actually they did very well with the grafics, im impressed. last year at gamescom i was standing at the swtor stand with aura and we laughed 5 minutes about the grafics with others. how shitty they where, insane. now its realy good ! but what i saw first was during the comparision to other games: swtor was in hd and the other games not. but meh fanmade u said so i guess u cant expect more. tough the game shines more then others when its shown in hd and the others not. tl;dr: im impressed what they did with their grafics tbh
With AoC I think he meant at release, which was true tbh but screenshots did not do it justice (in fact somehow the screenshots changed the lighting). It's still very rough compared to faces in Mass Effect (where close-ups were also important), but at least you can differentiate the characters and seems people will look unique.
I think the biggest problem is screenshots don't really ever do justice to a game in movement, look at rift for example. Screenshot wise maybe it's comparable, in motion we all know how well that did.
Tbh I could really make awesome Screenshots in RIFT, the environments looked really good in some places and the characters (despite everyone looking the same) were quite decent looking from certain angles. It was actually the in-game motion that was less good. So yeah like you said , in AoC ingame was better, in RIFT out of game is definitely better.
Can't say I 100% agree with the fanboy-made clip here. But hopefully the graphics that matter the most and suck the most atm, the faces of people in cutscenes, will continue to be developed up until release.
This is why I don't understand why they went with a cartoony look, if you want to see details on close-ups you definitely don't want to have anything that blurs out complexion or emotions.
They went for the cartoony look for optimisation, they want you to be able to run SW:TOR in decent GFX mode on older PC's. What they have done is quite clever really. Because the Areas are planets and independent from each other, they have been able to create quite stunning backdrops that wont kill your old gfx card, which helps to compensate for the more cartoony character models.
Well, what is the problem with having an option of turning on all the bits and bobs or turning it off. They can just like EVE for example even allow you to use different rendering engines, yes extra work but Close-ups are important for them!
