Diknak

in terms of the better performance, there are several reasons. One is the fact that the EQ2 engine is 10 years old, and when they were designing it, they figured the CPU was going to do most of the performance related tasks (the GPU was highly under realized at the time). It was a very bad mistake, but SOE is trying to move things to the GPU where they should be. Another reason is the fact that WoW's cartoony style is not just because of the color pallet, but because of a low polygon count. You will notice that not many things in WoW are rounded. They call it 'artistic', but it is a simple fact of making things have a very non realistically low polygon count.

If you don't understand what I mean by polygons, you need to understand that when a flat circle is drawn on a computer, it is not "round". There are two basic methods of drawing a (filled) circle. You can either (a) start at the center and draw a straight line to the edge. Then you draw thousands of line extremely close together so it looks like a circle. Or (b) you can draw several squares and place them on top of each other (each is slightly rotated more than the next). Those squares then form a circle when stacked, but it is never perfectly round.

So to make a 3D object, you are really using squares or polygons. The more polygons you have in your object, the more realistic and rounded the surfaces will look. Of course if you have to calculate millions of polygons, it takes a lot of system resources.

Rhymez

the graphics are the major reason why it works so well , your RAM needs to preload a ton of stuff like textures, objects etc.
high resolution textures take up alot of space

so for example you are somewhere out in the field on your horse riding down a green valley with realistic grass trees lets say some rivers waterfalls , imagine all of that going towards fotorealistic(we are still far away from fotorealistic graphics right now)

so we have shit like Bump Mapping which as the name says bumps objects to give em a more realistic look as nothing is even in the real world , think of a rock or a club for example , (this is part of Shading btw if you heard of it )

so and now comes the cornerstone of 3D scenery which is LIGHT (Shadows of included) this takes up the most resources , to make you believe we are somewhere in the real world we obviously need light so we can have shadows , we can make metal blink and all this fency stuff , there are a few ways to achieve this , we have for example Raytracing we need this to determine where a ray of light hits an object and theres the problem there isnt just a single ray to calculate there is a huge amount to calculate and we are yet talkin just about one light source , you have ofc not just a single light source in a scenery , also rays the path a ray takes after it hit an object needs to be calculated and this takes again alot of horsepower

in open field there is lot more of this stuff going on than in a dungeon
(more preloading , more light calculation etc., details like in more polygons)


but you should basically get the idea now , WoW needs less resources to preload the scenery and theres a ton less calculations required

no idea if this dumbed it down enough

Rhymez

while the polygon count can be reduced and still make the object look like it should (mesh optimizing etc.), Carmack is working on better solutions atm, polygon count is these days not the issue anymore

Rhymez

oh and our current graphic boards aren't nearly nowhere enough to get into fotorealism

Deathsite

ok for starters i'm just posting this out of boredom nephews woke me up a lil early today. eq used to be a fairly large part of my life got old when devs got retarded and i quit been playing wow really light for a while and i just wanted to try to clear shit up for people apologies ahead of time for poor grammar and rambling but if you dont care don't bother reading on


honestly ... comparing this game to wow is really old you guys are all just battered wives coming back face first for a punch in the dome time and again. there is plenty of zoning in wow, battlegrounds, different continents, instances and raids same shit you have in eq.

the graphics aren't as bad as you all make them out to be in wow they give up some things that are pretty for the ability to make better encounters. you really have no idea how interesting it is to have to dodge fire in encounters seems easy as fuck but it's really worth it to be able to fuckin see graphics like that if they want you to dodge an aoe they fuckin have the boss say omgz big fuckin wall of lava come forth and you have to dodge it pretty simple but fun ffs and there's no like ok i see the lava and now i froze cause my computer has to run a shitty fuckin game and try to render it oh it passed already and i got hit fantastic. wow works and everything that's fun from wow eq tries to rip off in some way or another and fails miserably doing so.

