Yea Mark warned us in the news about the “crazy eyes” that make them look a bit nuts. Usually they're sweet though, at least to those who like weird small races. ^^
Also remember they are building this game for large scale battles. So FPS > Graphics.
You can have fairly low end graphics and still look tasteful. Hell, Crowfall is built around a similar scale with a similarly cartoonish art style. Unlike what we're seeing here though, Crowfall's art looks good.
CF and CU have very different art style, so I guess that it is a matter of taste.
Also remember they are building this game for large scale battles. So FPS > Graphics.
Yep, and what I find amazing is that CU has some pretty detailed / high quality character models and gears while still supporting hundreds (thousand?) of characters on screen with great performances. I think that it's a feat no other game has ever achieved.
Also remember they are building this game for large scale battles. So FPS > Graphics.
Yep, and what I find amazing is that CU has some pretty detailed / high quality character models and gears while still supporting hundreds (thousand?) of characters on screen with great performances. I think that it's a feat no other game has ever achieved.
I don't think the issue is "graphics", it's art design.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
I don't think the issue is "graphics", it's art design.
Hmm well I think that in this case it would still be a matter of taste, if I'm correct the TDD realm was always meant to have a more exotic / eccentric look than the Vikings and Arthurians.
The armor in itself seems not too problematic imo, I like the concept art:
I think that the issues with the screenshot are: 1) Luchorpan being a small race, their head looks disproportionately large 2) For some reasons the 3D model of the armor appears more "futuristic" than what was intended in the concept art, I guess they could reduce this perception by adding earth/nature elements and adjusting some of the bright yellow texture so it becomes a bit more drab and rough. Right now the 3D model reminds me the Elites' suit in Halo 2. 3) The heads of the characters are "popping" out of the armor, it looks like the faces were kind of superimposed to the image. Same thing happened on some other screenshots.
I have no problem with the suit itself, just the gems. If they simply picked a more artistically pleasing color for the gems, it'd be 100 times better. Something complemetary like rubies or yellow topaz or something would be far less tacky.
I don't think the issue is "graphics", it's art design.
Hmm well I think that in this case it would still be a matter of taste, if I'm correct the TDD realm was always meant to have a more exotic / eccentric look than the Vikings and Arthurians.
The armor in itself seems not too problematic imo, I like the concept art:
I think that the issues with the screenshot are: 1) Luchorpan being a small race, their head looks disproportionately large 2) For some reasons the 3D model of the armor appears more "futuristic" than what was intended in the concept art, I guess they could reduce this perception by adding earth/nature elements and adjusting some of the bright yellow texture so it becomes a bit more drab and rough. Right now the 3D model reminds me the Elites' suit in Halo 2. 3) The heads of the characters are "popping" out of the armor, it looks like the faces were kind of superimposed to the image. Same thing happened on some other screenshots.
I like that concept art. Somehow it doesn't transfer over well into 3d. Maybe those gems are a little too large in the game version.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
MarkJacobsCEO City State EntertainmentMemberRarePosts: 649
edited January 2017
Folks,
Thanks for your comments, positive, negative and/or in-between. Let me just clarify a few things:
1) The amor that the TDD is wearing is supposed to be less realistic, and more colorful, than the armor of any of the other Realms. The armor of the Fall Court of the TDD was designed to be worn in forests where the color palettes will match very well with the bright fall colors you'll see there. The TDD will, of course, have other options as well for other forests and other times of year.
2) Please keep in mind the impact that lighting has upon the shininess of the armor/weapons/scene. Has we have been saying for the last few months, we've been adding new engine features, and that has an effect on the overall look. The art team is getting more knobs/dials to tweak, and once that is done, we'll be doing another review of all the armor/weapons/etc.
3) Yeah, that screenshot wasn't the best but we wanted to focus on the armor and doing that, well, the head/eyes look creepier than they will in the final game. Sorry about that.
4) As posted above, the particle system is indeed more than two years old. An improved one is currently being coded and should be good to go, at least a first pass, before the end of the month. At that point, Mike Crossmire, who also was the effects artist for Dark Age of Camelot (and one of Mythic's earliest members) will be able to display his talents.
