First impressions: Third generation, my ass. Models look lifeless, plastic, and bland. World looks hum-drum. For all the hype about its incredible graphics engine, I'm not impressed yet.
The graphics? LOL!
After realizing how poorly designed the engine was from its inception, I got flamed for pointing out the massive inefficiencies the company hopes "Future Hardware" will be able to counteract with brute force.
I conducted a few tests of my own to see just how poorly this engine handles today's bleeding edge hardware and was taken aback at how sloppy the graphics were handled (test system: p4 2.8 GHz, 1 GB RAM, GF 6800 Ultra OC'd):
<> Hair brings a 12-15 FPS drop compared to a "bald" model due to the engine rendering the polys beneath the hair (that we won't ever see). The Play-Doh hair was bad enough but choking my card when others choose to plop that shit on their heads is rediculous.
<> Clothing and armour consists of a generic catsuit that is placed over the entire body (sans the head) and the body is rendered beneath it: again, more polys we'll never see are getting rendered and killing precious cycles. It's great that they use bump maps to mimic mulitple armour types but the end result looks like everyone's wearing spandex Halloween costumes (how many suits of mail in other games can show off ass-cheeks the way they do in this game? Not good when I'm playing a guy and have to go 1st-person to avoid cheek-vision).
<> Shaders turn materials completely different colours so when those materials are outside the LOD parameters enabled for Shader use, the materials turn completely different colours in the lower-res/simpler models (why not make LOD textures that mimic the Shader colour changes?).
<> No LOD Hair models? After a certain degree of distance beyond the High-Res spectrum, hair vanishes completely...hopefully this will be addressed soon.
<> This is just an opinion but: the artistic aesthetics feel schizophrenic and derived (see: stolen) from too many sources and don't feel cohesive at all (like working on a mural that 20 people start at different ends).
It's a shame that title was such a waste of time, money and talent. I've met some great people within that community but I'm not planning on buying that re-packaged POS nor do I plan on ever discussing that game beyond its initial "new" factor (which lasts a few months before the mainstream tires of it and moves onto something else).
This great artist I met on the official Fanboy forums summed it up best when she said: "More polys and pixel shaders != superior graphics."
Heck, I could have made a billion-poly mesh in Quake 3 and when it ran like ass, claim it's "intended for future hardware that I've never tested it with." WoW's graphics may not be some great step forward in aesthetics but: atleast they run well (the "you have to disable shadows, spec-flora & texture quality has to be reduced" limitation that was imposed by EQ2 was pathetic...make something work with today's hardware and scale up, don't drop a pile of poorly coded crap in our laps and blame $500 videocards that handle other games better for your engine's shortcomings).
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