Visual Update of Original Content

lucky_Sage

yes the should but they wont. they should also have a toggle added for open world to turn it into adventure zones for people who like that stuff and allow world bosses, delves, anchors, and public dungeons to have a chance to drop gold items. it would be a great revamp and easy new content that could entertain pve'ers. what would be really cool if it turned anchors and world bosses to b like old wow bosses where it would take 25 people to kill maybe not all the time but certain time every hour or so one will respawn to be a epic boss

Synthwavius

I agree but Stonefalls actually look very decent compared to Glenumbra for example.
Covenant architecture is already ultimate generic copy paste but the landscape that accompany it makes me often feel like I'm playing 2001 game with slightly updated graphics. Sadly I guess they will never redo the vanilla content because they can't monetize it.

SickleCider

I can understand their hesitance to add more assets into the vanilla zones, though I agree it'd really help the sense of atmosphere. I think they could make a really impactful change if they updated their lighting and weather systems. The things I would suggest:

• Give each zone a different color bias to emphasize uniqueness. For example, I feel like Rivenspire's lighting palette should have a dustier, grittier appearance, and a warm overcast at night. Compare that to a place like Wrothgar, where they did do a good job emphasizing the cool tones.
• Enhance night time contrast, reduce day time contrast. I'd like to see night time have deeper shadows, and for lighting objects to really pop. The day time lighting gives everything a bleached, washed out appearance, and I think something softer that didn't strip away the colors would be much more pleasant.
• Reduce ambient fog. Some ambient fog is necessary, both to simulate realistic distant objects, and also to obscure LOD objects. The fog seems really thick and close, however. I think interior fog should be eliminated altogether.
• More dramatic weather/more varied weather. I'd love for the rain, snow, and sand storms to be much more bombastic now and then. Thunderstorms and lightning, very very frightening!
• Consistent dynamic shadows. They appear in some circumstances, and not in others. Characters and objects seem to float where there are no shadows present. I consider this a lower-tier priority because shadows can be very taxing on a system and compromises are perfectly understandable.

Tavore1138

I am about 90% sure they have been adding 'furniture' to the zones on a very gradual basis - often when they release new furniture for housing you will see it pop up here and there in the original game zones as well as the DLC areas. I suppose with lag always being an issue they have to move carefully to avoid breaking the servers...

I'd love more immersive weather - my understanding is that weather happens at our end so what you are experiencing may not be waht I am seeing? BUT if that is the case they could easily do a few things - maybe a programmer can tell me if these would be feasible:

1/. Make us see the same weather (i.e. send whatever 'heavy rain' or 'bright sunshine' trigger they use to the clients of all players in the same area).
2/. Some sort of mild persistence to weather effects... puddles or a layer of snow on the ground. Again if this is handled at the client end it would presuably be a matter of sending a trigger to our side and adding an option to turn off persistnet weather effects in out quality settings?
3/. Mount/run speed impacted by terrain and thus also by weather (i.e. go off road in snow and you move x% slower).
4/. Flavour NPCs with some minor added dialogue about how hot, wet, cold it is.

The big one would be some way of doing seasons but I suspect that is askiing for too much as it would involve redoing the whole landscape....

Obviously I'd ultimately rather have good new content and fixes for bigger issues but when you spend a lot of time in game the looks and feel can take on a suprisingly high level of importance.

Delpi

What about original horse textures? xD