The
Wheel of Time review
Posted by Adam Klein on
December 29, 1999 - Page 2/4
Publisher:
GT
Interactive
- Developer: Legend
Entertainment
 Graphics and
Sound
If you have played Unreal, or any
Unreal engine based game, you will get a basic idea of what The Wheel
of Time will look like and play like. The Wheel of Time does use a
little bit larger and more open areas, so there is more to see on the
screen at one time.
When the Unreal engine was first
conceived, there weren’t very many alternative graphics cards that
Epic would want to worry about at the time, so the Unreal engine first
shipped with limited hardware support. More than a year later, The
Wheel of Time was released. This time with much better hardware
support.
3D accelerators support may still need
some improvement, but it is playable on almost all boards capable of
Direct3D rendering. 3dfx support is still another option for the
Unreal engine and will probably always be. You can also be sure that
the Glide support for the Unreal engine will be top notch.
I just wish that the hardware support
for The Wheel of Time shipped with better Direct 3D support. Even
playing with the very powerful GeForce video card I still had some
problems. The most noticeable was the performance. The current D3D
driver for the Wheel of Time has very poor texture management. When
there are large areas, I noticed a fairly large slowdown.
The artwork was done very well in most
areas, but in some of them the textures did not match or simply stood
out like a soar thumb.
One example was the textures for the
objects. The world textures are evenly blended and the object textures
looked a little bit uneven and out of place. Most of the time it
didn’t bother me, so I can’t really complain about that if I
really didn’t notice it. I did like how the graphics depicted a pond
or a small stream of water. It made it very believable.
The sound is about as average as sound
can get. Just like in most other games, the sound quality was what it
was to be expected. The music was done well, but not to my liking. The
music does set the mood and make the surroundings and action fit in
very well. I kept the music on during play because I feel that the
music in a game is part of it, so turning off the music is like losing
the experience to part of the game.
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