I could care less what any of those third rate pc hating studios have to say about anything.
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'fo real. 1.0 graphics were the bomb. I just remembered it, and became sad for a few days.
The 1.0 texture were overall very bad and copy past all over the place and that in a very bad way.
1.0 Ul'dah was so cold and lifeless, even with NPCs.
And the 1.0 Shroud was a pain in the ass. Oh... this river again, this river again, this forest road again, this forest road again... what is this heavy glowing lightning...
http://i.imgur.com/neRunNj.gif
Terrain and textures are not exactly the same, though having copy paste would help have higher res textures (reusing the same texture/less active space needed). Texture is the skin, the feature (river/cave/rock) being used in the same exact way over and over would be terrain (models that make the terrain, w.e). Anyway, you can have good textures and awful terrain. Seems like you're talking about the copy pasta formations of 1.0.
I miss the higher res/more intensive 3d mappings (bump) and shaders. DX11 update now is neat but maybe they can add little bits here and there over time, say some programmer on a side project - if they get time for those things.
Once screenshots of 2.0 we're first released, people began immediately accused it of having lower quality textures than 1.0, even though it's near impossible to judge such a thing from simple screenshots of a yet unreleased game. Speculation of 2.0's graphics even included a discussion about the grass! It got pretty crazy. In the end, I think everyone who played 1.0 would agree that overall 2.0 looks considerably better, and that the accusations about a visual downgrade we're premature. We should probably reserve judgement about the DX11 version until we've seen it first hand ourselves.
That's not a game image, rather a concept drawing of how the game would look. Not an actual rendered image.
That's not an in-engine rendering.
That's essentially a "freeze-framed" GCI cutscene you could say. It's been deliberately tailor made and rendered as a still image to use for a UI concept afterwards, (most likely) the UI was imposed on top in Illustrator/Photoshop.
That's not a drawing, that's a CGI render, everything has simply been posed with effects 'added' in, most likely by the CGI team (or even just the development team screwing around with still-frame rendering tricks in something like 3DS-Max).
However, most easily argued the texture quality as well as the way the current deferred rendering system handles lighting/shadows and shading isn't as nice as some parts of 1.23, there are ways to crawl that back a bit, but we're unlikely to see it for a long time. The most notable loss of detail is simply how the lighting system used in 1.23 affected bump/specular maps as well as shader effects. Sadly it's downfall was in the general rendering of the actual physical scene itself where it simply looked washed out or buggy/choppy at the best of times.
https://i.imgur.com/stPx1.jpg