Those are people?!

Finally we get to the graphics. Now, regular readers may have noticed that it’s taken me a little longer than usual to get to this point and there is a reason for that.

You see, for a modern singleplayer RPG (and a Triple A one at that) there is simply no skirting around the issue. Hellgate doesn’t look good.

You can walk straight through NPCs, the animations are samey and not very fluid, there’s no normal mapping at all, nevermind anything more advanced like parallax occlusion mapping. The textures on the characters are especially atrocious, to the point that I at one point thought that playing The Witcher had damaged my eyesight because…well, nevermind.

The reason that I’ve taken a while to get to this point though is because I wanted to fully detail the multiplayer side of things because, by MMO standards, the graphics are more passable and the clipping problems actually make a tiny bit of sense.

With that in mind then, let’s have a look at some of the graphics and see how scalable the game is.

Model Draw Distance

The model draw distance setting comes in four flavours (Low, Medium, High and Very High) and controls the distance the models are drawn at, naturally. If you’re getting sick of fog of war and pop-up then the you’ve probably not set the draw distance high enough.


Above we’ve got pictures of only three of the settings because the difference between Very High and High is pretty negligible. Hell, the difference between most of them isn't exactly massive.

The draw distances in Hellgate are actually pretty good, mostly because the models aren’t very complex but we’ll get to that next. Sure, there’s fog in the distance and the only key difference is the shapes looming out of said apocalyptic dust cloud, but it’s used atmospherically and doesn’t damage gameplay. Even on the highest settings you’ll still see some fade-in in our experience, but the game is playable even on low draw distance.

Model Detail

OK, so you’ve seen things far away, but how about them close up. There’s high, medium and low options for model detail and below we’ve got a picture of the same guard on each setting.


It’s hard to believe, but this is actually the same guard in each screenshot. I have no idea why the low setting changes The Female Guard With A Pierced Lip into a Ugly Man With A ‘Tache, other than it possibly uses fewer polygons. Ahem.

Whichever way you look at it the models do look pretty awful though, even on high. They don’t move their mouths when they speak, the idle animations are awkward and boring and the textures are blurry and ill-defined to the point that Doom could put them to shame.

Want a tip? Go for the highest setting. It doesn’t look good, in fact it still looks downright bad, but it may give you some consolation to run a triple A title at full capacity. Of course, that said, if this is the best that triple A games can do at the moment, then Crysis is going to be a huge disappointment – even Knights of The Old Republic looked better/equal to this.