Brockololly wrote...
Dejajeva wrote...
On the topic of art style, and I'm probably going to get flamed for this, but my boyfriend and I were playing MW3 today, and we were on the Piazza map (which is an italian seaside city, lots of tight corners, very rambling, not unlike kirkwall. sorta), and I randomly looked up and saw the most beautiful mountain, mist swirling around it's top…little details could make the world of difference between a clean kirkwall underground and a grimy, awful, rotting darktown.
No, I agree. The thing that especially DA2 is lacking is any attention to detail. Or when they do have details, they're blatantly copy/pasted to death, like how all of the darkspawn share the same model and thus have the exact same bloody tear running down one side of their face. Having more attention to detail visually is what makes the game world feel like an authentic, plausible place and not just a level in a video game. Both Witcher games but especially The WItcher 2 and Skyrim as well do a very good job of creating worlds that feel authentic.
Its the little details that make those worlds come alive- things like seeing the mist swirl around the peaks in Skyrim or birds that circle the towers in The Witcher or just having sheathes for swords or banners and flags that flap in the breeze. That sort of thing by themselves aren't big, but they're attention to detail that makes the world seem like a place that people could feasibly live in.
The world of DA:O and DA2 both feel, when I am honest, like cardboard backgrounds to me. This was definitely worse in DA2, because it lacked the variety and size of DA:O. And indeed, the attention to detail. DA:O had some, DA2 had very little. What was there, like the Tree in the Alienage, stood out positively, but also drew attention to the serious lack of it elsewhere in the game.
Ironically, this lack of detail was actually extolled as a virtue by the EA Bioware PR circus prior to release. At the time I sort of laughed it off, but as I pay attention to how other games handle detail – including a recent purchase, Xenoblade Chronicles on the humble Wii – I am getting increasingly disillusioned. DA2 really is a very poor game in terms of visual design, once the initial impression of Kirkwall’s spiky bling-bling wears off (which it did rather quickly for me).
Take a look at these videos of Tarantia from Age of Conan. Tarantia is a city whose colour scheme is not too dissimilar to Kirkwall. It runs on the Dreamworld engine, which was initially developed around 2000. Tarantia itself was developed well before the game’s release in 2008, well before DA:O.
www.youtube.com/watch
www.youtube.com/watch
www.youtube.com/watch
Now, AoC is hardly the greatest game (and Funcom bears plenty of blame for that), and Tarantia has many of the weaknesses of MMO hubs; as it is a relatively static environment by itself, compared to say, Vizima in The Witcher I. The graphics do somewhat show their age. But in terms of visual design, Funcom mostly did a pretty good job. Look and listen to the little details: Birds in the air, the sound of gulls in the harbour, the fading paint, horseturds in the streets, a dog chasing a cat, the view of the city from the area outside the gates of Old Tarantia. And the architecture! This isn’t a cheap and inferior imitation of some ancient or medieval European city, but Bronze Age Troy, Hattusas and Mycenae meets classical antiquity meets sword and sorcery fantasy art.
And almost everything you see can be visited, even if much of the city consists of adventuring zones.
One example of where you notice the bad environmental design of Kirkwall is when the player easily misses what are supposed to be imposing vistas in Kirkwall. That’s not the case in Tarantia, where there are several locations whose very purpose almost seems to be for the player to feel awe.
Age of Conan also has something that DA seems to lack. Funcom developed an extensive 'art bible' as a guide to their visual design, combining real-world historical cultures and sword & sorcery artwork (illustrations, comics and some movies). I remember seeing dev videos where I could see Funcom's artists really delving into illustrations of historical artefacts. The recent Conan movie made use of that Bible, and wherever you see interesting and good art direction in that movie, it's a good bet that's the AoC art bible's influence.
I got the impression that other devs use similar art bibles or something equivalent.
DA/DA2? I get that uncomfortable 'let's make up as we go and pick up things left and right' approach feeling.
And that's not just the art design; it's the entire setting.
It starts with the name. Thedas. The Dragon Age Setting. If you can’t be bothered to invent a proper name for your setting, that signals to me that you are not taking your worldbuilding seriously. If you are not taking your worldbuilding seriously, you’re likely to fall hard, sooner rather than later. You’re on a one-way trip to the country of Hopelessinconsistencystan and its neighbours, Blandistan, Everythingplusthekitchensinkistan and Retconnistan.
Yes, I know, the Elder Scrolls has a God called Akatosh (Also Knowns As The Old Smaug Himself), the nickname of a
gametester back in the days. But that was in an era and under circumstances when game settings were pulled out of the business end of people’s digestive tracts, and were basically throw-away products produced by teenagers with pimples.
We’re way beyond that.<_<
It's not a bad way for a one-off product that might turn out to be a flop ('let's not invest too much into this thing'), but for a developing and expanding new IP?
Modifié par Das Tentakel, 03 avril 2012 - 08:39 .
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