Well, I think you make a few bold statements here: one that "objectively" the art style is no good, and the other that it is apparently painfully obvious that they didn't have the talent or experience to make a good game.
I'd say that your first statement obviously isn't objective at all, it's completely subjective of you to say that the art style sucks. I happen to think that it's great and that it is far more immersive than any other MMO on the market (except for AoC, but that has other issues...) because of it's gritty realism.
Your second point is also simply your opinion. In my opinion it is a great game, but it certainly does have some flaws.
There's a massive amount of character/class customization to be had and that's just great.
1. The fallacy of your response is simply this... you said "ART STYLE", where as I did not. Art style is different from the actual quality of assets and the art being made. So it says to me that you might not understand the difference. A good example could be Bioshock Infinite... it has a clear style thats actually very good, which means its had a decent art director involved. Individual assets however were often very poor, lots of mirrored textures which create odd patterns and sloppy UV work.
2. As an artist who makes such content, I can speak to the objective nature of whats done poorly. What I did say was absolutely objective, yet because I dont think you understand the technical side or even what to look for, in your mind its subjective. This is in part because you do not seem to know the difference between art assets and art style.
The art is not good. Meaning the assets are either poorly made or had minimal effort put into them. They have poor use of tiled textures, theres a lack of individual assets including that which involves actual clothing, weapons and armor. Environment art is very poor. Cities and towns are a small handful of assets duplicated all over the place while also keeping it small in both scope and scale. This is 2014, no need for a 4-5 huts to = a grand city anymore. Lack of dynamics in cloth, npc behavior, rigging and animation, silhouettes for character types, environment variation and design... its all done to such minimal levels that having a $200 million dollar budget makes NO SENSE AT ALL. This is objectively poorly done work. There, again, is no excuse outside of cutting corners, to have all the armor get pasted onto the characters body as a type of skin. It tells me the artist dont understand the importance of silhouette based design, which is even more important for this particular genre.
So regarding the art, no I dont think its a subjective interpretation. I am objectively pointing out whats actually done poorly, intentionally poor or unintentionally poor.
This is the equivalent of lecturing people about why classical music is objectively superior to rock and roll. The graphical style is aiming to evoke certain emotions, and they can succeed or fail on their own criterion. Some games use a cartoon style to good effect; others aim for a kind of realism. What you're doing comes across as arrogance - to raise up your aesthetic preferences over those of other people. For example, if there were a ton of dead space buildings in town then players would complain that it was too hard to find the key spots - this is a design choice and a very defensible one. The scale is, of course, far off relative to the real world - how long would it take a real person to ride a horse across a continent? This is much slower than in a game with such different ecosystems so close. So what? Why would the "realistic" thing be better? And what is the counter to the utterly predictable problems that this would create for game play?
This is the equivalent of lecturing people about why classical music is objectively superior to rock and roll. The graphical style is aiming to evoke certain emotions, and they can succeed or fail on their own criterion. Some games use a cartoon style to good effect; others aim for a kind of realism. What you're doing comes across as arrogance - to raise up your aesthetic preferences over those of other people. For example, if there were a ton of dead space buildings in town then players would complain that it was too hard to find the key spots - this is a design choice and a very defensible one. The scale is, of course, far off relative to the real world - how long would it take a real person to ride a horse across a continent? This is much slower than in a game with such different ecosystems so close. So what? Why would the "realistic" thing be better? And what is the counter to the utterly predictable problems that this would create for game play?
Its apparent you have no idea what I was talking about nor its subject matter, either that or you just chose not to employ basic reading comprehension.
It has NOTHING to do with aesthetic or "style". If you read my post you would have gathered that by now. Its clear however that you are responding based on sentiment and limited knowledge based around assumption... I highly recommend avoiding that.
Additionally, in regards to realism... who said anything about realism? In game development, scale, scope and quality are very important parts of what sets up the visual design process. If the scope is small (smaller towns, less people, less character animation or npc behavior..ect) then the quality of assets, the scale of their behavior, can go up. If the scope is large, and you have sprawling cities, then the quality of individual assets and behavior can go down. The reason for this is cost... cost as in cpu/gpu cost.
