I love Rome and everything related to its past. I mean, I have a Masters in Roman Law (totallly off-topic, LOL) and always enjoyed shows, expositions, movies and whatever related to this great Empire.

Purchased the Total War Collection months ago on Steam (with a pletora of games) and thought to myself: should I install Rome? I mean, it is almost 10 years old! Must look horrible :P.

Yesterday, I decided to take a look. Game installs fast and the first pre-rendered cut scene is on. "Ugly", I think to myself. Go to settings, put everything on max except for anti aliasing and go to the first battle. To my surprise, not only did it look very nice (much better than the cut scene), but the gameplay is absolutely engaging. Had to stop after the first 20 minutes or I would sure get so involved I would do nothing else.

So this is another inherent quality for PC Games: you can get an older title, max it and it is almost sure going to look good after so many years, probably much better then it did in the machines available for the releases. My rig, which is not so powerful ( i7, 8 gigs, radeon 7730) can handle thigs from today very well. When I get a new one in about three or four years, I can go back to the titles of today and see how they look in better apparatus. Long live PC Gaming!

One of my favorite games ever :). I played like 400 hours on the Europa Barbarorum mod for this game alone.

I will even be buying a new pc for the Rome 2: total war.

Wow, and without mods? lol. Usually on a thread like this people have a list of mods that really bring a PC game up to date. Just look at the graphics mods people have released on Morrowind; it looks close to Skyrim quality!

Not sure if their are graphics mods for Rome but it may be worth looking into.

Yup! It does look good in full HD. Frame rate gets erratic with high anti-aliasing though. I think I'll get used to the game and its mechanics before opting for mods.

I can see this happening to me lol. That's why I stopped quickly yesterday. :)

I spent a month playing Medieval: Total War three years ago. You know, the one with sprites. :p

Was amazing, I wish the newer ones had sprites as well.

That's what I thought. There are many other Total Wars in my collection and I imagine how good they look, specially since they are all more recent than Rome. Seen a video of Napoleon recently and it's blown my mind. Next in line for sure!

I say that big TV's make everything look ugly, as opposed to a small screen.

I'm not really sure about that. I've finished Darksiders recently playing it almost exclusively on my 15" laptop. But the times I ran it on my big LED TV it seemed to look even better (and in full HD, opposed to the console versions).

so I suppose you are going to get Ryse day one then? ;)