine can only support features, it doesnt magically create them when you slap a new engine onto a game. Features you have to make. Which take years. Its called making a new game.

All it takes is a decent sweetfx profile to fix everything wrong with how the game looks. Demanding that they redo everything in the game because you don’t like how it looks is a bit ridiculous.

gw2 needs a lot of stuff, but better graphics is not one of them. It would be good of course, but definitely not needed.

Wow, this game already looks ten times better than any other MMO out there except Tera and people always just want more no matter what.

Its an MMO, it can’t have the same graphics as an FPS. It lags enough already.

You think WoW looks as bad as it does after all this time because its dated? No, Blizzard could easily afford to replace its graphics engine entirely. Easily! But they don’t because it wouldn’t be able to handle the amount of players on-screen.

Its less about GPU and more about CPU overhead. People automatically think that having a powerful GPU is a fix for all issues, but it doesn’t work that way. There’s major threading issues and CPU bottlenecking under the hood. The more objects on the screen the more your CPU load no matter how much you offload to the GPU, because at some point you have to actually process those objects. And every command that you make to the GPU and all the textures, vertex lists, shader code, etc. that you upload to it are all CPU-bound, because they are handled by the driver.

If its hard to understand, just consider that your graphics driver is made from CPU code. It can tell the GPU to do something, but the very process of it doing that consumes CPU on top of the game, and due to how threads work, it isn’t as easy as just offloading it to another core due to asynchronous data access problems.

More or less MMO engines have to follow the same restrictions as RTS engines, in contrast to an FPS which only has to support maybe ten players.

The only thing GW2 could do to max your graphics card even more than it already does (given that it is already 100% vertex and pixel shader based), would be to support screen space ambient occlusion or SSAO. Although it already has its own form of albedo (solar radiance), so it wouldn’t make much of a difference.

^ These issues can be avoided entirely by implementing Dx11/12 renderer. Although when I made a thread asking for it, some guys decided that it’s a genius idea to talk to me about marketing and economics and I’m like whaaaaaa ?!? this game barely works on 50vs50 and that is a real problem and those guys are giving me economics lessons? <o>

It’s not just the graphics renderer that seems wrong, a lot of other things are just weird.

Like how they can’t support Mac natively and have to use a Windows emulation layer like Cider to make it work? Do they program gameplay directly against the Win32 API to make it such an unsurmountable task to support non-Windows platforms without Cider? It’s against all software engineering good practices to mix platform-specific API calls with the business logic. Normally you’d “just” have to port the renderer to OpenGL and you would be 90% done.

Another one is how they embedded a full HTML renderer in the engine for the trade post. Really? Why not just a simple RESTful web service for fetching and sending data and render the UI natively? The trade post UI feels very sluggish right now…

Yeah, I’d like them to rewrite their engine, but the graphics engine’s woes is just half the story.

no-no-no the graphics are fine, the problem is just the lack of support by Anet for headjacks (bio data ports). Comon Anet, get on the ball!

Ravenmoon.5318:

^ These issues can be avoided entirely by implementing Dx11/12 renderer. Although when I made a thread asking for it, some guys decided that it’s a genius idea to talk to me about marketing and economics and I’m like whaaaaaa ?!? this game barely works on 50vs50 and that is a real problem and those guys are giving me economics lessons? <o>

No, it can’t. DirectX 11 is thread-safe, but that doesn’t automatically make the game engine fully thread safe from the ground up. It doesn’t mean that the rest of the engine can accomplish tasks asynchronously without sufficient locking.

DirectX 9 in its own thread is about the same performance-wise as DirectX 11/12. And the game already fully offloads DX9 without the -dx9single option passed to it.

Graphics engine =/= game engine.

To put it more simply, imagine that your game code is running on one CPU, and your graphics code is running on another CPU. At some point you have to synchronize with the graphics code so that you can pass the coordinates, animation properties, etc. of each object in the game code (often called “actors”) to that thread.

During this time, both threads freeze if they try to access the same data asynchronously, and only continue when the data access is finished.

Solutions to these problems require the engine to support it from the start. Using a different graphics API just means that you can access the graphics API from all threads safely. That’s useful if you’re trying to render from two or more threads, but your game code is always running on a single CPU due to network synchronization and timing and thus at some point you will always lock on the game data.

