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While Star Wars: The Old Republic offers low, medium, and high texture settings, the medium setting has turned out to be a bug.
According to BioWare community manager Stephen Reid, the medium option was never meant to exist in the MMO.
“Yes, we had a small UI bug that unfortunately caused confusion over how the game is intended to work. The textures you’re seeing in the course of normal gameplay are optimized for that mode of play. The textures you’re seeing during cinematics are also optimized for that mode of play. They are higher resolution, but that’s because we’re able to control cinematic scenes to ensure good performance in a way we can’t during normal gameplay.”
Reid goes on to explain in depth on the official forum the nature of textures in MMOs, stating:
“In comparison to single player games and other genres of multiplayer online games, MMOs have much higher variability in the number of characters that can be potentially rendered on-screen at the same time. In MMOs, even though most of the time you’ll see a relatively small number of characters on screen, there are certain situations in which many more characters will be seen. Some examples of these situations include popular gathering places in-game (in our case, the two fleets), Operations with large teams, and Warzones. In those scenarios the client (and your PC) has to work hard to show off a lot of characters on-screen.
“During development and testing of The Old Republic, our priorities were to ensure the game looked great and performed well. In testing, we discovered that using our ‘maximum resolution’ textures on in-game characters during normal gameplay could cause severe performance issues, even on powerful PCs. There were a variety of possible options to help improve performance, but one that was explored and ultimately implemented used what is known as a ‘texture atlas’.”
Recently BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk said he would have liked to see the studio have more time to test Star Wars: The Old Republic.
About the Author
Star Wars: The Old Republic
- Platform(s): PC
- Genre(s): Massively Multiplayer, Massively Multiplayer Online, RPG, Science Fiction