With ESO, the scope and scale are SMALL, everything is actually being instanced with players occupying the same space but in different instances. As such the quality can actually go UP, but this wasnt done.
2. As an artist who makes such content, I can speak to the objective nature of whats done poorly. What I did say was absolutely objective, yet because I dont think you understand the technical side or even what to look for, in your mind its subjective. This is in part because you do not seem to know the difference between art assets and art style.
The art is not good. Meaning the assets are either poorly made or had minimal effort put into them. They have poor use of tiled textures, theres a lack of individual assets including that which involves actual clothing, weapons and armor. Environment art is very poor. Cities and towns are a small handful of assets duplicated all over the place while also keeping it small in both scope and scale. This is 2014, no need for a 4-5 huts to = a grand city anymore. Lack of dynamics in cloth, npc behavior, rigging and animation, silhouettes for character types, environment variation and design... its all done to such minimal levels that having a $200 million dollar budget makes NO SENSE AT ALL. This is objectively poorly done work. There, again, is no excuse outside of cutting corners, to have all the armor get pasted onto the characters body as a type of skin. It tells me the artist dont understand the importance of silhouette based design, which is even more important for this particular genre.
So regarding the art, no I dont think its a subjective interpretation. I am objectively pointing out whats actually done poorly, intentionally poor or unintentionally poor.
Regarding customization... theres objectively very little outside of picking the order of character and weapon skills, as well as gear styles. You cant change the color of the gear, its usually the same asset with a slight variation every 6-10 levels. Most players really start looking the same, and with only 4 character classes...you will see the same class based skills used over and over, especially since they limit the player to 5 (alternating) slots.
This game looks one of the best mmorpgs I've ever played and I've played a lot, it's the amount of details, I'll see if I can be arsed to post some screenies tomorrow that shows the great deal of details, since it seems like you've been playing on low settings. It's one of the driving forces for me regarding exploration in this game, and I rarely explore just because the areas look good.
And what a pity that there's no rainbow colored gear or over-done disneyland fantasy gear, it's actually refreshing to see solid good looking armor instead getting all kinds of shape and size of ridiculous, that just would not fit the theme and lore, it fits games like Wildstar who are aiming for that kind of over the top stuff and it's fine there, but it does not mean it's good for every game.
I play all my games on max settings, but what you think looks good is subjective. What you not looking at is the technical aspects which make up the assets being presented. I could take a poorly made asset, toss into a game engine, apply some post effects like DoF and Bloom..and bam some would say thats great looking art. The problem is they are getting "amazed" by some processing effects, nothing more. There are some parts of the asset making process you WONT see directly... like the rigging. Characters (players, enemies, npcs) are rigged with a kind of virtual bone system. These are then animated and that gives you everything from walk cycles to neutral poses..ect. You can see when these are bad/poor when the animation comes across as poor. Some assets are more obvious, trees are a great example of poor work.
What you are probably not used to seeing is a heavy use of normal and specular texture maps, which are applied on SOME assets. These make textures look shiney, the normal maps give the illusion of depth. Some of these would be great...if they were not projected onto existing geometry like the skin of a persons body (as a form of armor replacement).
Anyways I digress, tired of beating this dead horse. I cant expect everyone to understand, only frustrating when those who dont have the gall to say someone else is wrong despite not knowing why.
I play all my games on max settings, but what you think looks good is subjective. What you not looking at is the technical aspects which make up the assets being presented. I could take a poorly made asset, toss into a game engine, apply some post effects like DoF and Bloom..and bam some would say thats great looking art. The problem is they are getting "amazed" by some processing effects, nothing more. There are some parts of the asset making process you WONT see directly... like the rigging. Characters (players, enemies, npcs) are rigged with a kind of virtual bone system. These are then animated and that gives you everything from walk cycles to neutral poses..ect. You can see when these are bad/poor when the animation comes across as poor. Some assets are more obvious, trees are a great example of poor work.
