Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Blizzard Polish

Maybe it's just part of the "suspending disbelieve" thing. But judge yourself.





On encoding, the second video is an attempt to record at 2560x1600 and then scale the video down to the rather unusual 1728x1080 format using Lanczos3. This is 16:10, but looks almost better than the upper video, which is a native 1920x1080 resolution without resizing. Since both videos are very short and do not have a lot of moving pieces, I used the excessive CRF=15 to encode both. Naturally, both look best at 1080p at Youtube.

3 comments:

  1. Real WoW players avoided Vashj'ir completely :)
    So many things go wrong there, you have no idea..... Melee fight is a nightmare, and good luck with AoE spells.

    I never understood the whole "can use your mount underwater" thing.... I think it's to allow people to use flying mounts from the water. At the same time, as a druid, jumping out of the water and shifting to flight form has always worked well :P

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  2. Yeah, it's silly. Almost as annoying as being unable to mount your sea horse when your feet are on the sea bed. You can, of course, mount your flying mount just fine in that situation.

    Sadly, the polish has been declining since the B-team took over. It feels like there's a "stuff it, just shove it out the door" mindset at the moment. That, more than anything, is what will kill WOW.

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  3. Incidental, but it seems like they made the natural swim speed faster. It's pretty close to land-based run speed now. I remember it being about 2/3 the speed. I'm not sure when they made that change, but I think it was pretty recent.

    ...and kinda strange. Pragmatically, I don't mind it, but I got used to the somewhat plausible fact that swimming was slower than running.

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