Is this the same Alpha that Lord British played?

I actually tend to agree with most of what you've said here, except the 300M. The reality is one of these 'blockbuster' games can typically be developed for less than 100M but regardless it's a pre-alpha release. This product is not indicative of a final release for production and should not be taken in that way. The people complaining about the graphics need to go back and look at what the development team asked us to test. I've not seen a place where they asked us to explain how we feel about graphics or textures. The test build had finite goals for testing and the graphics were just there... If we compare to the initial development of World of Warcraft which had something on the order of 70M for its budget should we expect the same level of game? I should think not...

I personally have no qualms with the graphics but there are going to be some people who will want more... that's the way it always goes.

 

Honestly, given that it's pre-alpha Release 1 (note the screenshot of Path of Exile in the same timeframe), the graphics are actually not bad at all. The foliage on trees and plants are very well done (and I consider myself a stickler on this as I HATED 3d graphics back in the days of trees and bushes being portrayed as cardboard cutouts in an X shape). Most of the textures hold up well (aside from Blurry Mountain the Volcano) both at a distance and up close, and other than tweaking the character models, those are very close as well.

And all of that is BEFORE any smoothing has been done or effects added in by video card post-processing (such as anti-aliasing and so forth). It's not LotRO on the highest end DX11 card turned all the way up, but whoever expected it to be in R1 was probably the same type expecting R1 to be the full release of the game.

The $300Mill number got thrown around, but even that is a bit of a mistake. In the last Pen of the Avatar with Stephen and Lum, they mentioned that just video segments such as intros by higher end companies can run more than $1Mill per minute. Then add in the cost of well known voice actors such as Steve Blum and company.

What happens is these "AAA" blow the budget on those two things and leave you with garbage in between.

That to me is mainly due to mismanagement than to any concept that graphics and gameplay are somehow "on a slider" directly opposing each other.

 

RG is like Bill Gates. The game on his desk is several years ahead of the game on your desk.

I think too that the pre-alpha release 1 was targeted at specific things they wanted us to stress test. Conversation, inventory, decorating, logging onto the server, creating characters, the basic stuff. Richard is playing a much larger part of the game and if you notice, he even states that his version doesn't have the full combat mechanic installed as of yet.

When you can snatch the stone from Richards hand you will be worthy of New Britannia.

 

You're right, and the 300mil was just a number I pulled out of my butt. Just trying to illustrate the point that we shouldn't try and make unrealistic demands of a company, when even AAA titles struggle to accomplish the same tasks. I myself was very impressed with the graphics, even not being smoothed out yet they looked amazing to me.

I think we as a gamer base are starting to feel over entitled. We demand each new game to be 10x better than the last, yet we are impatient for them to produce a finished product and we complain at even the slightest graphical error or bug. I think people should be forced to play a MUD or learn how amazing UO was despite its lack of technological features and graphics. Then maybe we will stop busting the proverbial balls of each company. Again, IMHO of course.

Let's try and remember this: who the Hell has EVER wanted to play an RPG or Sandbox and put graphics in their top five want list? People would be setting fire to FFVII right now and UO would have shut down in 2003.

 

I can completely agree with you here. And I didn't mean to make it sound as if it was impossible for the "slider" to not be there. It's just the sad fact it typically is because you'll get things like SWtoR. It is by FAR the coolest game in terms of the cut scenes, voice acting and the graphics are amazing. Yet, it's probably the worst MMO released in 10 years by a major company. They focus too much on graphics, spend their budget/time on it, and they run out of the resources (or time) to make the game any good. So from the almost get-go it appears as if the teams decide if they want the most pleasing looking game, or focus on gameplay.

WoW is the king of this, it's graphics suck. They are cartoon graphics. BUT! they work, they are "good enough", and they put so much effort into gameplay that it's been the King of MMOs since its release. If they would have allocated more and more of their team to making it look better, that's less of a team they would have had to make the game as amazing as it is/was.

That's all I mean by it, I was not attempting to argue.

P.S. "between $150 million and $200 million" is how much SWtoR is rumored to have cost. Mindblowing amount of money for such a terrible game... Then again, EA.

 

After spending so much time on the argument over on the UHall, it's kind of a knee jerk reaction for me as well, so my apologies there. But I think that has to do more with a certain segment of the UO player base as much as it does EA "management".

If R1 is "rough"... I think "polished" is going to look and play quite amazing.

 

Fear not, I've spent much time on stratics, so I myself am use to it also. I just didn't want you thinking I was attacking you or anything. I often come across as trying to cause an argument when I don't mean to.

I'm not very knowledgeable with Unity or anything, and I know they can purchase some structures and whatnot from the Unity store. Wouldn't that put a limit on how well the graphics become anyways? Since it's prepackaged items? Forgive me if I'm dead wrong though.

Also, don't take me wrong either, I'm super happy with the graphics now, and how they were able to produce so much in such little time due to the program.