Sad State of Our Graphics

Very true, but in a MMO scale its risky, because if your re-investment doesnt pan out. Its like throwing money into a black hole, and thats potentially millions in cash lost . Companies will cut their losses and simply move onto another project

When did I say they shouldn’t invest more into the game? I said that you can’t expect more investments to mean better graphics. If you want them to have better graphics then they would first need to upgrade to at least UE4 which would be a huge undertaking. Yes they need more investments. However those need to be used for other areas that need actual improvements that are more than cosmetics.

Doesn’t answer the question he asked. Why? Why spend resources on better graphics when there are other areas that need improvements which actually impact game quality (IE better server stability).

Business 101. Every investment is a risk. That’s like saying I’d rather make $10,000, because I’m too nervous to make a million.

And guess what.. BDO doesn’t use UE3…

Okay but they aren’t doing that either. They aren’t improving gameplay, graphics, or advertising at all. They’re literally just staying stagnant, and milking the same old tired cow (us) more and more without putting any effort to grow the player base. It’s own community is suffering for their lack luster efforts.

Ideally the game just needs to be "Remastered". bring it up with the new technology, graphics a little more clean and not looking "To samey" everywhere we go.
That being said, would just like to point out to everyone that chances of a "Graphics update" or anything to do with the core gameplay/inner workings of the game is 90% unlikely to ever come out now. The studio has less members, they dont really know where they wanna direct the game entirely and they dont really give notice to the community in terms of the general QoL things we wish for. I feel like the best kind of MMOs are the kind that listen the community and have an active community manager. Im not saying mepps is bad, but from experience from other games, i see many community members from their respected companies taking an active part in the community and maybe running small events for players.

That wasnt the point. He asked for an mmo that is graphically intense and still retains the huge multiplayer experience

That not true at all.. I believe people just say these things without actually trying to see if it’s true. They literally just tried to update the UI. Yes it has issues but it’s something they tried to do to make improvements. They are also doing slight graphic reskin of some NPC models. They also mentioned recently that they did some hardware updates to help strengthen the servers.

What you’re asking for requires them to funnel such a large portion of funding that they would have to do something similar to what they did when they originally introduced StU. Look at what an outcry the dcuo community made..

It is a point. Like it or not you can’t compare a game on an old engine to one on a new one. Look at games on UE1. Should games in those engines be expected to make graphical changes that put them on par to UE3? No

You’re still not getting that it’s not as simple as you are trying to make it seem. Engines games run on is a huge part of the quality they can do..

After reading all the comments, I would like to add few things.

First of all, I am all up for Graphics Update, not because it looks bad right now, it definitely does not. But only because, it's 12 years later, we might want to keep up with graphics of other MMOs to attract newer generation. Let's be honest, all of us saying that graphics are great were quite young when we started playing this game and now, we love it for nostalgic reasons .

Anyways, that being said. The upgrade isn't something that can happen overnight. It will require massive budget, time, developers and patience from the current player base. And upgrading from UE3 to UE4 isn't always the best way to go.

Someone stated above to compare MMO to MMO. Well, "Blade and Soul" is the perfect example. They upgraded from UE3 to UE4 last year. So, when you upgrade, there's always going to be Pros and Cons. Pros were less lag, faster loading times, less stutter. Cons were frame rate drops, uneven graphics throughout the game, each dungeon had different reaction to the upgrade.
Just look at the first few seconds of the video and you will see what I mean.


Bless Online is another example of Unreal Engine 3 game, which had good graphics, though the game was shut down and Bless Unleashed was launched with Unreal Engine 4 with even better graphics.

So, for DCUO, even if they upgrade to Unreal Engine 4, and it's a BIG if, it doesn't necessarily mean that update will benefit us or change the way DCUO looks today. All the open worlds, raid maps etc. are designed keeping in mind the capabilities of UE3. So, if they change every single little texture again and upgrade it to UE4, it doesn't mean if one thing is looking great in Thanagar, it will look great in Patchwork as well.

