You know... the more I look at the art the more I've been asking myself whether the issue I have with the art is really about the 'painted style' and I don't think it is. I think my issue is really more about:
1) It's not edgy enough. If the game had a bit of a darker 'Cyberpunk' edge to it I would like it a lot more.
2) Painted is fine, but within the painted 'genre' I'm not sure I like the style of the art. I've looked at a lot of other games that seem to have a painted or stylized art style and some of them look pretty darn good (not my preferred style of art... but I have to admit they still look great). Such as Swords of Legend Online, the old (cancelled) Everquest Next, etc. actually look pretty decent. I mean I still prefer a more realistic art style but within their style they were pretty nice to look at.
3) Lack of polish. The graphics look very dated right now, especially the character models. It just doesn't look very appealing and I don't think it's because of being 'painted'. It looks more like these character models are still just place holders and don't have much polish yet.
3b) A lack of detail. Especially the buildings, but the landscape as well. The buildings lack anything to make them distinct. There's no furniture, no signs, no 'props' to make them look like they are actually part of a living and breathing world. The landscape feels the same. Sure there is grass, hills, cliffs, etc. But every square inch of the land is grass. I don't think I saw a single patch of dirt or gravel or a game trail, etc. that would make it feel more 'alive' and diverse. There was no flora and fauna beyond the trees and harvestable bushes.
4) A lack of points of interest. The world seemed to lack any special points of interest. I found an area with skeletons and some kind of glowing totem thing and that was interesting, but that was really it... I didn't see anything like the chessboard in Butcherblock Mountains, or other areas that said 'this is really neat... I want to hunt here'. The goblin caves were just a rather drab cave without much to make them interesting. No moss, dripping water, echo noises, or other interesting things you might find in a regular cave... or anything like goblin beds, etc.
Having said all that I think you can chalk a lot of that up to being in pre-alpha. However, I feel compelled to talk about it to ensure the devs have proper feedback on how the community is feeling about the art. Especially since it does not appear that they will be reversing direction here. It's important that if they are going with this art style that they 'get it right'. I also feel like some of these things should be a bit farther along by now. I was rather surprised that the only playable race was Human and that the character model for it didn't look very good.
I would love to hear others thoughts on this (beyond just I hate the new art style). As I think being more specific with your feedback and 'why' you don't like it might help the devs make it from a negative to a positive.
I think the word you are looking for is: bland
Also, why are there so many large buildings in that "town" that has no houses? How are those large empty buildings justified with no population, nor a means of supporting a population there. If there is a story about how this is an old fishing village, ok them make it look like that, or a mining town or something other than the worlds most generic bland boring town ever, that somehow has every amenity in it.
If this is the starting town of the game, why ever leave? It has everything all right there, near by and easy to access. It's the perfect place.
A starting town should be shoddy, lacking in amenities and in need of support from the larger more secure towns and as a player I should work to help this shoddy little starting town and I should be encouraged to leave it by means of quest pathing, amenity seeking or resource hunting.
Kittik describes it perfectly. My analogy (from a friend!) is Quest64 art style. It is the blandest thing I have ever seen in gaming. I cannot fathom how the devs would even consider having content that is so mundane at ANY level. Just because EverQuest had some super boring starting areas doesn't mean that should be replicated..it's crazy to me. We are far too many years into this project to have the game look like this. When I pledged to this project I was expecting vast underwater cities as a Dark Myr..or some bizarre planar wind twisted realm for the Skar. I was expecting stuff like the tower of the reckless magician, or faerthale, something cool. What we are seeing here has zero "wow" factor. All I can say is, "meh, at least they have something playable".
Kittik said:
A starting town should be shoddy, lacking in amenities and in need of support from the larger more secure towns and as a player I should work to help this shoddy little starting town and I should be encouraged to leave it by means of quest pathing, amenity seeking or resource hunting.
This is still pre-alpha. Maybe they will change the npc's in the future to remove alot of them. It is pointless for testing purposes if we don't have any smithing capacity for example at the town so people can test the crafting skills. If smithing npc's were move to Thronefast then we would then be complaining that we can't test that skill because that part of the game is still locked out.
So it is possible they have everything available at the start location so we can do all the different testing. (also maybe this is their vision for a starting location).
I do wonder if Availia has so many services simply because we don't have a City yet and they want to make sure that people have a fully playable experience. That thought is why I haven't had a problem with Availia at this point.
That said, I agree with the art points. For me it isn't so much that it is hand-painted instead of photo-realistic. I genuinely don't like the style itself. I don't like the animals; I think they look like they were designed for children's cartoons where animals need to be able to make human facial expressions.
I also don't like the trees. They lack bark; wood grain is visible. And the swirls look cartoony and unnatural as well.
I don't like the skybox; it's blurry and has Earth's moon if I'm not mistaken.
Some of the mobs like skeletons and the environmental effects are nice and I like those a lot.
All of that said; it is personal preference that would only matter if:
A) the majority of people interested in classically inspired MMOS (their market) felt the same way
AND
B) It would prevent them from buying/enjoying the game.
Are we allowed to post here the screenshots that have been shared by VR on the official Discord? Because I don't love the "painted" style myself, but the new screenshot of the Ogre model wearing plate armor is pretty sweet. We'll have to see it moving in-game to form a final opinion on it, of course. But it looks a darn sight better than what we've seen so far.
Corwyn said:Are we allowed to post here the screenshots that have been shared by VR on the official Discord? Because I don't love the "painted" style myself, but the new screenshot of the Ogre model wearing plate armor is pretty sweet. We'll have to see it moving in-game to form a final opinion on it, of course. But it looks a darn sight better than what we've seen so far.
