Bioware become toxic for latest SWTOR letdown

[Deleted]

OP is on SWTOR FORUMS...

The whole community is up in arms this type of press at such an early stage is damaging the developers reputation for honesty just when they need trust... at go live...


Originally Posted by StephenReid
Hey everyone, thanks for bearing with us as we investigated the concerns raised here.

After investigation, it seems that the confusion here is a combination of a UI issue that's been resolved and a feature that's working as intended, but the reason why it's 'working as intended' needs explanation.

First, the UI issue. The preferences menu as it is seen on the Public Test Server for version 1.1 of the game is correct - there are only supposed to be two texture choices, 'Low' and 'High'. This replaces the original three-choice preference of Low/Medium/High because in reality, there was never supposed to be a 'Medium' choice - that was a bug.

Here's where we need to explain. As many of you have noted, your character in the game world is rendered using lower resolution textures than inside of cinematic conversation scenes. This was a deliberate decision by the development team. To understand why this was done, I have to briefly talk about MMOs and their engines.

In comparison to single player games and other genres of multiplayer online games, MMOs have much higher variability in the number of characters that can be potentially rendered on-screen at the same time. In MMOs, even though most of the time you'll see a relatively small number of characters on screen, there are certain situations in which many more characters will be seen. Some examples of these situations include popular gathering places in-game (in our case, the two fleets), Operations with large teams, and Warzones. In those scenarios the client (and your PC) has to work hard to show off a lot of characters on-screen.

During development and testing of The Old Republic, our priorities were to ensure the game looked great and performed well. In testing, we discovered that using our 'maximum resolution' textures on in-game characters during normal gameplay could cause severe performance issues, even on powerful PCs. There were a variety of possible options to help improve performance, but one that was explored and ultimately implemented used what is known as a 'texture atlas'.

To understand that I've got to get technical for a minute. When a character in the game is 'seen' by another character - ie, gets close to your field of view - the client has to 'draw' that character for you to see. As the character is 'drawn' for you there are a number of what are known as 'draw calls' where the client pulls information from the repository it has on your hard disk, including textures, and then renders the character. Every draw call that is made is a demand on your PC, so keeping that number of draw calls low per character is important. With our 'maximum resolution' textures a large number of draw calls are made per character, but that wasn't practical for normal gameplay, especially when a large number of characters were in one place; the number of draw calls made on your client would multiply very quickly. The solution was to 'texture atlas' - essentially to put a number of smaller textures together into one larger texture. This reduces the number of draw calls dramatically and allows the client to render characters quicker, which improves performance dramatically.

When it comes to cinematic scenes, however, characters are rendered using the higher number of draw calls and maximum resolution textures. This is because in those scenes, we have control over exactly how many characters are rendered and can ensure that the game performs well. The transition between 'atlas textured' characters (out of cinematics) and 'maximum resolution' textures (in cinematics) is mostly hidden by the transition between those two states (when the screen goes black), but obviously it's clear if you pay close attention.

In summary; yes, we had a small UI bug that unfortunately caused confusion over how the game is intended to work. The textures you're seeing in the course of normal gameplay are optimized for that mode of play. The textures you're seeing during cinematics are also optimized for that mode of play. They are higher resolution, but that's because we're able to control cinematic scenes to ensure good performance in a way we can't during normal gameplay.

We understand the passion and desire for people to see the same textures you see in our cinematic scenes in the main game. Because of the performance issues that would cause for the client, that's not an immediate and easy fix; we need to ensure we're making choices that the majority of our players will be able to benefit from. Having 'atlassed textures' helps performance overall, and that's a very important goal for us.

With that said, we've heard your feedback here loud and clear. The development team is exploring options to improve the fidelity of the game, particularly for those of you with high-spec PCs. It will be a significant piece of development work and it won't be an overnight change, but we're listening and we're committed to reacting to your feedback.

[Deleted]

There is already a bloody thread about this statement about 2 threads above yours. learn to search

[McTurbo]

how does this in anyway make the game toxic. its playable. it plays well for most people. and looks good to boot. can it look better? sure. and im possitive its going to get what you want when they get to it. until then this is the first month. let them get gameplay bug issues fixed before we start complaining we cant play with all the graphics on ultra.

[Zyzzyx]

Consider how many of the people complaining would actually stop playing forever because of any of this. Probably none. People just love to complain and sound like they really matter.

I've been on the side of "fix your crap, I want my graphics", but people spend way more time acting bigger than they are.

[rigoremortis]

toxic? did you even bother to read it? lol


its a legit response to problems that people feel have come up with the ui, and he gave both the nice guy customer service response, as well as the techy nerd response, lol cant ask for much else. the game looks good so far, and they've done an amazing job putting it all together, give em some time and quit ragging on em, lol.

[McTurbo]

im just amazed at how many people are spoiled when it comes to games.. its like they forget this is the pc... putting out a game and then patching it for bugs has been standard on pc games since the days of quake 1 O.o.

everyone complains they want quality pc games over consolized games ported to the pc.. yet when the devs make a few mistakes due to the massive amounts of different hardware and driver issues that plague pc's.. the players are just all over them and saying fail game fail game.. cry wolf some more please.

[rigoremortis]

Consider how many of the people complaining would actually stop playing forever because of any of this. Probably none. People just love to complain and sound like they really matter.

I've been on the side of "fix your crap, I want my graphics", but people spend way more time acting bigger than they are.

this 100% ^

[Glorious Leader]

how does this response make them less honest or "toxic". We really need to find a way to weed out these kids from posting here.

[Icarris]

I think a lot more people are having problems with their computers not even able to play the game because of the specs, instead of "I can't run my settings on ultra max"

[3clipse]

We don't need two of this thread.