5) As per what Francis has stated above, FPS > Graphics, always so we have been focusing more on the engine side (as we've been saying for 2 years) than the art side. Now that the engine is proving that it can handle large-scale player connections (we're running another Backer and Bot test in 10 mins with 1020 Bots running around in a tiny space), once we get the new animation system and improved VFX system in, we can review our decisions on things like poly/tri count that we made three years ago. Right now, it looks like we can up the poly/tri count for our models, which will make things look even better.
That's it for now, I'll be hanging around here for a couple of hours while we run our test so if you have any questions, feel free to ask.
And thanks again Bill and MMORPG for the coverage!
Hi Mark thx for coming here and addressing concerns.
As someone who played WAR and GW2 WvsW alot, how do you plan to solve the problem of huge zergs and one faction completely dominating other since those were my main problems with those games ?
Hi Mark thx for coming here and addressing concerns.
As someone who played WAR and GW2 WvsW alot, how do you plan to solve the problem of huge zergs and one faction completely dominating other since those were my main problems with those games ?
You have a quick summary in CU Wiki on Zergs, including "balancing Realm populations" link in the list.
@MarkJacobs Connected to many negative comments here (and on many other places), I hope you'll consider growing the art team bit sooner than planned. Those "little" things can hurt the game much more than it seems on the first glance.
W...aaagh?
MarkJacobsCEO City State EntertainmentMemberRarePosts: 649
Hi Mark thx for coming here and addressing concerns.
As someone who played WAR and GW2 WvsW alot, how do you plan to solve the problem of huge zergs and one faction completely dominating other since those were my main problems with those games ?
You're welcome! As James said, linked below, this is a subject near and dear to my heart and one we've been addressing with our Backers even before the KS began. You can't solve huge zergs and the kind of round-robin, keep trading, and other PvP/RvR problems you see in games with a silver bullet, you need to address it through lots of different systems/mechanics. Anybody who promises that "they have solved the problem" is being foolish. What I can say that we are doing is trying, right from the beginning, to make that kind of play the least optimal and fun for players. Will it work? Time will tell, but we've already shown that we are willing to make changes, even if the cost is high, to make Camelot Unchained a better game. Since RvR is the core of the game, we will do even more there.
Hi Mark thx for coming here and addressing concerns.
As someone who played WAR and GW2 WvsW alot, how do you plan to solve the problem of huge zergs and one faction completely dominating other since those were my main problems with those games ?
You have a quick summary in CU Wiki on Zergs, including "balancing Realm populations" link in the list.
@MarkJacobs Connected to many negative comments here (and on many other places), I hope you'll consider growing the art team bit sooner than planned. Those "little" things can hurt the game much more than it seems on the first glance.
We'll grow the art team when we are locked down in terms of the rendering pipeline, lighting, etc. Until we do that, if we spend a lot of time on art, we might have to throw it out. Other games have had the same problem and paid dearly for it. Sometimes the studios can afford to do that (Blizzard), but an independent, self-funded dev can't. So, we'll grow the team when it's the best time to do so for our Backers, even if we lose some prospective Backers because they don't like what they see today or tomorrow. I'm in this for the long haul and since raising additional funds for Camelot Unchained has not been a priority for us, I'm not going to change that approach now, even if there is some negative external feedback to art design.
And, when it comes to art, everything is highly subjective of course. We'll be polling our Backers once we get into Beta and see what they have to say about it. I'm eager, no matter the response, to hear what they have to say about things.
Thanks for link/info to the other poster James, appreciated!
@MarkJacobs Connected to many negative comments here (and on many other places), I hope you'll consider growing the art team bit sooner than planned. Those "little" things can hurt the game much more than it seems on the first glance.
They already have ~8 full time artists though. In this specific case it's probably not related to a lack of dev. time spent on art.
Otherwise I'd say let Sandra work 60+ h. / week, half the time creating lovely animations and the other half drawing first draft concept art as she used to and excels at.
MarkJacobsCEO City State EntertainmentMemberRarePosts: 649
@MarkJacobs Connected to many negative comments here (and on many other places), I hope you'll consider growing the art team bit sooner than planned. Those "little" things can hurt the game much more than it seems on the first glance.