Last thing, since DCUO opted for Comic style graphics, current art is not bad. No doubt it can be improved. If they start playing with lighting, shadows, depth of field, motion blur, gloom etc. The game can look totally different. But all of this require massive amount of time and money. It would be better to just launch DCUO 2.0 at this point than to upgrade.

So, to be honest, it's pretty, but I feel this is more the modeling and not graphics. I would probably have to look at some gameplay footage to get an idea.

Also... those bends on her elbows... D:

That's not going to happen. It would require essentially rebuilding the game from scratch on a new engine and would probably cost hundreds of millions. Nobody's going to invest that kind of money into a game, that's never been particularly popular, despite having a license to use some of the most popular characters and stories on the planet. Enjoy it for what it is. Many games of this genre have shut their servers down after far less than 12 years.

It's also likely not as complicated as you're trying to make it seem.

One person was able to make the most realistic flight animations in the new UE demo.

One person.

It seems to be incredibly easy to use, easier to build on, and would be way easier to update. Why bother with this ancient engine that literally cannot move forward without throwing tons of resources at it? Why is this defended from people who know next to nothing about it when we've gotten almost nothing from it in years? Are you seriously happy with the content we've seen in recent years?

The most recent thing we've gotten was a broken UI menu. Colors were atrocious, functionality was obnoxious, and using it was hit and miss on consoles if it even worked.

Things have been breaking left and right constantly, every time they "fix" one thing, it screws up 20 others thanks to this old engine that no one knows about.

Training is intensive. Devs are on a revolving door and have dropped like flies, likely all attributed to being forced to learn on this system. It's crazy to want to keep or defend something with so many detrimental aspects. We've hit a wall and it's definitely noticeable.

Good lord. Where to even begin with this?

Have you ever even used UE? Or Unity? Have you ever even programmed? UE3 is not transferable to UE4 or UE5, meaning even with the source assets, you would be essentially rebuilding an entire 12 year old game, from almost scratch. Think about how many open worlds there are, NPC interactions, solos/duos/alerts & raids. Now, the code? Jesus, I wouldn’t even want to think about that. The syntax is similar but the codebase is entirely different, meaning you’d have to Re Code 12 years worth of code, so no, you can’t copy-paste 12 years of code onto a new engine or just drag the “DCUO Folder” and then drop it into a new game engine. UE3 wasn’t even made public, the closest you can get is UDK which is not exactly the same, and it’s a garbage fire. It’s essentially a different world to UE4 and above.

The time, effort and resources it would take to do a complete rebuild will never be worth it.

I didn’t actually read this properly when I first quoted your message, but it actually made me laugh out loud. Do you really think that video of the “Superman” demo on UE5 was 100% entirely made from scratch by one guy? Please, my ribs are hurting. Epic Games developers are some of the best in the business. The engine comes with their own subsystem of physics installed (14 of them) and they’ve made it very easy to tweak and use. I can promise you it wasn’t made by “one person”. The open world that is also on display was courtesy of the Epic Games dev team made available for anyone to use, also not by just one person, it took years of development from the best developers in the business to launch that engine with those physics and graphics, and it’s also not like Epic Games doesn’t have the funds for it.

But who said you were to make $10,000 or anything at all? You could put $5,000 in and and only make $150 dollar back. That is a real possibility.

Funny you say that it’s defended by people who don’t know the system when you are showing that you’re the one who doesn’t know about it. One person was able to make a demo so it means that it’s easy to do? Sorry but that’s now how it works. The devs would have to write out a lot of the code for the entire game while maintaining keeping everything the same (gameplay wise and mechanics wise). One person even said that a game recently switched from UE3 to UE4 and not everything ended up reacting the same.

I'll show you where you dismissed me as though I were some naive child:

Nowhere did I say just graphical improvement. Re-investment into DCUO could be beneficial in more ways than just one, as proved by Square Enix, but because I mentioned it instead of someone like Proxy, you had to take the opposite position.

I like the graphics we have.

Not everyone has a 5K USD PC, game runs fine on my Intel laptop.

Plus, are you going to tell me this looks "horrible"?