OK so I officially take back some of the comments I made during my review of Firefall. I kind of said it was an ugly game with it’s own charecterised charm… I was quite wrong. It turns out I did the noob mistake of not checking my video options and the were automatically set to the lowest of the low, I’m so used to auto detects picking the rigth sort of option that didn’t even check… sooo umm oops.
While not an amazingly technically masterpiece of graphics it is certainly a much more beautiful game then I had anticipated. Many difffernt areas are well thought and and the light.. my goodness the light effects that occur based on the time of day are truly amazing and add a wondorous feeling to the world. Some areas filter this light very differently as well to create different hues which adds a nice change to the visuals. I sat up on a mountain top watching the sun come up and go down again as it is just so well done.
And the night.. WOW the night, all the effects going off make for some amazing pictures as the many lighting effects add some interesting contrast to the world. Flash lights opperating all around, lasers firing, blasts going off, and the slight lights that line the battleframes and structures all add to the experience.. it truly is a chorus of colour at times.
So in order to make ammends I basically spent an entire afternoon exploring the world in it’s entirety and taking a large number of pictures to highlight the beauty of the world. So here below is a lovely slideshow or you can go to the flickr set and see them at your leisure. hmm just realised the slideshow only shows up on the webby rather then other versions.. oh well
The lighting seems very good, probably by far the most impressive thing about it. Some of the models look a bit plastic/overly texture mapped (like overdone parallax stuff). Still very nice! Good screenshotting.
For the most part none of the textures in the game are done very well, but with the level of detail in environment as well as it being further from the camera means you don’t notice.
The character models are rather bad though but in first person view I tend not to notice it very much.
I think all the models, enemies and characters are rather basic in order to cut down on the server load.
It definitely doesn’t look horrible, but the styling feels very dated and unoriginal now. I understand the need to address technical limitations with more simple textures and what not, but god can we get a new MMO that isn’t a cartoon or an anime?
It makes sense for a smaller mmo to be characterised as you can get away with less graphically fidelity then an mmo going for realism.
Wow is still looks ok to this day but when you look at others which realised back then they are abysmal.
There’s no shortage of mmo eye candy out there and in coming either