Well the game engine isn’t going to change. But certainly the UI is poor, the particle (weapon) effects need serious toning down (slider option) and things like 3d support (rift/sbs options etc) are going to be needed very soon with kit arriving this year.

I think the game looks fantastic as it is. Sure it’s not the most hyper-realistic graphics you can get, even in an MMO, but it’s beautiful. (See below.)

And because a lot of that is down to the art style rather than simply making the most realistic graphics they could manage on the most powerful engine they could get upgrading the engine is unlikely to achieve much without them also going through and re-designing every single object in the game to make use of the new engine.

On the plus side past experience suggests that it also means the game is likely to age better than many which go for realistic graphics.

For a quick and easy extreme example look at Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker. OoT was amazing when it first came out, it may be hard to believe today but people could not stop talking about how good it looked. These days even when reviewing the updated re-releases journalists will urge players to look past the graphics to appreciate everything else the game has to offer.

Wind Waker on the other hand was somewhat controversial at first for the extremely cartoony, cel shaded look. But these days no one makes any apologies for it, it looks nearly as good by modern standards as it did when it was released.

And for an MMO which (hopefully) many people will still be playing in 10 or 15 years time that’s important.

Sandpit.3467:

things like 3d support (rift/sbs options etc) are going to be needed very soon with kit arriving this year.

Yeah dk2 is looking pretty good. Some pretty nice titles lining up for it. Whiplash!

When i compare this game to other mmo’s out there, and esp to those i’ve played before, this still looks pretty awesome.
I’m running this on a Core i5-16Gb ram-ssd512 and a Gtx 970/4G, on triple screen setup. The only time i have some lag is on worldbosses when there’s a LOT of players on. Other then that the game runs smooth everywhere, no hickups, no glitches.
Oh, and everything is maxed on my system.

Daywolf.2630:

Sandpit.3467:

things like 3d support (rift/sbs options etc) are going to be needed very soon with kit arriving this year.

Yeah dk2 is looking pretty good. Some pretty nice titles lining up for it. Whiplakitten

o bad the requirements are so high but it is a high end add-on after all.

• NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
• Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
• 8GB+ RAM
• Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
• 2x USB 3.0 ports
• Windows 7 SP1 or newer

Daywolf.2630:

Sandpit.3467:

things like 3d support (rift/sbs options etc) are going to be needed very soon with kit arriving this year.

Yeah dk2 is looking pretty good. Some pretty nice titles lining up for it. Whiplakitten

To bad the requirements are so high but it is a high end add-on after all.

• NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
• Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
• 8GB+ RAM
• Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
• 2x USB 3.0 ports
• Windows 7 SP1 or newer

Danikat.8537:

I think the game looks fantastic as it is. Sure it’s not the most hyper-realistic graphics you can get, even in an MMO, but it’s beautiful. (See below.)

And because a lot of that is down to the art style rather than simply making the most realistic graphics they could manage on the most powerful engine they could get upgrading the engine is unlikely to achieve much without them also going through and re-designing every single object in the game to make use of the new engine.

On the plus side past experience suggests that it also means the game is likely to age better than many which go for realistic graphics.

For a quick and easy extreme example look at Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker. OoT was amazing when it first came out, it may be hard to believe today but people could not stop talking about how good it looked. These days even when reviewing the updated re-releases journalists will urge players to look past the graphics to appreciate everything else the game has to offer.

Wind Waker on the other hand was somewhat controversial at first for the extremely cartoony, cel shaded look. But these days no one makes any apologies for it, it looks nearly as good by modern standards as it did when it was released.

And for an MMO which (hopefully) many people will still be playing in 10 or 15 years time that’s important.

The art direction is ultimately what makes a game look good, but you need to give the artists the mean to make it look good, and that’s the role of the engine programmers.

That’s the thing I find paradoxal with Arenanet. I think they have the best artists in the industry (after maybe the ones behind Assassin’s Creed games but that’s close) and I regret not having purchased the art book at launch because I think it’s a collector’s item now, but the engine that Arenanet gives their artists to work with is (or at least looks) abysmal.

Also, I disagree with your Zelda analogy. The reason why games from the 1995-2000 era such as Ocarina of Time or Super Mario 64 look ugly is because those games were created when 3D graphics just began becoming mainstream so they had a very low poly count. But if you look at the games with pre-rendered 2D graphics from that era like Diablo II, Starcraft or the prerendered backgrounds from FF7-8-9 they still look great. (Pixelated because of the media, but they still look great.) Heck even Donkey Kong Country still looks good. And today the realtime graphics look better than the prerendered 2D graphics of that era, so I don’t think people will look at current gen games and think they’re ugly.

