Redcoat wrote...
Look at the various details the designers have included - the piles of books haphazardly strewn about, the animal pelt hanging near the wall, what appears to be garlic hanging from a rope, some nug carcasses hanging near the fireplace, the firewood piled in the corner...it's these sorts of details, this "clutter" that gives the world verisimilitude; it creates the impression that people actually inhabit this place. If this location were in DA2, it'd likely be little more than a brown box with two or three props thrown in.
I don't know if DA2's terribly sparse environments were due to time restraints or a conscious design choice, but it makes the whole of Kirkwall feel like a ghost town.
I'm pretty sure it was a conscious design decision, based on trying to free up memory by getting rid of all that stuff that actually makes the environments look like lived in places and not desolate dioramas. Just as much as forcing "unique" companion outfits is in part due to freeing up memory since the character model can be just one piece and not made up of different bits like Origins.
Just take these quotes from Art Director Matt Goldman in a bunch of pre-release interviews:
From PC Gamer:Actually it’s a doddle to see the change between Origins’ muddy, bleary visuals and Dragon Age 2’s stark, highcontrast lines. Clearly the artistic blandness of the first game still rankles for Goldman. “Damn cheese-wheels,” he semimutters, referring to the ubiquitous hunks of Edam deployed around Origins’ dungeons. Put in place solely to fill up space in sparse areas, they – and similar cliche-fantasy ephemera – distracted from the game’s overall motif, softening the point of swordblades with down-home pointlessness. Matt snaps back from his frustrated reverie and explains: “The props are to help give context for what the area is, but overall I’d say Dragon Age 2 is a lot more minimalist looking. The intent is to create a strong personality without getting in your face and without distracting you with all these details that don’t really do anything – they just screw up your path line and make shadows a lower resolution.”
Matt’s background gives him a uniquely artistic perspective: “we’ve stripped off what’s extraneous and as a result made the environments and characters sharper. The environment is basically – in terms of a band – the bassline. You have to lay down a nice thick bassline to set the mood: it’s the backbone of the picture-making, story telling. But if it’s too detailed then you get this disrupting camouflage problem where you can’t tell what’s going on. So by stripping away things and looking for opportunities to create some more dramatic silhouettes, you can focus attention on the character.”
Or at Game Informer:Before, I think Origins was kind of like Death Dealer meets The Hobbit.
It was half really “raah, scary” and half really whimsical. We wanted
to take it into more of a desolate feel and kind of strip it down to a
hot-rod Samurai look. Not only visually, but in terms of the actual
storytelling motifs that appear in those movies. The cautionary tale was
really appropriate for DA2.
The lack of detail and life in DA2's world makes it a very boring place visually and the new art style of forcing spikes and blockiness on every single thing makes it feel not like a real world, but like a half baked game.
Redcoat wrote...
I'm glad some finally noticed the lighting issue; nearly every single location in the game is what mappers call "fullbright" - i.e. no lighting variation at all.
Another thing that struck me is how much worse the face textures are for NPCs...they have have this bleached, washed-out look to them, as if no shader effects are being applied at all. Hair and beards look particularly bad:
Yup, the crappy lighting makes for a much less atmospheric game IMO. Just look at most any scene from Amnesia: The Dark Descent or go out at night in a lightning storm in STALKER- the lighting (and sound) is what makes those games so absorbing and immersive and atmospheric. Supposedly the lighting is something they really worked on in DA2, but its mostly a side step and in cases like the faces, they look horrible in many lighting conditions. I don't know if thats a lighting, texture or shader issue, or just DA2's ugly face morph system.
Modifié par Brockololly, 28 juillet 2011 - 02:44 .
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