The RoR sprites lack contrast, details, soft shadows and are in general blurry and of low detail compared to properly rendered AoE2 sprites. This is not only bad to look at, but also has a gameplay impact. Units lacking contrast and other details are harder to distinguish from one another than properly rendered units.
I don’t know what went wrong while porting the sprites but they definitely should be re-rendered with the same technique as AoE2 sprites to meet the quality standards of AoE2.
FREQUENCY OF ISSUE
100% of the time / matches I play (ALWAYS)
REPRODUCTION STEPS
Here’s the steps to reproduce the issue:
play RoR
EXPECTED RESULT
RoR sprites should have the same quality as properly rendered AoE2 sprites.
IMAGE
upper: current RoR sprite, lower: official AoE 2021 anniversary sprite (properly rendered)
I think the problem may have to do with SLD compression settings. Perhaps they compressed the files too aggressively, noticeably below main AoE2DE’s quality level, to keep the DLC file size down.
Also, I don’t think I can show you examples, but the sprites from the Return of Rome beta look significantly better, because they used the SMX format.
The female villager and the trade cart sprites look nice and they are also SLD, so I don’t think it has something to do with the compression. I think they did something wrong during the rendering.
Just going by your comparison shots, the problems you want to show, like curves turning into straight lines on the Scout’s body, indeed look like artifacts of DXT compression. That’s all I can tell. At minimum, the problem is related to the lossy texture compression.
Whatever the cause, this situation doesn’t sit well with me. When I played the beta, I actually liked what Return of Rome’s art team had done despite lacking the budget to redo much - tweaking AoE1DE sprites to make them brighter and more colorful. I felt they did the best they could, and wouldn’t have imagined this effort ruined by the final product.
It also makes another community member’s reaction, from back when the switch to SLD was announced, look prescient:
[You could] simply use BC7 [a more advanced texture compression algorithm than SLD’s BC1]. No one playing DE has hardware that does not support it.
At the time, the SLD switch was an improvement - the sprites were more colorful than the 256-colored SMX versions, with no noticeable loss of quality. It seems under the pressure to downsize the DLC graphics to 2.2GB, BC1 has finally reared its head.
Hmm the reason why graphics may not be best might be because they used only AoE1DE 1x and 2x graphics if I am to believe contents of folder where everything has x1 and x2 behind. I think they should have used x2 for standard and x4 for UHD.
The never wibe fixed, and I doubt also that he was talking with the team about, in sure it’s just too much work to render it correctly, at the end it’s just a poor upscale.
I have little faith in the team doing anything about the horribly blurry sprites in AoE 2 DE - RoR. It was one of the first things I noticed, that the sprites are notably worse than the official AoE 1 DE game.
Remember, it took 3½ years for them to actually bother to fix the Age Insiders problem in AoE 4 where we didn’t have our Insider rewards at all. This was after a thread was made that got over 600 replies which they deleted almost 2 years before they actually bothered to fix the issue.
It seems quantity of updates is far more important to these guys than quality.
That said, even the AoE 1 DE sprites in some cases (eg. on Zoom 4x) look better than the AoE 2 DE ones. Given that this is what, the 3rd remaster of the series after HD version. It’s just insult to injury.
GAME INFORMATION
