I think it’s time for a general graphics overhaul for maps, like wot 1.0. Up close maps look really bad in air battles, mountain peaks are literally 2 planes. It’s not a surprise, because maps were not updated for years. Maybe even they were never updated since launch, if i remember correctly. Either way not much has changed since like 2015 when it comes to maps, only engine and effects updates.
I know these maps are enourmous, but every game has good looking textures for close objects and bad ones for far away objects. It could be an opportunity to fix some issues, like map sectors’ ground textures just not loading in sometimes (It’s not a hardware problem, and it’s unlikely it’s a driver problem, because i’ve seen it both on nvidia and amd. By the way amd drivers above 23.9.1 are broken, they load only the lowest ground textures.) and general optimization.
In my opinion there’s too much new toys being added, when the base for it all is aging.
This is vietnam with full graphics at 4k (supersampling for a 1440p monitor), all sliders to the max. I know, big maps, but that’s a stretch in my opinion.
The aircraft looks really good though, i have any complaints only in cockpit view when i zoom in.
I totally agree with you. At least, i think ground textures and assets deserves to be reworked. Vehicles models / textures are greats, but the surrounding environnement feels like a 10 yo game that has never been revamped (which is almost the case)
It’s quite disappointing to observe that even in the areas around the airfield where players are expected to pay the most attention to details, the quality is remarkably mediocre. War Thunder should strive to enhance the environment’s realism by drawing inspiration from real-life settings, akin to how Microsoft Flight Simulator seamlessly integrates data from Google Maps. Rather than relying on the creative interpretations of a modeler who may not fully grasp geography, resulting in absurdities like farms on cliffs or bridges leading to nowhere that seem to come from a careless and abusive use of procedural textures.
From high in sky ground looks ok but not fantastic, but when close to ground it is clearly shit. I wouldn’t expect it to look perfect, but there could be improvments on textures when close insteand of 10m x 10m pixels lol. They could add more objects (rock, more variety of trees sapling, oak, birch, fields), they could refine models also : better looking trees, better looking airfield, lakes too look very polygonal.
I’m pretty sure it is not a big deal, they just need to focus on it for a major update. Because if vehicles models looks good and “shaders” too, the game still looks old and deserves to be revamped
What you see here is one of the airfield assets used for every single map and every single airfield on the map. They have 3 assets for airfields, small airfield, big airfield and modern airfield. They don’t even bother to blend them in with terrain, so we get airfields on unrealistic plateaus and even levitating airfields you could fly under at some point. Smigol did it once in one of his videos.
The issue isn’t just about missing definitinio on the maps; I get that some things might be left out for performance reasons on large maps. What really baffles me is the lack of authenticity. I struggle to comprehend why maps should be confined to fantasy environments crafted from imagination (with vague reiminicences) instead of faithfully representing real-life locations with their exact colors, shapes, geography, and various historical elements.
While we are exceedingly meticulous about the precise representation of aircraft, it appears that the opposite holds true for environments. Concerning immersion in the game, the environment is the aspect that most negatively impacts my suspension of disbelief; everything comes off like stage props or early PlayStation 2 graphics. Every city seems like a basic copy-paste of the same couple of buildings, scattered randomly. I’ve never experienced the sensation of truly flying over Cologne in the 1940s or any European countryside.
As simple as it might seem to convert a two-dimensional satellite image into a representation with topography, it remains inconceivable for Gaijin!!
