7 réponses à ce sujet

[StElmo]

As an artist myself, I have fallen in love with the DA2 art style. Sure, the assets get WAYYY overused. But the actual aesthetic itself, WOW.

• It's not generic
• It uses siullete based morphology
• It's neither gritty realistic rubbish, nor super fantasy world colorful - it's very painterly.
• The design is incredibly consistant - althugh that could be because of overused assets...
• It bathes in light, which is RARE in modern games, which tend to love gritty, muddy shadow - ergh
• Armor is stunning, yet not too crazy (yay for no boob plate armor on the female hawke!)
  
  Some Criticisms:
• The hair styles don't always fit the overall aesthetic
• The hairstyles are a bit too young looking - about 50% of the hair in the character editor make femhawke look like a 12 year old girl, damn wierd and a little bit creepy.
• Overused assets sorry, you guys probably hear that a lot.

Overall, I think it is absolutely stunning, don't you dare go back to DA:O style BioWare - it's so generic and would probably suit something more like a Boulder's gate sequel or something - I know many DA:O fans love Boulders gate

Also, sometimes people say it's too "anime" - but I hate Anime with a passion (don't get me started) and yet I like this art style?

Some great screens:

Modifié par StElmo, 16 septembre 2012 - 03:51 .

[Allan Schumacher]

I don't think the first picture is would be that uncommon of a camera position. The second one is certainly a more scenic pose.

[Allan Schumacher]

SomniariKess1124 wrote...

History can be a life saver for games. why they couldn't just research the armor, weapons, and Architecture, and actually give it a time-period feel. DA series seems like it was supposed to be for Medieval, and DAO did brilliantly at that, but DA2 just feels like... Bioware got cocky. Kirkwall didn't feel like it had a historical origin. just felt like a mesh of recycled enviroments and cave-man days.

Just... make it feel like a real city, with a certain culture there. Kirkwallers struck me as the kind that like to make money, so why not reflect that onto the city?

I felt a bit of an medieval Islamic influence seemed to be present.

[Allan Schumacher]

I'm certainly no expert of medieval islamic influence, but i have visited the Al Hambra in Granada, and Cordoba, and several other cities in Spain with remnant moorish buiodings and architecture. Based on those experiences, I can only wonder hw you got that impression as I didn't see that at all.

I'm not particularly well traveled, but just the colors and the kind of haphazard way the town was set up reminded me of bazaars you see in like Indy movies and other Middle Eastern locales. Especially the desert like color scheme. Or how these places were depicted even in games like Rome/Medievial: Total War and what have you.

[Allan Schumacher]

tehturian wrote...

Skyrim has quite nice wilderness areas but aside from maybe Markarth all the "cities" look bland and uninspiring.

Whiterun, supposedly the centre of trade and culture in Skyrim. Lol.

There's often scaling issues with open world games.  Fallout New Vegas has full towns that only have 4 houses and 2 places of business, for example.

[Allan Schumacher]

And it suffers from being a scaled-down settlement, it would have profited in terms of immersion by being significantly larger and more populous. Maybe console hardware limitations have something to do with this?

I suspect it's more of an active design choice. If you look at say, Fallout 3 and especially Fallout New Vegas, they are open world games that necessarily downgrade the total square footage of settlements just to keep the scale manageable.

I live in Edmonton, with a decent amount of urban sprawl, and it'd probably take me several hours to walk from the Eastern tip to the Western tip. While the idea might sound cool and awesome, I don't think Skyrim would be a better game if the settlements would require players to take 30-60 minutes just to get around.

A bit of suspension of disbelief is needed for a game like Skyrim and other open worlds that don't just take place in a city.

[Allan Schumacher]

I agree that generic is no longer a useful word.

It's pretty much synonymous with "poor" in that it's a qualitative pejorative that people use to describe an art style that they don't like.

[Allan Schumacher]

Upsettingshorts wrote...

Allan Schumacher wrote...

I agree that generic is no longer a useful word.

It's pretty much synonymous with "poor" in that it's a qualitative pejorative that people use to describe an art style that they don't like.

Tell that to Matt Goldman, who explicitly described the art direction for DA: Origins as "generic:" 

According to Matt Goldman, art director for BioWare's Dragon Age II, being generic was an actual design principle for the Dragon Age: Origins art team. While Goldman didn't direct the art department that worked on Origins, he's familiar with the instructions the former team was given: "Actually, the design creative was 'it's generic,' which isn't the most inspirational direction that you could give a team." 

[source]  

Generic is a useful term, I believe, but 'round these parts plenty of useful terms are used to convey so many different ideas that their purpose and meaning are lost.  See epic, immersion, choice, etc.

Personally, I would label DA:O's art style as generic in the sense that it was derivative of very broad genre conventions and tropes.  It didn't really do much of anything, intentionally, to assert its own visual style.  Plus, if "generic" is what you tell your art team to go with, it pretty much amounts to an instruction not to take any risks and restrain creativity.

That isn't to say DA2's distinctive art style was good and everyone should like it - and for the life of me every single conversation about it on these boards involves posters mixing aesthetics and graphics with reckless abandon to the point it becomes a frustrating exercise - only to assert that it, in fact, had one.  

As such, people can argue over the subjective merits of DA2's aesthetic, but it remains unquestionably DA2's aesthetic.  As to whether or not having a certain recognizable style is the kind of advantage that ought to be placed firmly in the objectively good category, I'll leave that argument to people with a more thorough grounding in art and art theory.  

Here's what Matt had to say:

After some prodding, he comes around: "The art is important, especially for an RPG, because the art helps draw the player in and make it a more immersive story-telling experience ... If the art is aligned with the design intent ... then it makes the design much stronger." 

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I'll trust Matt to use the term appropriately, instead of the excessive overuse I see from people that seem to use it for "I don't like this."

It's like, in general usage the word "ironic" typically means whatever the speaker wants it to mean as it's used so much.  However if an English Literature professor uses it, I'll generally accept that they've used the term correctly.