Behellagh.1468:

Daywolf.2630:

Sandpit.3467:

things like 3d support (rift/sbs options etc) are going to be needed very soon with kit arriving this year.

Yeah dk2 is looking pretty good. Some pretty nice titles lining up for it. Whiplakitten

To bad the requirements are so high but it is a high end add-on after all.

• NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
• Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
• 8GB+ RAM
• Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
• 2x USB 3.0 ports
• Windows 7 SP1 or newer

Runs on lower specs, also depends on the game like with any system.
From their QA FAQ:

Minimum requirements: A computer running a Windows 7 or Windows 8, Mac OS 10.8 or higher, or Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating system, 2 USB ports (at least one powered), and a DVI-D or HDMI graphics output.

Recommended specifications: A desktop computer running a dedicated graphics card with DVI-D or HDMI graphics output, with capability of running current generation 3D games at 1080p resolution at 75fps or higher.

Also from their forums in regards to running it on a laptop:
“GTX 560M – 2GB VRAM (2 Generations ago) + Core i7 – 2.9GHz (2 generations ago) + 12GB RAM – Runs mostly everything fine, nothing to worry about.” https://forums.oculus.com/viewtopic.php?t=11773

And runs on lower specs than that as you can see.

It’s their recommended requirements, I’m not making this up.

https://www.oculus.com/blog/the-rifts-recommended-spec-pc-sdk-0-6-released-and-mobile-vr-jam-voting/

Behellagh.1468:

It’s their recommended requirements, I’m not making this up.

https://www.oculus.com/blog/the-rifts-recommended-spec-pc-sdk-0-6-released-and-mobile-vr-jam-voting/

Yeah “recommended”, not required. My laptop doesn’t meet the recommended specs to run gw2, but it does just fine (my desktop does better). Max graphics settings or lower here with gw2, it’s not an issue for me. Usually user feedback gives a better idea of minimum to acceptable requirements, which I did link to an example. But for individual games, you would need to do your research as with any PC game you buy.

Other games:
Create a character → walk into different lighting → character now looks terrible

GW2:
Create a character → walk into different lighting → character still looks good, sometimes better

I’m all for better graphics, but for the love of Dwayna do NOT screw this up ^ ^ ^

DarkWasp.7291:

Other games:
Create a character -> walk into different lighting -> character now looks terrible

GW2:
Create a character -> walk into different lighting -> character still looks good, sometimes better

I’m all for better graphics, but for the love of Dwayna do NOT screw this up ^ ^ ^

Signed.

I may have concerns about aspects of the game but its appearanceis not one of them. By MMO standards its gorgeous.

Well there are the spoiled photorealistic players with the hardware that other game engines can render individual dust is rays of sunlight which adds nothing to the actual gameplay. Pretty if you have the time to look at it.

A new engine would be good only if oriented to a less gpu/cpu demanding, in my opinion.

You can install GemFX or SweetFX and play around with many graphics settings or get a preset.

I have attached a screenshot with one of the settings I tested.

Heavy real-looking engines are not good yet to mmo’s… would turn the game nearly unplayable… let’s see how Black Desert will behave. ESO has another artistic style, but lets face it… GW2 is tons ahead in overall… ESO movement feels blocky, robotic and strange…

HAve a nice time around!

Has nothing to do with network speed and everything to do with CPU performance and possibly server performance. Network usage is well under 100 kilobytes per second in zergs or boss events and is under 10KB/s for just running through a map.

here 2 pics with some light effects
and really i don’t see any problems the game looks amazing and sharp

so for pll that QQ that this game is outdated you really need a better GPU
or just quit the game very easy

i think this game looks pretty awesome actually

problem with engine updates is that they are very costy, don’t really change fun factor of game, cause a lot of bugs and cut certain part of players from game because their pc can’t run it anymore

go do world boss events or do zerg vs zerg in wvw, a lot of people complain about 1 fps

The game looks really good, in my opinion.

Personally, I think the UI could be updated a bit. Although the “painted” theme is fitting with the initial GW2 style, to me it looks unfinished, like they were using everything as placeholders until they get something better. I wouldn’t mind seeing an updated UI.

I think the overall graphics are pretty good. The in game post processing is pretty horrible though. I turned it off cause I couldn’t stand to look at it. I use sweetfx for that now.

