Wait… what??? It wasn’t completely, overwhemingly obvious to him that this would be a problem before release? Hilarious.
Also…
Vanguard’s art is hideous, like Oblivion’s. Yeah both use all the fancy stuff in your GPU and yeah the outdoor terrain/plant stuff that is largely procedurally generated all looks impressive, but everything that involves actual art design is terrible.
Oblivion isn’t that bad, in my opinion. A bit generic, but not bad. Other than the trademark Bethesda we-can’t-do-faces faces.
Oblivion’s art isn’t remotely “hideous.” Actually, the design of the cities is generally good and the Ayleid ruins are gorgeous. The human faces are bad, but a lot of the monster designs are good, particularly the goblins.
Calling Oblivion’s art “terrible” is sheer hyperbole in my opinion. There’s a lot of damn good design in that game.
Oblivion’s design is good… for me to poop on!
Oblivion’s art is actually very good (buildings, equipment, dungeons), with some parts that are hideous (characters, animations) and others that are borrowed and today feeling repetitive as they are shared between a bunch of other titles (the trees and vegetation in general, part of SpeedTree).
The terrain overall look is quite bad, world design is bad. But the dungeons can be truly amazing.
In Oblivion is the engine to suck balls. NetImmerse/Gamebryo has always been awful with memory managment, performance and a bunch of other glitches never addressed. Since Morrowind and DAoC.
Sadly you cannot even compare it with other engines, as there are none decent that are used for similar sights (Gothic 3 is Oblivion-like, but technically pathetic).
No one is actually building good engines anymore. There’s a whole lot of licensing and very few groups of devs building good engines. WoW cannot be compared to next-gen effects, of course, but the way it renders the terrain is unparalleled (the way everything looks smooth and detailed, the way the terrain is modeled, that is bound to the engine, the lighting and so on).
Btw, the faces are awful because they are also ran on a third party engine.
There’s very little “Bethesda” in Oblivion. The vegetation is SpeedTree, faces are FaceGen, the physics is Havok and the rest of the engine is Gamebryo.
Part of Oblivion prettiness and good screenshots is mostly because the scenes are crowded.
The terrain in WoW is like poop. Shiny, plastic-coated, hardened poop with moss on.
Oblivion actually looks great both outside and inside. Play with heads off for best looks.
Huh? Oblivion’s terrain looks a lot less smooth than WoW. This is not a matter of taste or art. Oblivion’s terrain is much more “angled” and the texture blurs to a puddle as the LOD kicks in.
They also mostly use one texture only for the grass that has a quite horrible tiling effect, and it’s also a bit too “fluorescent” in color. That’s also why Oblivion looks best at dawn or dusk, when colors are a bit more dim and realistic.
Smooth is bad. The real world isn’t all that smooth. WoW terrain is over-shadered,
and much more of an eyesore to me.
WoW definitely has issues with overly smooth terrain. It’s fine on plains, but mountains really have the evil-heightmap look going for them.
Gothic, now–Gothic has nice mountains. Not particularly large ones, but they’re appropriately craggy.
I don’t think you’re giving enough credit to some of the other art assets. Look for obvious hard edges in Oblivion, like bricks with infinitesimal seems. You’ll be hard pressed to find them because of the excellent modeling/texture work. That’s one of the things that really impressed me. If you look really closely you’ll see how many of the models were constructed to fake realistic edges without being realistic, but it’s still better than a lot of games. However, it could just be a case of selective memory on my part.
Edit: Removed a concession you made in a prior post, that’s what I get for reading the thread backwards and not waiting to reply.