I might be a POE shill but god the Graphics and Animations in D4 makes POE look like Trash

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TheAshmaker wrote:

The game looks really bad from the beta footage i saw streamed today. Poor UI design. Boring gameplay due to levels being extremely linear. Skills are not flashy and dont feel like they have impact. Weird sharpness although its player adjustable. Game has this grey pallet to everything that looks super weird.

Also the camera is super weird. They managed to make the game simultaneously look too zoomed in and zoomed out at the same time because the camera is actually zoomed in too much but character and enemy models are small and look like ants.

Shame. PoE desperately needed competition because this game is so bad since the 3.13 and 3.14 patches but oh well. I guess GGG is free to reign without making good decisions, content, balance changes, etc.

Some of the vfx is not enabled in the beta like some of the lighting you see in d2r - ziz pointed out or someone did on his stream.

I have been playing the beta and got my sorc to 25 and I can say that the level/world design, terrain traversal, and ambiance is next level tech. Some of the dungeons in D4 are gory and disgusting AF and that is by design. It has a true modern 3D feel between the character and the environment.

That said, I have been enjoying LE perhaps more than D4 and that game still has a ways to go in the vfx and character animation department. Considering the last patch of LE and what they started with, if they can make those same gains in the next major patch that team will catch up quickly.

I will say however that as much as I appreciate the new darkness of D4 that truly brings me back to D2, it is so good it's actually really depressing. I guess some people like that sort of thing but perhaps I got too old for it. I love the immersion but to an extent lol. So many hours of gore and depression, the mind can only take so much.

Diablo 1 was darker. Not just literally, though that did help quite a lot.

Graphic updates to D1 mostly ruin the atmosphere of the game and make it look like D2. Don't get me wrong, D2 had some gross and gore but it didn't give you quite the content dread D1 had.

The cell based lightning Diablo 1 used worked in it's favor much of the time in creating a consistently dark gothic atmosphere. D4 certainly tries to go back to this but I don't think players these days don't like being unable to see outside a very small light radius.

Ever use Gotterdamerung in D1? It's hilarious int two ways. Can't see a thing and high light radius is actually bad and causes enemies to aggro from further away to it actually helps.

Sound track helped a lot too.

there is no point to making threads like this until PoE2 comes out in beta, because you're comparing a game made by a few people from 2013 to a massive budget AAA game in 2023

There is only so much you can graphically improve in an existing game without doing a complete remake of it in a newer version of the engine or different engine altogether.

Yes GGG is a much bigger company now, and PoE2 will be the proof of that (hopefully).
They've already demonstrated tech like animation blending & destructible environments, and there will likely be a lot more graphical improvements.

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stalkingjackal wrote:

there is no point to making threads like this until PoE2 comes out in beta, because you're comparing a game made by a few people from 2013 to a massive budget AAA game in 2023

There is.

GGG uses an in-house engine which means they can update and add to it whenever they want. The fact they haven't is a strong point of criticism. Warframe is the same age and they still add new tech and open up the limits of what their engine can do.

There's also the Accessibility options. Text to speech, In-game voice chat, color blind mode, text size, closed captions, changing colors / size of overhead bars and layout of the UI.

Some of this was generally invluded with games even when PoE came out.

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Xzorn wrote:

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stalkingjackal wrote:

there is no point to making threads like this until PoE2 comes out in beta, because you're comparing a game made by a few people from 2013 to a massive budget AAA game in 2023

There is.

GGG uses an in-house engine which means they can update and add to it whenever they want. The fact they haven't is a strong point of criticism. Warframe is the same age and they still add new tech and open up the limits of what their engine can do.

There's also the Accessibility options. Text to speech, In-game voice chat, color blind mode, text size, closed captions, changing colors / size of overhead bars and layout of the UI.

Some of this was generally invluded with games even when PoE came out.

Using the same engine doesn't mean it's using the same rendering & animation systems.

I'm not sure about Warframe since I didn't play it. But I'm a game dev and been working with Unreal engine for many years, so I know it's a pain in the ass to update older projects to newer versions of the engine. Some graphical aspects are simple to update like environment art, sound etc. but some others like lighting, UI & level design are much harder to change without completely re-doing them from ground up.

So there is a certain range of improvement that can be done, but it is limited. For example, World of warcraft has been out for 20+ years - and the latest versions of WoW definitely look better than when it first came out - but they can never make it look like a next-gen game because that'd require building up from scratch. It is possible, but it'd have to be a different game - eg: how PoE2 will have the same classes but it will be completely new character models.

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stalkingjackal wrote:

Using the same engine doesn't mean it's using the same rendering & animation systems.

I'm not sure about Warframe since I didn't play it. But I'm a game dev and been working with Unreal engine for many years, so I know it's a pain in the ass to update older projects to newer versions of the engine.

I mean, that's kinda the point.

Rendering and animations are a decent part of what makes a game look / run good.

If you want PBR, add it. If you was 3d particles instead of sprite, add it. I've seen games use the same engine but look nothing alike over time. EverQuest is a good example of this or even Skyrim.

Skyrim is an example when the base engine rendering and functions aren't updated but damn near everything else is. It looks like a game from today but will keep your GPU nice and warm.

This looks to be what GGG has done. They're not really going back and writing new base code but instead pushing what they have further, like Skyrim. Still, I think GGG's biggest hurdle is Enemy Density. It seriously limits what can be realistically rendered. Personally I feel they really need to get their API integration down. I literally test which one to run each league because it changes.

WoW could be made to have much better poly count and textures, esp since it uses Lua extension. It wouldn't even be that taxing thanks to how Lua and C work so well together. Faster load times, high LOD, cam tweaks, UI tweaks. A lot can come from one lua API dll file.

I feel a good example of how an engine can fully evolve over time is EverQuest. Hell, that game still had better UI features than most games and despite being 20 years old, it supports ultra-wide.

d4 picture is gorgeous and videos dont do it justice
its beautiful

animations are not perfect, my main complaint is how characters model dont have a lot of weight. sorc strafe casting just looks weird in a game with slower combat

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feike wrote:

Meh, anyone serious about games know by hearth that graphics dont mean shit after 15 minutes.

Yeap. Its the gameplay and time investment that makes me not want to play. Graphics in poe are pretty good. When you can see what is going on on the screen that is. Atmosphere also works well enough.