A Graphics Perspective

[PaxArcana]

Endless Space 2 is also quite good, IMO.

[SaintD]

Honestly, I think the game has aged very surprisingly well. CoX has this very clean and clear look to it, and it has always relied more on decent design as opposed to sheer graphical greebles; this is really stark when you compare the updated parts of Atlas Park to Kings Row or Steel Canyon. CoX wasn't graphically LAZY, but it never tried to just go completely nuts. They kept things simple, clean, clear, so now we're playing it in 2019 and although it looks dated.....it's simple, clean and clear so it still looks nice enough.

Compare this to the contemporary competition from Cryptic Studios; Star Trek Online in 2019 is a disaster of blooms and effects brawling with low-res textures all over the place. The design is often a bit wonky and so the whole thing looks more and more dated by the minute. Champions Online......oh my God. This is the weirdest situation where I loved how CO looked when it came out, and at that time I found the graphics much nicer than CoX, but now the march of time has ground CO's stylized looks into low-res mush that now look WAY worse than CoX because CoX......continues to be fairly clean and clear. The whole low-res graphics situation really stands out for me because I got a 32 inch curved gaming monitor and play at 2560x1440, so I really, really appreciate how City of Heroes doesn't just turn to mashed banana when I scale it up to that size.

But there's one other REALLY important part of why CoX still looks good - this is a game, and games are in motion. Although the oldest stuff in CoX does indeed look jank and dated, the majority of the animation work in CoX, and especially the stuff added in the latter part of the game's lifetime, was brilliant. It's a masterclass. I genuinely feel that the X-Factor that draws people back to CoX that they don't realise is the animation. It's smooth, it's fluid, it feels properly weighty. Compare this to Champions Online, a badly designed soup of just basically boring and bad animations that cheerfully interrupt and cut into each other between auto attacks, and a feeling of weightless lack of impact from bad effects, and the result is a hilariously dated, disgustingly ugly mess where combat devolves into moronic flailing that has no feeling of impact or effect....which is epitomised by the numbers that just float serenely out of the top of the enemy until they lay down, which can often happen with no intervening animation, they just snap to the floor.

[PaxArcana]

30 minutes ago, SaintD said:

Champions Online......oh my God. This is the weirdest situation where I loved how CO looked when it came out, and at that time I found the graphics much nicer than CoX, but now the march of time has ground CO's stylized looks into low-res mush that now look WAY worse than CoX

... GODS YES.

I recently logged on to CO for the first time in something like eight or more years (and boy, was that Lifetime Subscription a horrible mistake ...) ... and I was just flabberghasted at how bad everything looked.

 

But it's not just that CO hasn't aged well.  The character I logged on to, Patriot, was created as a middle-school boy with super-strength and invulnerability.  When I made him, I kept his build very slim - he's supposed to be 13 or 14, and not a particularly athletic kid either.

 

But ... what showed up on the screen looked .... thick?  Not exactly squat, but no longer the slim kid I'd built him to be.  NFC what the heck was wrong, and don't care to figure it out and fix it (not like I'll ever PLAY the damned game again, ugh).  But there's definitely something going on, other than aging poorly.

[SmalltalkJava]

I like the coh graphics.  I have no complaints. Now with cell shading I can even switch the graphics flavor if I want.   Pretty cool. 

[Vanden]

I just really wish we had fingers.

[Ry]

I'm not gonna lie. For a game that came out in 2004 City's graphics have held up surprisingly well for the most part. Keep in mind it came out before World of Warcraft and in my honest opinion? Looks miles better. Like, miles.. so many miles.

 

I honestly prefer it as it was, the cel shading is nice but its not something I'm used too. Kinda makes me tilt my head a bit, but the reflections of it are pretty, that I'll admit!

[ed fray]

 

I also fired up Champions on Friday and... GAH!  I don't remember it visually being that bad.  Now I never did much with it but have some HOURS in it.

 

CoH's graphics are fine! 

 

Other 4X space games I really like:  Reach for the Stars (C64) STARS! (win 3.1), Sword of the Stars I, (SOTS 2 had a really rocky launch & while I own it, have done really maybe an hour in it. Its many patches supposedly made it playable), Polaris Sector (on GOG-- kinda pricey), Star Ruler 2, Distant Worlds, Sunless Skies<--Steam Locomotives in SPAAACE!), Endless Space 1 is good but I bounced off of ES2.

 

Steam has 2 huge sales-- their annual winter holiday one and annual summer one.  Interspersed with those will be Labor Day, Halloween, US Thanksgiving (Black Friday), US Prez day, & Memorial Day Sales.  As Gog has gotten bigger they began doing similar sales & usually trying to upstage Steam by holding theirs a week or 2 earlier.

 

 

[Xeres]

Graphics are a very big deal to me for new games.  But they aren't everything - otherwise I'd still be playing Black Desert Online.  I am not.

 

I accept CoH's graphics as they are because that's the way it's always been and I'm fine with that.  However, if the game was rendered in an updated graphics engine I'd be fine with that too.  It's not something I'm actually expecting but would be the ultimate wish list item for me - if it was something that's feasible.  I really don't know what's entailed in doing that (my guess is quite a lot).

 

But the game is fine as is for me.

[Rathulfr]

On 9/28/2019 at 9:34 PM, PaxArcana said:

But ... what showed up on the screen looked .... thick?  Not exactly squat, but no longer the slim kid I'd built him to be.

He thicc tho.

[Lines]

CoH also has beautiful world design compared with Champions. Champions seems mostly empty to me, with a few points of interest that don't really relate well to one another. Especially I-forgot-the-name city, where the city centre had those obnoxious, inescapably large, ugly skyscrapers and everything else looks like it could be 80's small scale architecture. Those skyscrapers were like a few shops (for superheroes) or an arena (for superheroes), it broke the immersion. Why were these hideous monuments erected? Why are significant buildings like the town hall and the superhero-group-I-forgot-the-name-again headquarters dwarfed and made to feel like a byproduct by these irrelevant monstrosities? 

 

I mean look at this nonsense. They don't even make sense against each other. One is future-art-deco and the next is a pair of long-ass tubes. I think there's a blimp on top or something.

 

 

Paragon City, The Rogue Isles and Praetoria all hold together really nicely. The cities are designed with focal points in mind. The Atlas Statue, Cole's Tower and The Tangle are all great scales for the world around them and have the meaningfulness to back them up. Good world design goes a very long way to make the world feel engaging, regardless of the quality of the graphics.