I have to call BS on that one. AH2's graphics are significantly in advance of AH1's, even when just talking about terrain. Yes, there are legacy issues from AH1 in the terrain, particularly in the large scale terrain features. But in the finer details AH2 is much better and the newer aircraft, v2.01 and above, are MUCH better.
The key word Karnak is Significant. Yes I agree there have been many improvements but not significant ones. It's all been a very long slow evolution rather then revolution. When AH2 was released it was a suprise that it looked almost the same as AH1 even including the same maps.
The only terrain updates have been to the textures themselves,base layouts,more barns,trees,hedges, windmalls etc. The actual Terrain Mesh detail and Landclass is the same. E.g we still get the mass tile effect from alt as we did with AH1. There are still no clouds, or any variance at all in the weather.
With AH2 an entirely new engine or something was expected, so it wasn't to be but that's ok we can wait. However we are now pushing towards 2010 with basically the same engine from AH1 with updates. I know AH builds the game to work on low spec machines, but really the average low spec machine has moved on since 1Ghz P4's and Graphics cards with 128mb of ram. Just as it has with download restriction sizes of 120mb and dialups. It would be interesting to run a poll to see just what the average customer PC specs are.
Thankfully the gameplay itself and mates is what makes it and I'll take that over eye candy. But it's not easy introducing new players based on this alone, they expect eye candy as well.
<S>...-Gixer
