Hi Res Texture Pack

[Raeletta]

Would be nice to have the option. Would be meaning unless you can give us a REALLY good reason not to, damn well do it, as pretty as the game looks in general there are some bits like the aforementioned weapons that look terrible. As a stopgap, perhaps you could at least boos the textures of the obvious ones, it should not take as much effort.

Those who cannot use it would not. The option could simply be a tickbox for the download for the space-problem potential. Though the game only takes up about 10 gig at the moment it could be pretty frigging huge after an expansion or two with high res textures.

I'm up in the air for those suggesting Tessallation though. I've not actually played many games using it, but TSW took an insane hit with it on and it only really looked good on Ground only (Where it actually did make the floor look great). This is on an 660Tix2 SLI setup.


edit:

Oh for the textures or effects argument: try playing an old game with boosted texture packs like Deus Ex or something. They're pretty equal, textures can always look better, but poor effects can feel strange on top. The effects are however, imo, pretty much perfect for now and would nto look wierd over better textures at all. especially considering most of them are lightshows blinding you :P

And for the hell of it, here is Valve screwing up their own high res texture pack (Half life 1s official higher res texture pack. I think it came with Blue Shift?), we don't want this either lol:

[Shioban]

I'm up in the air for those suggesting Tessallation though

Tessellation requires too much processing time to even bother putting it into an MMO. For the likes of a first-person shooter you have a smaller FoV (Field of Vision), allowing you to occlude anything not in the FoV.
Where-as in a 3rd person MMO with hundreds of mesh objects in the scene it's simply a waste.

The detail can be easily acquired from the use of normal/height/bump maps.

[CrAZYVIC]

Tessellation requires too much processing time to even bother putting it into an MMO. For the likes of a first-person shooter you have a smaller FoV (Field of Vision), allowing you to occlude anything not in the FoV.
Where-as in a 3rd person MMO with hundreds of mesh objects in the scene it's simply a waste.

The detail can be easily acquired from the use of normal/height/bump maps.

Depend of your rig, the resolution and the amount of tesselation applied.

The Tesselation option would be "optional" with levels.

Low x16
Medium 32x
High 64x

In my gaming experiencies the tesselation is a game changer. This effect in moderate amounts is always noticeable.

I cant play Crysis 3 or tomb Raider without that.

Yes is a demanding effect but nothing a 780 TI or a R9 290x or CF/SLI cant handle.

[Shioban]

Depend of your rig, the resolution and the amount of tesselation applied.
I cant play Crysis 3 or tomb Raider without that.

Yes is a demanding effect but nothing a 780 TI or a R9 290x or CF/SLI cant handle.

That's the thing, the average user simply doesn't have that kind of hardware, it's actually a very very small percentage of people, it would be considered a huge waste of time at the moment to focus on something only a relatively small amount of people will be able to use.

You'll notice that any game that actually uses tessellation, does so very sparingly.

Even a simple grid when tessellated can almost quadruple the amount of triangles to be rendered, this will always cause a huge performance hit as there's no way to avoid it, you're essentially adding in more triangles to be calculated per frame.

Tessellation is nice to go in and add detail where you simple didn't before. Let's say a cobbled stone road, after developing the area you feel more detail could be added, tessellation+displacement mapping would be perfect if you didn't have the time to go back and adjust the original level layout, however even on a low factor Tessellation can still cause performance and intended implementation issues.

Another big issue is artifacting with low sub divisions, usually forcing developers to use a higher tesselation factor per edge. It's an automated process, where something hand-designed will appear correct to the designer (A brick wall for example, then when a low factor tessellation is applied the algorithm won't understand that "This is meant to be flat, this is meant to be rocky", applying the tessellation at a low sub division to avoid an artefact appearing (A lump/bump where one should not exist) is a nightmare of a task. It's no easy task to go about fixing this issue either.

Tessellation is essentially subdividing and displacing the new triangles (and or not displacing), as with all mesh models the more triangles being rendered the more processing time is required to render the item, this still to this day requires a beefy GPU as you already noted. Until these 'currently beefy' cards are the standard I can't see Square Enix taking the leap to use it.

The ARR team don't seem to want to add anything that the average user can't use (And for the most part Tessellation would be ignored or turned off due to its requirements). So as many people would argue "Well why not add X and make it optional, I bought a $2,000 PC and I want to use it!", the team don't want to seem to add anything optional that only a small handful of people can currently use.

Overall however, if your 3D artists are capable, this should be at all costs avoided as it's an unnecessary "Oh crap this probably needs more topology" addition.

Personally I think the more options the better, but most likely they'd wish to invest their time in something the majority can actually use an enjoy.