Zeckul

I think that the 2D backgrounds can be in a high resolution as well. Well, that's very debatable, and the screens you provided actually prove otherwise. Are you really arguing that ToEE is more detailed graphically than The Witcher 2? How could they be anyway? They are also, just like The Witcher 2's graphics, 3d renders. The only technical difference is, at the risk of repeating myself, that for ToEE the calculation of the final picture happened on the developer's computers rather than yours, whereas The Witcher 2 uses your GPU to render in real-time. Otherwise the same basic techniques are used: modeling, texture, lighting - and The Witcher 2 uses higher-res artwork, much more detailed lighting, and entirely new methods that were unknown when ToEE was developed. ... The choice between a pre-rendering and a real-time rendering approach is a technical one, because these are different technical means to produce graphics. Anything that can be done via pre-rendering can be done in real-time, given the proper techniques and computing power. What's so difficult to understand about this?

That's your subjective opinion. On any objective criteria they are superior: - they are higher resolution - they are more detailed - they present a variety of effecitvely realised graphical styles, from cartoonish fantasy to dark and gritty realism - they are more dynamic (although that doesn't show on a static screenshot) On that note, most of the artwork in Infinity Engine games was actually 3d models. GPUs didn't really exist back then so the team had no choice but to pre-render everything. That did nothing to alter their style, it merely meant that the rendering happened on the devs' computers rather than the players'.

And again, let me reiterate : it's not about technical advantages. It's about a certain style, which some people find very appealing. Such level of detail is simply unattainable when using a real-time rendering approach. Yes, and what I'm saying is that the same style can be achieved using both a real-time rendering and a pre-rendering approach; that being a given, a real-time rendering approach presents interesting technical advantages, so it's overall a much preferred approach today. That particular screenshot you showed is something that real-time rendering engines can easily achieve today on just about any hardware.

A lot of people will buy and upgrade computers between now and 2014. The Witcher 2's recommended specs will represent a fairly dated computer by then. An isometric view is just a projection, and a real-time rendering approach can use whatever projection desired including, but not limited to, an isometric one. That said the only difference between a pre-rendering and a real-time rendering approach is the time and place when the rendering happens, not the style or quality of the graphics. That's the point I'm trying to make. A technology is not an aesthetic.

Regardless of your personal preferences, the level of detail shown in this screenshots demonstrates that any style can be achieved using real-time rendering. That looks exactly like a pre-render of a 3d house model. The only thing "2D" about this is that the render happened on the dev's computers rather than on yours, and the limitations inherent to that approach. As you said, it's not a matter of technology but of style, and a real-time rendering approach, while allowing the same artistic freedom, would bring several technical advantages.

RTS: Anno 1404: (Anno 2070 looks even better but it's not medieval): TBS: Civilization 5 RPG: the best-looking RPGs (Gothic IV, The Witcher 2) lock the camera to a close third-person perspective, but it's not hard to imagine what the games would look like with the camera slightly more zoomed out. That is, way better than any 2D RPG I've seen.

An isometric projection doesn't imply or require the use of 2D backgrounds. The problem with 2D backgrounds is that the camera is forever locked to a certain orientation and plane. A 3D game that uses an isometric projection could allow rotating the camera, allowing the player to see all sides of a building for instance. It could also simply default to that projection but also allow arbitrary camera movement for cutscenes or just observing the scenery as one pleases. This is an issue now because today's screens have widely varying resolutions and PPIs. To give the game roughly the same scale on all screens will require zooming in and out of pre-generated bitmaps which is inherently imperfect and worse than generating the picture at the correct resolution natively from 3D model data. So if you will take the time to build 3D meshes of your environment to simulate dynamic shadows and lighting, why not use these to do the actual rendering. 3d-on-2d (beyond divinity, rise of nations) has always looked off because of the differences in lighting and resolution: you can easily tell what's being rendered in real-time and what's not. A full 3d render doesn't suffer from such inconsistensies. Sure, the developers could go to great lengths to produce this highly refined hybrid technology that manages to hide the seams perfectly, but why all this complexity when you could just do everything in 3d in the first place. Well that's simply wrong. We can do something that looks much better than the IWD and BG backgrounds in real-time 3D today, on hardware that most gamers already have. The Xbox 360 which is hardware from 2005 currently does high-detail, fantasy artwork that is higher resolution than anything seen in IE games: (Trine 2) Or in a more realistic style: (The Witcher 2) These are technically superior in every conceivable way to the 2d backgrounds we've seen in IE titles. They may not have the same style, because that's not what the artists were aiming for, but there's no question that the same style cannot be achieved, and in much greater detail, using real-time rendering today with cheap and widely available hardware. Don't mix style and technology. People also tend to ignore that IE's static backgrounds had several shortcomings: - They could not represent depth convincingly at all - it was a stretch of the imagination to picture yourself moving up or down in space even in areas that attempted to depict mountains - They were generally terrible at representing any dynamic surfaces - the "flowing lava" in Icewind Dale and IWD2 was jarringly static for instance, water was always another issue. Icewind Dale was a good setting for the technology precisely because everything was frozen... - The lighting was not convincing at all

No, I don't want to see 2D backgrounds. The use of 2D backgrounds: - restricts the camera to a pre-defined plane - precludes graceful scaling depending on resolution, as the only option to maintain scale is to zoom in and out of pictures using imperfect filtering algorithms: this is what makes IE games look either blurry or tiny on today's displays - makes it nearly impossible to achieve dynamic lighting and shadows - makes it much harder to animate anything in the backgrounds, leading to unnaturaly static scenes - is entirely unnecessary to achieve the level of detail seen in Baldur's Gate, IWD2, etc.; today's hardware is more powerful and more capable, in real-time, than the pre-renderers used then.

A game engine is the underlying magic that makes stuff happen. Without an engine a game is just a pile of pretty drawings and sounds sitting on your hard drive. Specifically, a game engine has a renderer whose role is to put pixels on your screen. What this renderer does might be as simple as copy-pasting bitmaps (either hand-drawn or pre-rendered) in the correct order and position to compose an image; this is basically what the Infinity Engine does, it's a 2D engine. Or it could generate a picture from abstract geometrical data such as 3d models, a camera position, positional lights, project hand-drawn textures on the geometry. That would be what the NWN2 engine does, it's a 3D engine. All engines dictate what the graphics end up looking like to various extents: all Doom 3-engine based titles have that Doom 3 look (especially lighting), but Source-based games are much more diverse. Unity is designed to be extremely flexible and allow for basically any style, as Obsidian devs have confirmed. That they're using such a mature and solid framework is great news as it means the resources are going 100% into features and content rather than porting, testing on various OS/hardware configurations and making expensive tweaks to a less flexible engine. Oh, hi btw, first post here.