216 réponses à ce sujet

[Indoctrination]

I found that in DA2, it was really, really easy to make a good looking character in the game's face builder. I noticed that this was significantly harder in games like Origins and especially Mass Effect 3 without the aid of extensive fan modding.

I'm wondering if it was the unique art style in DA2 that made it easier to make cool looking characters, and I'm wondering if its the realistic art style that made custom Shepards look so old and generally terrible, half of the time in ME3. It would be nice if a developer familiar with the graphical side of the game could fill us in on how much the art style affects their face builders.

I hope the face builder in Dragon Age 3 lives up to its predecessor, because it was really good!

Modifié par Indoctrination, 11 mars 2013 - 11:55 .

[Sabariel]

Yes, you are the only one. No one else likes it.

No one.

[Liamv2]

It was good for female chars in the CC but awful for the male one

[BeatoSama]

I agree. I thought it was pretty charming. And the companions in DA2 are much more expressive as well.

DAO comes across as too 'semi-realistic' to me which makes things seem off in conversations.

[Roobz82]

I liked it. I'm replaying it now.

[M Hedonist]

Liamv2 wrote...

It was good for female chars in the CC but awful for the male one

Agreed. The first thing my brother said when watching me play DA2 was something along the lines of "Why do all the guys wear makeup?".

[Liamv2]

Sauruz wrote...

Liamv2 wrote...

It was good for female chars in the CC but awful for the male one

Agreed. The first thing my brother said when watching me play DA2 was something along the lines of "Why do all the guys wear makeup?".

Yep and it was the the other way round for DAO all of my female chars looked like they have been put in a washing machine

[Reidbynature]

I found DA2's art style to be very hit and miss. When I was first seeing previews for the game I was excited because I thought Origins was pretty bland and I was hopeful we wouldn't have to put up with the same overly bulky and misshapen heavy armours with pauldrons that would obscure your entire head in conversations with npc's.

Though DA2 seemed bland at times in its own way too. The environments weren't always great to look at and they dropped the ball on the youknowwhat-spawn, making them less Orcish and more Cenobite-ish (which was compounded in Legacy with the redesigned Genlock and Hurlock Alphas).

Yeah, DA2 is a very mixed bag when it comes to looks for me.

[Shevy]

Making a good looking male character, especially with a beard, was horrible. And in general I didn't like the change in the art style, mainly for two reasons. I was fond of Origins look and I don't like "cartoony" looks in general. Maybe I would like it more, if DA II had been the first installment in the series, don't know.

So my preference would be that with the new engine they are going back to a more "realistic" look. For the cc there should be more longer hair styles, no plastic-like faces, no auto-readjustment by adding a beard, sliders and better lighting!

[syllogi]

I liked the character design of the main characters, and the Chantry stands out as a very attractive area, but in general, area design and design of minor npcs was lazy and ugly. If all models and textures had the same level of detail and attention paid to them, DA2 would have been a lot better looking. Instead, we got that horrid corrugated cardboard texture pasted all over the place, as well as some areas that wouldn't have been out of place, graphically, in NWN1.

I understand the time crunch issue, but we have to judge the product as sold to us, and I really hope we get more consistent quality when it comes to art in DA3.

[Blazomancer]

I think the character creator of DA2 allowed lesser degree of customization of the facial structures, which is why it was hard to screw up when creating a new face. I'm sure many would agree with me that no matter how much you tinkered with a certain present, the end results always kind of looked similar.

In origins, each structural attribute would cover a wider range, meaning it was easier for the proportions to go berserk and consequently, the warden to look like a clown. However, it also potentially allowed people to come up with good looking faces having different facial structures.

Personally, I'd want a CC which would allow me to tweak each preset and come up with considerably different looking characters, which IMO wasn't the case in DA2. Having said that, the DA: O CC wasn't perfect either, but I'd certainly appreciate a much greater degree of freedom.


I found the art style in DA2 very pretty, but for a dark fantasy setting, I'd prefer more realism, so there.

[Indoctrination]

Blazomancer wrote...

