King Arthur II - Technical Interview @ PC Games Hardware

Dhruin

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PC Games Hardware has a technical interview on King Arthur II, for those interested in whether shader model 5 is better than the others:
2) In spite of the fact that for a Roleplaying Strategy Game visuals are not as important as for a shooter game why do you decide to utilize the very modern DX11 API?
The DirectX 10 and 11 versions have introduced only a handful of new, basic technics that cannot be utilized with DX9, basically they're full of structural improvements. The few features that are new and special in DX11 – like the tessellation support – cannot be used for the moment to build a game upon it, since it is still not wide-spread enough. However, the structural improvements of these newer versions can be utilized to run a more stable and faster game code compared to running only the DX9 on a 64bit Windows 7 for example.
More information.
 
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They did a very good job with the graphics in King Arthur I. I was impressed with how good everything looked while still having very low hardware requirements. They made Empire Total War look like it was done by a bunch of tasteless amateurs who insisted on making use of state of the art hardware even though they had no clue what to do with it. And I enjoyed the game a lot too. For a while. Unfortunately their odd decisions about supposedly balancing the tactical side of the game made the combat both trivial and goofy and it's just not very much fun to abuse a scripted opponent the same way over and over and over again. From the videos I've seen it looks like they tripled or quadrupled the unit sizes in King Arthur II and that seems to me pretty good evidence they've decided to proceed further in the wrong direction. As such I'm not even sure I want to buy this game. It's depressing for me to see so much potential being wasted on what is ultimately a lightweight game meant for casual gamers. If I do buy it it will only be to reward one of the few small developers that's doing something different and isn't trying to recreate the good old days of 1989. And for fuck's sake anyone who wanted to play games that were just like the ones released in 1989 would play the originals, get a clue "indies". Not you, Neocore. You guys are doing it right, you just need to decide who your target demographic is.
 
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The rssult will be that ONLY Directx 11-based screenshots wll be visible online and in magazines … No-one would dare to show the sub-optimal looking screenshots of Directx 9 …

… Also interesting that they don't ask questions about Directx 9 … ALWAYS the newest version, ALWAYS the version the "early adopters" paid so much money for … (In graphics cards ...)
 
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I'm currently playing King Arthur 1 and I love it. Choices and consequences and surprises everywhere. Challenging combat (could be a little more balanced sometimes) and interesting text adventures.

Thx again for the King Arthue LP, rk47!
 
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I voted for this one as my most anticipated of 2012. Loved the first one, yeah sure it was a cakewalk and seriously unbalanced by the, but you know what? I actually enjoyed it! I like it when games start out hard but if you play your cards right you are unstoppable by the endgame. It still took me a couple of restarts to get it right in King Arthur...
 
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… Also interesting that they don't ask questions about Directx 9 … ALWAYS the newest version, ALWAYS the version the "early adopters" paid so much money for … (In graphics cards …)

Ugh. You'd like to see screenshots for games at low-medium settings? Of course that's not gonna happen. They're not going to show you the worst version of their game. *roll eyes* Besides, DX11 cards are cheap these days. Furthermore, they were saying that they will *not* be making use of DX11-only features, which means that visually, there will not be much—if any—difference.

Maybe there's a corporate conspiracy in there somewhere, too? :)
 
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