What I really would like and it is probably never going to happen is a DX11 64 bit client so the game can utilize resources more efficiently.

Sweetfx oe gemfx is what youre looking for

Are you idiot it already laggs for the most people in the new areas even on good pcs and you want them to make it for better? they will 100% kill the game if they do it WoW is the top because it plays even on bad PCs the other mmos are all dead because they require high end pcs

Hannelore.8153:

Ravenmoon.5318:

^ These issues can be avoided entirely by implementing Dx11/12 renderer. Although when I made a thread asking for it, some guys decided that it’s a genius idea to talk to me about marketing and economics and I’m like whaaaaaa ?!? this game barely works on 50vs50 and that is a real problem and those guys are giving me economics lessons? <o>

No, it can’t. DirectX 11 is thread-safe, but that doesn’t automatically make the game engine fully thread safe from the ground up. It doesn’t mean that the rest of the engine can accomplish tasks asynchronously without sufficient locking.

DirectX 9 in its own thread is about the same performance-wise as DirectX 11/12. And the game already fully offloads DX9 without the -dx9single option passed to it.

Graphics engine =/= game engine.

To put it more simply, imagine that your game code is running on one CPU, and your graphics code is running on another CPU. At some point you have to synchronize with the graphics code so that you can pass the coordinates, animation properties, etc. of each object in the game code (often called “actors”) to that thread.

During this time, both threads freeze if they try to access the same data asynchronously, and only continue when the data access is finished.

Solutions to these problems require the engine to support it from the start. Using a different graphics API just means that you can access the graphics API from all threads safely. That’s useful if you’re trying to render from two or more threads, but your game code is always running on a single CPU due to network synchronization and timing and thus at some point you will always lock on the game data.

Let’s agree to disagree. The API implementation on the driver’s side makes all the difference. This is what DirectX12/Vulkan are trying to get away with (and adding more “closer to the metal” access).

It’s the driver’s implementation that uses only 1 CPU core for all your rendering calls. And well it can’t be any other way because the driver has no knowledge how your game works. Thus GPU vendors release drivers with specific game logic every time an AAA title hits. (Which still isn’t perfect but better than default for sure)

Many things you’ve said are already asynchronous and its pretty evident while you play the game. Many objects (or “actors”) are not rendered until they are ready. Which is all great and whatnot but there’s a real physical limitation using the Dx9 API, which was made a little over 10 years ago when the best CPU for the job was the AMD Athlon 64. The times when AMD was THE king of performance and Pentium 4 was a joke. This API cannot utilize the underlying hardware properly. Fact. Countless benchmarks prove that point.

Which is easily observable. Your system dips below 60 fps but your hardware is not really stressed. Nah. My R9 290X barely heats up. And we all know that this particular GPU has heat issues (yes i rushed and bought the reference board which heats up like crazy (overclocked at that), i hate myself for this xD)

Network code has nothing to do with how the game behaves when there is large scale combat. Its the inability of the graphics engine to take advantage of the hardware. Which has a lot to do with the graphics API and its implementation. Gw2 is really pushing it.

or are you planning to eventually move to DX11? Right now this game is so badly optimized it hurts…

Now that would be a good reasson to buy a 100$ expansion, having the game on Dx12 running efficiently along all CPU cores, not the mini Rytlock.

My answer, probably yes.

Why, because even without knowing the internals of their engine I can tell you it would be a lot of work. It could even be technically impossible for them to do it depending on what sort of dependencies their existing content has.

The big fail was that they sticked to this old dx version in the first place. They at least should’ve considered DX10 during development of the original game…

Rampage.7145:

Now that would be a good reasson to buy a 100$ expansion, having the game on Dx12 running efficiently along all CPU cores, not the mini Rytlock.

But then people will start to cry that ANet have also to include a free copy
of Windows 10 .. because its unfair to give them a game with something that
they can’t use.

Oh .. and all people who have already bought Win10 want their money back
from ANet .. lol

There are no plans to upgrade to a newer API because a lot of people is still running this game in Windows XP, so the maximum API they can support is DX9.

Also, only changing the API wouldn’t completely solve the optimization problem, Nowadays biggest problem is in heavy situations where tons of calculations need to be done by the cpu.
Game engine also needs a deep revision, which could take months or even years to refine, and in a game which is changing constantly, it’s even more difficult.