I think the character creator of DA2 allowed lesser degree of customization of the facial structures, which is why it was hard to screw up when creating a new face. I'm sure many would agree with me that no matter how much you tinkered with a certain present, the end results always kind of looked similar. In origins, each structural attribute would cover a wider range, meaning it was easier for the proportions to go berserk and consequently, the warden to look like a clown. However, it also potentially allowed people to come up with good looking faces having different facial structures. Personally, I'd want a CC which would allow me to tweak each preset and come up with considerably different looking characters, which IMO wasn't the case in DA2. Having said that, the DA: O CC wasn't perfect either, but I'd certainly appreciate a much greater degree of freedom. I found the art style in DA2 very pretty, but for a dark fantasy setting, I'd prefer more realism, so there.

I'm going to have to disagree with you here. ME3 allows for all kinds of different facial structures and its custom-faces generally look terrible in-game. If Origins' face builder was very good, you would see people using Origins avatars from that base face builder and not avatars from any of the hundreds of mods that were created specifically because the built-in face builder isn't very good.

[Biotic Sage]

I'm sure you're not the only one, but I'm not part of your group. I absolutely hated the art style. The Dragon Age Universe is supposed to be taken relatively seriously, and the art style should reflect that. It's high fantasy that is still very rooted in familiar social and political issues, and there are (supposed to be) actual consequences for your actions, and the decisions you make are supposed to be very grey in nature.

Unless I completely misinterpreted what DA:O was attempting to convey...

[Yrkoon]

Indoctrination wrote...
 If Origins' face builder was very good, you would see people using Origins avatars from that base face builder and not avatars from any of the hundreds of mods that were created specifically because the built-in face builder isn't very good.

What?  No.  Anyone who knows anything about mods will tell you that they use them because they can.    Because they're there to be used.   Because gamers will  *always* want more of something, even if the game they're playing already breaks the world record for content.   It's really as simple as that.  It doesn't  -at all-  mean that the vanilla face builder "sucks"  or "isn't good enough" .  Hell, does DA2 even have character face building mods?

And this is a red herring argument anyway.  We were comparing  DA:O's artstyle with DA2s.  And there's *no question*  on which one's face builder   is more popular.  Take a look at any thread on this forum.   Including this one.   Look at the avatars of the users.    for every one person who's using  a face from DA2,    you'll  see  at least  5   using one from Origins.  Why?  Because they look better.    the DA:O  face  creator allows for Vastly  larger variety and customization.  Even beyond  it's 3 different  race options.

Modifié par Yrkoon, 11 mars 2013 - 01:34 .

[Indoctrination]

Yrkoon wrote...

What?  No.  Anyone who knows anything about mods will tell you that they use them because they can.    Because they're there to be used.  It's really as simple as that.  It doesn't  -at all-  mean that the vanilla face builder "sucks"  or "isn't good enough" .  Hell, does DA2 even have character face building mods?

And this is a red herring argument anyway.  We were comparing  DA:O's artstyle with DA2s.  And there's *no question*  on which one's face builder   is more popular.  Take a look at any thread on this forum.   Including this one.   Look at the avatars of the users.    for every one person who's using  a face from DA2,    you'll  see  at least  5   using one from Origins.  Why?  Because they look better,   the DA:O character creator allows for Vastly  larger variety and customization.  Even beyond  it's 3 different  race options.

You're making this up as you go along though! People don't mod games "because they can." They mod them because they want to change something in the game more to their liking. Origins has 200 face mods because modders buid much prettier faces than the game itself does. You see more Origins avatars than DA2 ones and they're almost uniformly modded faces.

[Blazomancer]

I didn't touch the ME3 cc in my previous post. I'll disagree that the faces looked terrible; after all what someone finds beautiful is relative. Anatomically, most of the characters looked normal. Though I'm no way a fan of the ME3 cc.

I didn't say that origins cc is very good; I only said it allowed a wider range of customization for each facial feature, say the cheekbone height, while the DA2 cc locked this range to a minimum so that the end result is more or less similar to the preset and looked pleasant enough, which I believe is more like a failsafe mechanism. And IMO, this shouldn't be the case; in an ideal face generator, I should be able to replicate any face from the real world. Neither origins nor DA2 allowed this, but origins was relatively more flexible.

I think you can actually see people here in the BSN using characters from the vanilla game as their avatar, I know I did.

I don't know which character creator is better and I don't care. All I want is that the cc doesn't babysit me while creating a character. I want to have a wider and more varied permutation of end results possible for each preset.

