For those of you seeing ugly ships, are you on low settings or something? Because I gotta say, on high settings the ocean is a visual feast now. The islands look awesome - I can see trees and buildings and forts and stuff where they used to just be big plots of lands. And the ships look just as good as ever - I'm not seeing ships pop in size as they get closer. Some of the ships used to sometimes shrink or grow suddenly when you got closer to them and I'm not seeing that happen anymore, in fact I can barely tell when they're switching to more detailed ship models now unless I'm really looking for it (except the ghost ships with their wacky looking sails, that's an obvious switch). Those things plus the new lighting - being at sea looks fantastic.
Here are some other things I noticed while testing some of the new stuff:
- crows nests match the ships now (no more yellow and red crows nests on EITC ships)
- masts wobble a lot when they're hit (maybe I just didn't hit masts enough before but I never noticed them wobbling this much)
- It's way easier to disable a mast now because hitting the sails counts towards that
- I can see my body underwater in some places now (next to the dock on Tortuga is where I noticed this)
- I can't see anyone on any other ships anymore, not even other players. People on my own ship show up fine still. They're making the ocean feel so much lonelier...
- The new dig spot graphic looks okay in some places and just plain stupid in others. Why was this even necessary?
- It's really strange to log in and be standing inside someone else. I'm not so sure about the whole no-player-bumping thing and hope that D had a really good reason for it, but...
- You can still push players around, you just have to use enemies to do it. I found some AFK folks on Devil's Anvil and pulled a level 2 crab over to them. I was able to push them around with the crab just as if I were pushing them.
- SvS sails don't always show up properly colored - who's the bonehead that broke this one?
It looks like if you run on high graphics settings, this patch is a win but if you don't, things look worse now. The question I have, then, is whether there is some kind of performance boost that was gained for all the graphics that low settings traded in for? I didn't notice any on high, but I don't have a slow computer to test low settings with.