They already have ~8 full time artists though. In this specific case it's probably not related to a lack of dev. time spent on art.
I'd say let Sandra work 60 hours per week, half the time creating lovely animations and the other half drawing first draft concept art as she used to and excelled at.
Well, some of it is. The artists get far less than for iteration and polish than they would at other studios. Plus, we have fewer of them and,as you correctly stated, most have them do more than one thing, which cuts down on the time they can spend on any particular piece(s).
We expect to outsource or hire some additional help for the artists once we're in Beta 1 and/or have the lighting/rendering/etc. part of the engine closer to a semi-polished state.
<snippety snip> ...since raising additional funds for Camelot Unchained has not been a priority for us, I'm not going to change that approach now, even if there is some negative external feedback to art design. <snip>
That's an interesting detail - I hope "...not a priority" means not a priority at the moment, that is you will reach for additional investors when the time is right?
@MarkJacobs Connected to many negative comments here (and on many other places), I hope you'll consider growing the art team bit sooner than planned. Those "little" things can hurt the game much more than it seems on the first glance.
They already have ~8 full time artists though. In this specific case it's probably not related to a lack of dev. time spent on art.
Otherwise I'd say let Sandra work 60+ hours / week, half the time creating lovely animations and the other half drawing first draft concept art as she used to and excelled at.
Only one concept artist, Sandra is full time animating recently. I mean, I enjoy Michelle's landscapes and some other pieces and I shared them, with pleasure, on many places - I don't want to be misunderstood. I know that artists use "awesome!"s as a fuel, but diversity is good, even necessary at some point I'd say.
PS 60+ hours would be cruel, you want CSE to enter Sandra-only crunch mode
W...aaagh?
MarkJacobsCEO City State EntertainmentMemberRarePosts: 649
<snippety snip> ...since raising additional funds for Camelot Unchained has not been a priority for us, I'm not going to change that approach now, even if there is some negative external feedback to art design. <snip>
That's an interesting detail - I hope "...not a priority" means not a priority at the moment, that is you will reach for additional investors when the time is right?
If we need to. Look at the things other studios have done since their KS's funded. Ship sales, telethons, etc. There is nothing immoral/illegal about going down that path, but we simply put up our Builder tiers and left it at that. If we need/want other investors, we'll go down that path, we've said that in the past, but it hasn't been a focus of mine at all. Heck, I haven't even done a single "fly out" to VCs/game companies/etc. unless I was invited (and I also didn't ask for a meeting). We need to get into Beta 1, nothing is more important than that.
<snippety snip> ...since raising additional funds for Camelot Unchained has not been a priority for us, I'm not going to change that approach now, even if there is some negative external feedback to art design. <snip>
That's an interesting detail - I hope "...not a priority" means not a priority at the moment, that is you will reach for additional investors when the time is right?
If we need to. Look at the things other studios have done since their KS's funded. Ship sales, telethons, etc. There is nothing immoral/illegal about going down that path, but we simply put up our Builder tiers and left it at that. If we need/want other investors, we'll go down that path, we've said that in the past, but it hasn't been a focus of mine at all. Heck, I haven't even done a single "fly out" to VCs/game companies/etc. unless I was invited (and I also didn't ask for a meeting). We need to get into Beta 1, nothing is more important than that.
Of course, Beta is absolute priority now.
If I got it right, your plan is a kind of exact opposite to that of Crowfall devs? They are squeezing every possible additional cent from investors (and for quite some time already) while staying at 50% i.e. not losing control.
So it's something like, roughly speaking, additional millions to make the game vs better long-term profits, after launch?
is this game 20 years old all ready ? dam anarchy online looked better than this is the year 2000,
employ some korean devs to sort out your gfx befor its to late...
Just wanted to say that I was almost put off CU by that screenshot (keep getting children of the corn flashbacks), but after reading Marks answers I'm definitely still interested. I haven't backed CU yet, mostly to due to not being a PvPer by nature, but looking forward to seeing how CU looks, and how all the systems work, come beta.
Are those hundreds and thousands on screen at once with absolutely no culling?