[Plaintiff]

I like DA2's art style and character creator immensely over Origins. I'm actually dreading going back and playing Origins after I recently replaced my PS3. I'm going to hold off on that as long as possible. Not just because it's impossible to make a character that isn't hideous, but because large sections of it are unnecessarily padded, and combat is a terrible chore.

There's nothing wrong with DA2's style. No art style has ever stopped me from taking a story seriously, and if anyone seriously has that problem, I think they must be pretty shallow.

Saying it looks like a "cartoon" or "anime" is not an insult. Western and Eastern animation can be extremely beautiful, and can be used to tell all kinds of stories.

Having beautiful, "realisitic" graphics doesn't make a bad game suck any less. I find it highly ironic that DA2's detractors often claim that DA2 fans only care about "flash over substance", when one of their major complaints about the game is how it looks, and that their preoccupation with it's appearance prevents them from taking the story seriously.

Modifié par Plaintiff, 11 mars 2013 - 01:46 .

[Volus Warlord]

EntropicAngel wrote...

I've never been unable to create a good looking male in a bioware game.

You should try to make an abomination instead.

[gonzalez.melissa53]

I liked it. It was different and I enjoyed Origins just as much but I did like the new.

[Yrkoon]

Indoctrination wrote...

Yrkoon wrote...

What?  No.  Anyone who knows anything about mods will tell you that they use them because they can.    Because they're there to be used.  It's really as simple as that.  It doesn't  -at all-  mean that the vanilla face builder "sucks"  or "isn't good enough" .  Hell, does DA2 even have character face building mods?

And this is a red herring argument anyway.  We were comparing  DA:O's artstyle with DA2s.  And there's *no question*  on which one's face builder   is more popular.  Take a look at any thread on this forum.   Including this one.   Look at the avatars of the users.    for every one person who's using  a face from DA2,    you'll  see  at least  5   using one from Origins.  Why?  Because they look better,   the DA:O character creator allows for Vastly  larger variety and customization.  Even beyond  it's 3 different  race options.

You're making this up as you go along though! People don't mod games "because they can." They mod them because they want to change something in the game more to their liking. Origins has 200 face mods because modders buid much prettier faces than the game itself does. You see more Origins avatars than DA2 ones and they're almost uniformly modded faces.

Nope.  Do I need to get David Gaider in here to remind  you  that Gamers always want more, no matter how much you give them?    The fact that mods exist for just about every game ever  confirms this, it doesn't *at all* mean that the vanilla game was somehow empty or void of  (____insert lacking feature here____).  if it did, you wouldn't see 100,000+ Skyrim *content* mods, for example,  since skyrim is Hardly lacking  in content.  It's got hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of hours of content right out of the box.

And again, this aspect of the discussion is moot.  Lets discuss DA2.    the reason you don't see many mods for DA2 is NOT because "everyone's satisfied with it" or whatever nonsense you're trying to argue.... it's because the game isn't very moddable.  we have no modding tools for it.    if Bioware Had released a  tool kit for it, I assure you,   you'd see  thousands of face-building mods.

Modifié par Yrkoon, 11 mars 2013 - 01:45 .

[foxfeathers]

I loved DA2's style. And it didn't strike me as cartoony at all. Stylized, yes, but not so much that they became cartoons.

Also, female DA2 hair was SO MUCH BETTER than anything in Origins or Mass Effect. ME hair is the worst.

[Cimeas]

DA2's art style was fantastic, the game looked gorgeous on PC at max settings with the high res texture pack. I'm really happy they won't be changing it that much in DA3.

[grumpymooselion]

I don't know about the actual pull through in the in game graphics but a lot of the concept art was great. I really liked the architecture and the general design aesthetic of Kirkwall. The loading screens were also fun, as well as the random graffiti and etched/carved designs in the game. The character models, on the other hand, were really hit and miss as was the gear you could wear. It wasn't all bad though.

I guess I liked the idea of the more stylized design, but some of the ways it was implemented just seemed off here and there. I need to clarify, though, that the concept of going the stylized route had lots of potential. I'm actually sort of sad they seem to be moving away from it.

[katiebour]

Sauruz wrote...

Liamv2 wrote...

It was good for female chars in the CC but awful for the male one

Agreed. The first thing my brother said when watching me play DA2 was something along the lines of "Why do all the guys wear makeup?".

My m!Hawke disagrees with the above statement.