Feedback:User/Bradkay aus/Tessellation & GW2 GFX

Hi GW2 Team,

I just started playing Guild Wars a few weeks ago even though I brought it years ago & I'm annoyed I didn't get into it sooner. I've just brought all the expansions for GW & will support GW2 all the way!

Having watched the HD GW2 trailers quite a bit I have to say I'm very impressed. The scale of the world is amazing, but;

- The water still looks too transparent or maybe its that its so lifeless. LOTRO (check youtube) has good water effects. It also seems unresponsive to characters moving through it (no wake/disruption). In trailer 2 in the elementalist 'home base' you can see right through the water when looking down, but not when your looking up when your underneath? That's not right.

- A lot of the ground & other surfaces still look like those found in Everquest, Flat. I really thought you would make use of tessellation, everywhere! When I saw the Unigine Heaven benchmark I was beyond amazed that games would start looking lifelike.

- I also notice there didn't seem to be any depth of field blur (maybe because no cut scenes have been shown) as seen in the FFXIV trailer. The hazy effect does work well too, for far off objects. Love the shattered/blur effect at the end of trailer 2.

- The characters seem more plastic than those in the original GW. I suspect once they have facepaint, etc they will look better but still a bit plasticky.

- Getting really picky now but none of the foliage seems to respond to chars passing by/through.

- Also noticed that spells/magic didn't seem to light up the surrounding area e.g. in the Asura battles the surrounding environment didn't light up as a result of the spells/magic being used in the fight. Fire (except that emanating from chars/NPCs) did seem to 'reflect' correctly.

- Fur/hair doesn't seem to move.

These were by other posters but I thought I'd mention them again here.

- Weather effects, Real time random weather effects would be great. Imagine a random light/medium breeze passing through the Silvari home town (or anywhere for that matter) the trees/leaves/grass all rustle. A random snow storm in cold regions erupts with weather effects hitting the users screen (think motorstorm) or perhaps becoming transparent & fading away as they hit the screen.

I'd especially like to see tessellation used everywhere & improved water effects/graphics. It may be too late for the release of the game but maybe they could be added in later, like LOTRO are doing with their DirectX11.

* Update

- Also I hope you can have a bug reporting system (sorry to bring WOW into it) but I love their coordinate reporting system. This is another thing that really annoys me in GW is getting caught on invisible walls & not being able to walk down gentle slopes. Reporting bugs at their coordinate system would help you fix these easier.

I just wanted to update this with some more positive feedback too. Love that chars can move while casting, during battle. Scale of the world is great, the massive cities (human city in particular), Like the expanded 'lore' introduced in EOTN. Extra playable races sweet. Costume design continues to amaze me. Seriously whomever is in charge of that should be a designer in the real world. The garbage they release at fashion shows (milan, etc) is just amazing. Greater use of persistant areas, Event system upgrade, Great!