What you are probably not used to seeing is a heavy use of normal and specular texture maps, which are applied on SOME assets. These make textures look shiney, the normal maps give the illusion of depth. Some of these would be great...if they were not projected onto existing geometry like the skin of a persons body (as a form of armor replacement).
Anyways I digress, tired of beating this dead horse. I cant expect everyone to understand, only frustrating when those who dont have the gall to say someone else is wrong despite not knowing why.
What you don't seem to grasp is your opinion is subjective. Animations and texture 'assets' looks good to me, but that's an 'opinion' and your arguments appear invalid and stupid to me.
Glad to hear you are enjoying it. I am as well and eagerly await the new Adventure zone. I am currently leveling a Tank/DPS/DPS so I can play it. Currently lvl 36.
Tank/DPS/DPS? you say ...
I am leveling a DragonKnight that is using a bow and dual daggers with Medium Armor. After I make a level, I switch over to my heavy armor and put on my shield and sword to level up my tanking side. I have tanked all the dungeons up to lvl 35 so far and have gotten compliments for my tanking. So it seems to be working out so far.
The reason I am also doing bow/daggers is for the PvP.
"I don't give a sh*t what other people say. I play what I like and I'll pay to do it too!" - SerialMMOist
Nice change of pace on here.... for awhile I thought I was the only one enjoying my time in TESO and was beginning to question the mmo community! lol.
I will say, TESO had more than a fair share of bugs, but I play 1-2 hours a day since launch and have not had ONE gamebreaking or questbreaking bug. I have completed all quests that I started, no tickets to support needed. Maybe people who level really quick experienced more because of that, not sure.
Overall I think if they increase dungeon xp from mobs a bit, that would be beneficial to certain players. They also need make VR experience faster as well. or make only a second campaign required, not two...
Looking forward to hitting max level and visiting Craglorn, that sounds like the perfect direction for this game. Trials sound very fun can't wait to try them.
Now Playing: Bless / Summoners War Looking forward to: Crowfall / Lost Ark / Black Desert Mobile
Glad I didn't payed much attention to all those negative whining weiners on these forums. I just hope that we can bring some positive feedback out to some gamers, who would loooove this game.. With all the attention ESO is getting from the hate, I bet ya, some will join ESO. So they're actually helping us alittle.
The hate train for this game is extremely big and rediculously based on what ? Bugs and the wrong mentality in how to play eso and expectations comparing it to the Original elder scrolls series. Its stupid. This game is just so much better an mmorpg then most other mmorpgs released the last 10 years.
Well you could look at it this way, the game is so f'ing good that the haters only have bugs to cry about. I'm out of stonefalls and the only bug i encountered was a bookcase which didn't give me a book to read while in the grotto.
Whoa i better get my flame thrower out.
Clunky combat - not a bug, a design issue
Low textures - not a bug, a design issue
Lack of group play - not a bug. 99% of the game is solo content (debatable if this is a plus or negative)
Boring quests - How many times must I enter someones dream and rescue them? How many friendly ghosts are their in the world?
Recycled content - VR ranks1-10 are really a disguised addition 100 character levels of doing the same quests in different faction zones (quest content from different faction zones have same general plots and stories)
More recycled content - most delves (public dungeons) have identical layouts. (reminds me of world of warcraft where every cave spanning multiple expansions use the same layout and textures)
Crappy inventory system - Might be able to be fixed with mods.
No real endgame - It takes a hell of a long time to level up to 150 (50 + 10 vr ranks). but once you do the twice recycled questlines from different factions, no real reason to log on anymore if you don't like pvp.
no class/weapon balance - Classes and weapon skill lines are not balanced at all in terms of performance. Fresh level 50 sorc+destro staff can out dps any other class/weapon by a margin of at least 50%. 2handed anything does considerable lower dps. No balance put into making them competitive with each other for group content.
Don't say there's that people only complain about bugs. There are many issues with the gameplay outside of bugs that group centric mmo players are dissapointed with. However, I do give props to the bait and hook gameplay mechanics. For people that love solo content and single player experiences, this game has a lot of grind for you. If you can get past the recycled atmospheres, landscapes, delves, stories from multiple provinces, it really does have many months worth of gameplay for the casual solo player. I think that was zenimax's target audience.
