Terrain texture appearance

[Ekar]

I want to reserve final judgement until I have my own copy to test, but going by many of the screenshots on release I can't really say the landscape textures have really wowed me. I think it's the painterly, non photographic look that turns me off- the way textures blend into each other artificially, especially along the rivers this is quite noticeable. The colours are more subjective, since environment lighting can be so diverse. But resolution, detail, and overall balance and cohesion of the ground textures seems lacking. It looks unconvincing for now. Perhaps this is not such a big deal when everything is in motion, but seeing how well Wings of Prey handled the environment I was looking forward to seeing it matched or bettered by ClOD. The water on the other hand looks fantastic, with the small breaking waves punctuating and breaking up the surface. Really nice touch.

I'll just repeat I don't have the game yet. Looking at static screens you can of course get quite picky. I've done some environment work for other games and understand the argument well that details are lost in the heat of battle. You could work on perfecting textures endlessly but at the end of the day you're looking through the crosshairs, not down onto scenery. Still, nice scenery is nice