gear isn't as easy to get as some of you think, the gear in wow is seperated pvp pve your not gonna be great in pve with pvp gear and visa versa. so that's already 2 complete sets of gear you'll have to get depending if you wanna do most of the things wow has to offer. so breaking down getting the gear a little bit for anyone who cares doing the weekly wintergrasp quests gets you about 30k honor if you do them on tue and sat that is the most efficient and quick way to get honor, wg only goes on once every 2 hours and 20 minutes or so and is like 150 people vs 150 people trying to take over a fortress in a large zone / defend towers... honor is points you spend for pvp gear doesn't get you anything for raids or instances one piece of gear costs anywhere from 30 - 70 k honor for the base pvp set not the 2nd or 3rd tier up. doing battle grounds the most honor you can really hope to get with a win is in alterac valley and you get maybe 3k if your lucky and spend usually around a half hour in there. sooooo what i'm trying to say is the best you can hope for is about one piece a week maybe two if your spending shit tons of time doing things that gain honor.

so for pve you can get gear a number of ways, main way is to run instances which you can really only hope for a minor upgrade from quest rewards dropping from bosses in heroic zones there are a few diamonds in the rough but your not gonna be uber from plowing instances and the chance of getting the thing you want is still fairly low. next all bosses drop tokens prolly similar to shards but the gear isn't quite as awful as eq made it you can get extremely nice gear from tokens but low end pieces start at 15 tokens and you average 4-5 tokens out of an instance that takes 30-60 minutes. sooo 3 hours on average to get one low tier piece of worth a shit gear for pve. the set pieces that you can only buy 2 of off merchants, the rest you get from 10 man 25 man raid pattern drops, they cost anywhere from 50-80 tokens for one piece of good gear. then there's the new set that take triumph tokens most you can get a week is around 30 triumph tokens if you do the daily heroic quest and clear the new raid zone and the wg raid zone that you can only enter if your faction controls wg at the time. and those pieces cost 30-60 as well but you need the earlier pieces to really stand a chance in the new raid zone.

so for anyone that says wow makes getting gear easy ... take a look at eq it's got a face only a mother could love...

as far as the playerbase of wow ... yeah there definitley are some douchebags but picture this stick your hand in ten toilets... chances of finding a turd fairly small stick your hand in several hundred thousand chances are pretty fuckin high you'll find some doo doo butter there are douchebags in eq the same as wow but they are much rarer just because of the playerbase if your main turnoff for trying wow is because the playerbase is immature well that's just not true there are good people in wow just the same you only have to find them it's a fuckin mmo quit being anti-social and go make some friends.

my only gripes with wow is it's extremely simple to do your job as dps or tank healer w/e doesn't mean the encounters are horribly easy just doing dps as a dps is fairly simple, and it's ui targetting is a little hard to adjust to but not that bad when you're used to it and way more mods out there to make life simpler than eq. just an example as a mage doing the best dps i can do means casting 3 spells and dumbfires / short terms w/e they're up yeah not that hard but the enjoyable encounters make it worthwhile

i'm not saying wow is the greatest mmo but there are a hell of a lot more things to keep me coming back than eq had and people constantly comparing wow to this game is just fuckin retarded get off it people if ya like wow so much go play it

again sorry for the rambling and poor grammar hopefully if anyone cared this was insightful at least, peace out ya'll keep slamming your dick in the door trying to find anything enjoyable about eq! ;)

mafoe

Seamless, dickface.

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Anduri

Deathsite pretty much summed up why I hate WoW.

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Meta

I played both wow and eq2 and I honestly feel that eq2 is superior. It just needs a bit more care and attention than it gets. given anywhere near the dev time, funding and advertising that wow gets, eq2 would be awesome. WoW on the other hand, gets all of those things in abundance and is still meh..

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Pink Poodle

No offense but your post was painful to read. Punctuation, man! Capitalization!

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Rave Ghost says: "EQ2Flames on ED: Click here! And Part two! Some NSFW content present."

Deathsite

i warned you and it's the fuckin internet should get used to poor grammar