I simply had to write about this, because I’m finding the whole thing hilarious. It might be old news for everyone, though. I mean, I knew about the missing textures, but I was unaware that the subject had reached such heights over the last couple of days. Be warned though, because I might be finding it hilarious because it’s 2am here and I’ve had a very long week.
During early beta-stages, Star Wars: The Old Republic featured high-resolution textures. Then, suddenly, they disappeared. People want to know why – especially since those textures still show up in cut-scenes, but are unavailable during normal gameplay. In fact, people want to know so badly why they can’t use them all the time that several threads have sprung up on the official forums. The first thread is 117 pages long. When Bioware mods locked it and started a second one, the new thread went up to 112 pages before the mods had to intervene. The third and fourth? 125 and 148. At the time I’m writing this the fifth thread is well over 100 pages.
Finally, players managed to get a reply from Bioware. Stephen Reid, more famous as Rockjaw, stepped in and gave a pretty technical explanation (you’ll have to scroll down on that page, doesn’t seem like there are permalinks for forum posts). Basically it comes down to the amount of players that could potentially show up on-screen during normal gameplay versus the controlled environments of the cut-scenes. And the whole “high graphical settings look exactly as medium”-thing? That was a bug, there wasn’t even supposed to be a “medium” option. Ooops!
Then there’s this, a whole conspiracy theory about textures being constantly sent from the servers – presumably to protect the models from being copied. “If it is in fact the case that assets have been deliberately withheld from the client,” the poster there writes, “and thus have to be transmitted to the client from the server in some form, it goes a VERY long way to explaining most of the performance problems SWTOR has been having.”
Personally I am not invested in this, since I think SWTOR looks good as is and don’t really fret over the texture quality in-game and I like the graphical style in general. But I am not sure I buy the whole “too many players on-screen”-reason for not having the textures available for the people who have high-end rigs that should be able to cope just fine.
First of all, SWTOR uses an instanced model where copies of the same area are created if too many players are present in the same place at the same time. I think the max number of players I’ve seen in one area has been around 135+, and that’s spread across the whole Republic Fleet (and suffered a pretty bad drop in performance at the time). Secondly, Rift manages to show tons of players while also firing off all kinds of magical effects and fighting moves with my computer – which is slowly aging past its prime – hardly noticing. As it stands right now even high-end rigs stutter in SWTOR’s crowded areas, no matter how many players are actually visible on-screen at the time. Unless the whole engine and network code running the game are built of dreams, hopes and chewed bubblegum, I have a hard time wrapping my head around how the talented engineers at Bioware wouldn’t be able to make the game run a lot smoother in crowded areas than… Well, more or less every MMO out there.
It’s a mystery. And mysteries deserve elaborate conspiracy theories. If you happen to have one, feel free to share with the rest of us in the comments.
The header image is cropped from this picture, which compares the high-resolution textures with normal gameplay.