Rift boasted thousands on screen too and they tested it internally, but in reality it didn't perform that way and they use a really ugly implementation of culling to support that.
Guild Wars 2 had this problem as well and it has an engine that actually performs pretty good compared to Rift. Still they had a culling issue which they resolved a bit more elegantly than Trion did with Rift.
So the question being what, if any, compromises with the game need to make so those players can be on the screen at once. l think that's what more experienced large scale pvp players will be looking at. It's not just performance, but what you can see, how it looks, and how it performs.
Nothing would suck worse than looking down over a valley and seeing nothing and then going down into the valley to see the entire enemy faction pop up before you to your instant death.
I doubt we will have thousands of players on screen in CU, even in the largest battles, but we never know! If we can hit about 1,200 and beat the Planetside 2 record that would be cool.
From what I've understood, the reason why the Unchained engine can support so many players is that it was built with the objective of extremely large scale battles as first priority, which means that everything they're creating, whether it's art (poly count, texture, lighting, animation, VFX, etc), programming of the engine & server code, gameplay systems... is being developed with large battles (and smaller ones) in mind.
The compromises they have to make may be things like not as many PC pets / mounts / creatures and simpler pathing (e.g. player controlled spirits that go through objects rather than traditional pet pathing with object collision), less polys on tree foliage and grass, more "blocky" structures than voxelized ones like Landmark, toned down particles (compared to games like BDO) and other stuff.
So far they're performing some wonders to make the game looks great while still running at high FPS with hundreds of characters + structures. Beside PS2 (which is not a MMORPG and doesn't have destructible structures, heavy character/gear customization) and EVE (that uses tricks like time dilation to handle the large battles), no other game achieves such high numbers. The MMORPGs that get to about 250 players in fight have to cull massively the characters, reduce draw distance by a lot and use other tricks that impact on gameplay. CU otoh got the longest draw distance I've seen in a MMORPG and afaik there's no plan for the culling of characters the way GW2, BDO or other recent games are doing it. If I'm correct we should effectively sight the armies coming from very far when looking at the horizon.
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The old Pre-Alpha particles, which were added back in 2014, will get replaced soon by some improved VFX. It should look a lot better.
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edit: fixed the quote that I fucked up
I don't think the issue is "graphics", it's art design.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
The armor in itself seems not too problematic imo, I like the concept art:
I think that the issues with the screenshot are:
1) Luchorpan being a small race, their head looks disproportionately large
2) For some reasons the 3D model of the armor appears more "futuristic" than what was intended in the concept art, I guess they could reduce this perception by adding earth/nature elements and adjusting some of the bright yellow texture so it becomes a bit more drab and rough. Right now the 3D model reminds me the Elites' suit in Halo 2.
3) The heads of the characters are "popping" out of the armor, it looks like the faces were kind of superimposed to the image. Same thing happened on some other screenshots.
Luchorpan is the original Irish word, I believe. So, yeah, basically they are leprechauns... although, no doubt, with CSE's own twist to them.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Thanks for your comments, positive, negative and/or in-between. Let me just clarify a few things:
1) The amor that the TDD is wearing is supposed to be less realistic, and more colorful, than the armor of any of the other Realms. The armor of the Fall Court of the TDD was designed to be worn in forests where the color palettes will match very well with the bright fall colors you'll see there. The TDD will, of course, have other options as well for other forests and other times of year.
2) Please keep in mind the impact that lighting has upon the shininess of the armor/weapons/scene. Has we have been saying for the last few months, we've been adding new engine features, and that has an effect on the overall look. The art team is getting more knobs/dials to tweak, and once that is done, we'll be doing another review of all the armor/weapons/etc.
3) Yeah, that screenshot wasn't the best but we wanted to focus on the armor and doing that, well, the head/eyes look creepier than they will in the final game. Sorry about that.
4) As posted above, the particle system is indeed more than two years old. An improved one is currently being coded and should be good to go, at least a first pass, before the end of the month. At that point, Mike Crossmire, who also was the effects artist for Dark Age of Camelot (and one of Mythic's earliest members) will be able to display his talents.