Probably the main reason why I see a lot of "This game is great!" posts. without actually stating reasons outside of "lots of solo content" arguments.
Now saying all of this. I hope this game doesn't change and continues to be available. My wife loves this game and she has a mmo she can play for a long time and never feel pressured to group with others to get amazing gear.
I play all my games on max settings, but what you think looks good is subjective. What you not looking at is the technical aspects which make up the assets being presented. I could take a poorly made asset, toss into a game engine, apply some post effects like DoF and Bloom..and bam some would say thats great looking art. The problem is they are getting "amazed" by some processing effects, nothing more. There are some parts of the asset making process you WONT see directly... like the rigging. Characters (players, enemies, npcs) are rigged with a kind of virtual bone system. These are then animated and that gives you everything from walk cycles to neutral poses..ect. You can see when these are bad/poor when the animation comes across as poor. Some assets are more obvious, trees are a great example of poor work.
What you are probably not used to seeing is a heavy use of normal and specular texture maps, which are applied on SOME assets. These make textures look shiney, the normal maps give the illusion of depth. Some of these would be great...if they were not projected onto existing geometry like the skin of a persons body (as a form of armor replacement).
Anyways I digress, tired of beating this dead horse. I cant expect everyone to understand, only frustrating when those who dont have the gall to say someone else is wrong despite not knowing why.
You can give all kinds of technical details, and assume that I dont understand any of that, but it does not make the game look any worse on my screen. Could you give me a couple of example mmorpg games that look vastly superior compared to teso in your opinion? With somewhat similar art styles ofcourse would make most sense for comparisons sake.
Comments
This is the equivalent of lecturing people about why classical music is objectively superior to rock and roll. The graphical style is aiming to evoke certain emotions, and they can succeed or fail on their own criterion. Some games use a cartoon style to good effect; others aim for a kind of realism. What you're doing comes across as arrogance - to raise up your aesthetic preferences over those of other people. For example, if there were a ton of dead space buildings in town then players would complain that it was too hard to find the key spots - this is a design choice and a very defensible one. The scale is, of course, far off relative to the real world - how long would it take a real person to ride a horse across a continent? This is much slower than in a game with such different ecosystems so close. So what? Why would the "realistic" thing be better? And what is the counter to the utterly predictable problems that this would create for game play?
Its apparent you have no idea what I was talking about nor its subject matter, either that or you just chose not to employ basic reading comprehension.
It has NOTHING to do with aesthetic or "style". If you read my post you would have gathered that by now. Its clear however that you are responding based on sentiment and limited knowledge based around assumption... I highly recommend avoiding that.
Additionally, in regards to realism... who said anything about realism? In game development, scale, scope and quality are very important parts of what sets up the visual design process. If the scope is small (smaller towns, less people, less character animation or npc behavior..ect) then the quality of assets, the scale of their behavior, can go up. If the scope is large, and you have sprawling cities, then the quality of individual assets and behavior can go down. The reason for this is cost... cost as in cpu/gpu cost.
With ESO, the scope and scale are SMALL, everything is actually being instanced with players occupying the same space but in different instances. As such the quality can actually go UP, but this wasnt done.
This game looks one of the best mmorpgs I've ever played and I've played a lot, it's the amount of details, I'll see if I can be arsed to post some screenies tomorrow that shows the great deal of details, since it seems like you've been playing on low settings. It's one of the driving forces for me regarding exploration in this game, and I rarely explore just because the areas look good.
And what a pity that there's no rainbow colored gear or over-done disneyland fantasy gear, it's actually refreshing to see solid good looking armor instead getting all kinds of shape and size of ridiculous, that just would not fit the theme and lore, it fits games like Wildstar who are aiming for that kind of over the top stuff and it's fine there, but it does not mean it's good for every game.
