Why does everyone crack on the graphics?

[freudianslip]

Hello everyone.. Am I just easily amused? Do I gaze with child-like wonder at the sight of a stone rippling a pond, a Maple turning colors in the Fall? I thought the graphics in W&W were impressive, with the fading to dusk, the skyline, the excellent monsters, the attack animations, the ambient beasts (butterflies flitting lazily, fireflies zipping overhead, leaving a glowing trail, vultures circling lazily), fish in the water, the gentle rippling of the surface?

Is it nothing if it is not loud, fast, and colorful? Big explosions and guts flying? Have we become compromised in our contemplation of the sublime? A chance to observe a troll ambling through the early morning mists? A chance to hear the gentle gurgling of a toad warrior as his footfalls scratch lightly on the wooden planks overhead, as we wade through the murky water below? The scrambling of a spider as it seeks to bear down upon you, hairly limbs scrambling for purchase against the fallen leaves?

Oh well, just aimless rumination. I've read many reviews of this game, and I can't understand all of the people cracking on the graphics like a bat out of hell. Can they not run hardware? I am on 1024x768 D3D, maybe that's it. I think they are beautiful! Does the software look like dog doo?

Things that make you go hmmm..

I agree wholeheartedly. The first time I saw an eagle soaring on the winds in the sky, while in the forest near the crypt, I stopped moving and gazed at it with total wonderment. It reminded me so much of the time Wizardry 7 enchanted me with its ambient nature and sounds.

I think these reviewers/gamers who complain about the "poor graphics" are doing so because that GeForce Ultra thingamajig in their PCs aren't being heated up enough to justify their skipping lunch for 4 months to buy one... Or they think all games must look like FPSs in order to be judged to have "good graphics". Sheesh.

[thoon]

I agree too ... and it's different. Like Wizardry, it has unusually good scenes as well some flaws ... the moonrise is outstanding, and the translucent water is too. Of course seeing a bush narrow to a line as you approach it from the side distracts from the illusion, and having what you see when swimming bear no relation to where you are going is a disappointment. And items on the floor/ground can be hard to see.

Hi,

The graphics are nice; but the errors detract from the experiance. I have a matrox g200 with 16mb of memory. In d3d mode, it's too dark - changing the gamma just washes all the detail out. In software mode, the graphics are clean, clear and crisp. But I have a bad tendandcy to walk "into" objects or monsters and see thier polygonal (sp?) structure. Clipping issues are rather bad (but not as bad as Daggerfall). I enjoy the fx but the coding issues really detract from that enjoyment.

My US$.02

Sam, smyling!

[freudianslip]

I've been lucky there; the monsters don't seem to break up when they get close. The darkness wa a bit disconcerting at first, but I found that cranking the Gamma up a bit helped a lot. Plus, Illuminate does help a lot more than the rather ineffectual torchlight.

So far the dungeon design (in the Crypt, at least) seems to be pretty interesting; a bit of the "switch-hunting" is there, but still, kind of a neat design.