5) As per what Francis has stated above, FPS > Graphics, always so we have been focusing more on the engine side (as we've been saying for 2 years) than the art side. Now that the engine is proving that it can handle large-scale player connections (we're running another Backer and Bot test in 10 mins with 1020 Bots running around in a tiny space), once we get the new animation system and improved VFX system in, we can review our decisions on things like poly/tri count that we made three years ago. Right now, it looks like we can up the poly/tri count for our models, which will make things look even better.
That's it for now, I'll be hanging around here for a couple of hours while we run our test so if you have any questions, feel free to ask.
And thanks again Bill and MMORPG for the coverage!
-Mark
Mark Jacobs
CEO, City State Entertainment
As someone who played WAR and GW2 WvsW alot, how do you plan to solve the problem of huge zergs and one faction completely dominating other since those were my main problems with those games ?
@MarkJacobs Connected to many negative comments here (and on many other places), I hope you'll consider growing the art team bit sooner than planned. Those "little" things can hurt the game much more than it seems on the first glance.
We'll grow the art team when we are locked down in terms of the rendering pipeline, lighting, etc. Until we do that, if we spend a lot of time on art, we might have to throw it out. Other games have had the same problem and paid dearly for it. Sometimes the studios can afford to do that (Blizzard), but an independent, self-funded dev can't. So, we'll grow the team when it's the best time to do so for our Backers, even if we lose some prospective Backers because they don't like what they see today or tomorrow. I'm in this for the long haul and since raising additional funds for Camelot Unchained has not been a priority for us, I'm not going to change that approach now, even if there is some negative external feedback to art design.
And, when it comes to art, everything is highly subjective of course. We'll be polling our Backers once we get into Beta and see what they have to say about it. I'm eager, no matter the response, to hear what they have to say about things.
Thanks for link/info to the other poster James, appreciated!
Mark Jacobs
CEO, City State Entertainment
Otherwise I'd say let Sandra work 60+ h. / week, half the time creating lovely animations and the other half drawing first draft concept art as she used to and excels at.
We expect to outsource or hire some additional help for the artists once we're in Beta 1 and/or have the lighting/rendering/etc. part of the engine closer to a semi-polished state.
Mark Jacobs
CEO, City State Entertainment
Only one concept artist, Sandra is full time animating recently. I mean, I enjoy Michelle's landscapes and some other pieces and I shared them, with pleasure, on many places - I don't want to be misunderstood. I know that artists use "awesome!"s as a fuel, but diversity is good, even necessary at some point I'd say.
PS 60+ hours would be cruel, you want CSE to enter Sandra-only crunch mode
Mark Jacobs
CEO, City State Entertainment
If I got it right, your plan is a kind of exact opposite to that of Crowfall devs? They are squeezing every possible additional cent from investors (and for quite some time already) while staying at 50% i.e. not losing control.
So it's something like, roughly speaking, additional millions to make the game vs better long-term profits, after launch?
From what I've understood, the reason why the Unchained engine can support so many players is that it was built with the objective of extremely large scale battles as first priority, which means that everything they're creating, whether it's art (poly count, texture, lighting, animation, VFX, etc), programming of the engine & server code, gameplay systems... is being developed with large battles (and smaller ones) in mind.
The compromises they have to make may be things like not as many PC pets / mounts / creatures and simpler pathing (e.g. player controlled spirits that go through objects rather than traditional pet pathing with object collision), less polys on tree foliage and grass, more "blocky" structures than voxelized ones like Landmark, toned down particles (compared to games like BDO) and other stuff.
So far they're performing some wonders to make the game looks great while still running at high FPS with hundreds of characters + structures. Beside PS2 (which is not a MMORPG and doesn't have destructible structures, heavy character/gear customization) and EVE (that uses tricks like time dilation to handle the large battles), no other game achieves such high numbers. The MMORPGs that get to about 250 players in fight have to cull massively the characters, reduce draw distance by a lot and use other tricks that impact on gameplay. CU otoh got the longest draw distance I've seen in a MMORPG and afaik there's no plan for the culling of characters the way GW2, BDO or other recent games are doing it. If I'm correct we should effectively sight the armies coming from very far when looking at the horizon.