I play all my games on max settings, but what you think looks good is subjective. What you not looking at is the technical aspects which make up the assets being presented. I could take a poorly made asset, toss into a game engine, apply some post effects like DoF and Bloom..and bam some would say thats great looking art. The problem is they are getting "amazed" by some processing effects, nothing more. There are some parts of the asset making process you WONT see directly... like the rigging. Characters (players, enemies, npcs) are rigged with a kind of virtual bone system. These are then animated and that gives you everything from walk cycles to neutral poses..ect. You can see when these are bad/poor when the animation comes across as poor. Some assets are more obvious, trees are a great example of poor work.
What you are probably not used to seeing is a heavy use of normal and specular texture maps, which are applied on SOME assets. These make textures look shiney, the normal maps give the illusion of depth. Some of these would be great...if they were not projected onto existing geometry like the skin of a persons body (as a form of armor replacement).
Anyways I digress, tired of beating this dead horse. I cant expect everyone to understand, only frustrating when those who dont have the gall to say someone else is wrong despite not knowing why.
What you don't seem to grasp is your opinion is subjective. Animations and texture 'assets' looks good to me, but that's an 'opinion' and your arguments appear invalid and stupid to me.
Glad to hear you are enjoying it. I am as well and eagerly await the new Adventure zone. I am currently leveling a Tank/DPS/DPS so I can play it. Currently lvl 36.
Tank/DPS/DPS? you say ...
I am leveling a DragonKnight that is using a bow and dual daggers with Medium Armor. After I make a level, I switch over to my heavy armor and put on my shield and sword to level up my tanking side. I have tanked all the dungeons up to lvl 35 so far and have gotten compliments for my tanking. So it seems to be working out so far.
The reason I am also doing bow/daggers is for the PvP.
"I don't give a sh*t what other people say. I play what I like and I'll pay to do it too!" - SerialMMOist
Nice change of pace on here.... for awhile I thought I was the only one enjoying my time in TESO and was beginning to question the mmo community! lol.
I will say, TESO had more than a fair share of bugs, but I play 1-2 hours a day since launch and have not had ONE gamebreaking or questbreaking bug. I have completed all quests that I started, no tickets to support needed. Maybe people who level really quick experienced more because of that, not sure.
Overall I think if they increase dungeon xp from mobs a bit, that would be beneficial to certain players. They also need make VR experience faster as well. or make only a second campaign required, not two...
Looking forward to hitting max level and visiting Craglorn, that sounds like the perfect direction for this game. Trials sound very fun can't wait to try them.
Looking forward to: Crowfall / Lost Ark / Black Desert Mobile
Clunky combat - not a bug, a design issue
Low textures - not a bug, a design issue
Lack of group play - not a bug. 99% of the game is solo content (debatable if this is a plus or negative)
Boring quests - How many times must I enter someones dream and rescue them? How many friendly ghosts are their in the world?
Recycled content - VR ranks1-10 are really a disguised addition 100 character levels of doing the same quests in different faction zones (quest content from different faction zones have same general plots and stories)
More recycled content - most delves (public dungeons) have identical layouts. (reminds me of world of warcraft where every cave spanning multiple expansions use the same layout and textures)
Crappy inventory system - Might be able to be fixed with mods.
No real endgame - It takes a hell of a long time to level up to 150 (50 + 10 vr ranks). but once you do the twice recycled questlines from different factions, no real reason to log on anymore if you don't like pvp.
no class/weapon balance - Classes and weapon skill lines are not balanced at all in terms of performance. Fresh level 50 sorc+destro staff can out dps any other class/weapon by a margin of at least 50%. 2handed anything does considerable lower dps. No balance put into making them competitive with each other for group content.
Don't say there's that people only complain about bugs. There are many issues with the gameplay outside of bugs that group centric mmo players are dissapointed with. However, I do give props to the bait and hook gameplay mechanics. For people that love solo content and single player experiences, this game has a lot of grind for you. If you can get past the recycled atmospheres, landscapes, delves, stories from multiple provinces, it really does have many months worth of gameplay for the casual solo player. I think that was zenimax's target audience.
Probably the main reason why I see a lot of "This game is great!" posts. without actually stating reasons outside of "lots of solo content" arguments.
Now saying all of this. I hope this game doesn't change and continues to be available. My wife loves this game and she has a mmo she can play for a long time and never feel pressured to group with others to get amazing gear.