Goblin Squad Member
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@ Frawan
Your concerns are about things this demo is not meant to demonstrate. It already served its purpose as a pitch to investors, and it worked.
The middleware has nothing to do with how the spells looked, all animations/effects will be done by GW, the middleware is the 'game engine' which is a tool to bring together models, animations, particle effects, and code together.
Fancy graphics is something only a few MMO's do, and they are backed by big studios. Earthrise was the last low budget MMO that tried to look fancy, and it flopped due to poor game performance, due to horrible optimization. The graphics in the demo are right where I would expect them to be in the release. The animations and physics were obviously not a big focus in the demo video, they will be better in the actual game.
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The game engine looked decent. The grass, mountains, buildings, etc don't look all that bad. Actually, the game looks a lot like DDO. I hope they are improved as time in development goes on. I don't need high intense graphics. I just think they were nothing special. At least with the graphics as they are it looks like more people will be able to actually join and play the game instead of people with killer systems. I am fine with that.
The goblins and the paper dolls of the pathfinder "royalty" characters look a little wierd. Animations seem clunky. I hope that can be tweaked. I can deal with certain things. Just hope in time to see more of how characters will run, attack, etc. Not sure I like the animations so far.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I have a question concerning the environment; perhaps Dave Dawson (Environmental Artist) can answer it?
It has previously been discussed that the scale of buildings in settlements will be condensed so there is a more efficient and active use of space. I presume it also helps keep the graphical requirements down? So things such as doors or bridges will tend to be wider than normal to allow players easy passage and this is again another example of modifying the dimensions for gameplay purposes. That's all fine, as long as settlements still look mightily impressive, function fantastically for player's interaction purposes.
Preamble aside, my question is, how epic in scale will the outdoor environment likewise be?
For eg, in the tech demo the trees look like a generic type (which speeds up things I imagine). But the scale of them looks too small. If I am running around in a forest, I'd prefer the trees to be a lot bigger and more epic and to feel there is a strong sense of being lost easily. And likewise, I'd really like to see Mountains and ranges to be truly awe-inspiring. I think Skyrim or Oblivion had some very impressive ranges and open-world feel for eg. Obviously rendering all these things has a cost to it, but I think a lot of mmorpgs end up losing a sense of awe because the trees or cities are not as expansive and huge as you might find. The trees or hills actually look more like models you'd use in a wargame using miniatures: Fine as place-holders and use with rules of those games, but in a 3d environment I'd expect much more topographical variation and altitude - one of the few good things in the LOTR films that they capture imo.
tl;dr: Environments more like Skyrim/Oblivion of awe-inspiring open-world in scale.