Since I live in Sweden I could not get into the US beta but I couldn't sign up on my old account on the European one (not sure why) and had to create a new account... A bit messy.
Graphics? Is this game aimed at young children, like World of Warcraft? (Cartoons, whimsy, easy play, pandas). Or is this an adult game with an unfortunate artistic direction? Confused.
The graphics look fine, I'd go so far as to say they look pretty.
I'm tired of graphics whores dooming a game just because the rock on the left doesn't look real enough for them. It's getting to the point where games are competing over which one looks the ugliest and not what looks the liveliest.
At this point it doesn't take much to ruin immersion for you people.
It seems that several people had an idea in their head of what EQN 'should be' and now they're disappointed. I'm not sure if they wanted EQ2.5 or what but I think the current planned EQN looks great so far.
I for one would not want EQ mixed with say Dark Souls. I would hate that.
That reminds me, have they mentioned death penalty yet?
Originally posted by palulalula It is so amazing and beautiful! I can't sleep and eat anymore. First real next gen mmo with everything you need. This is the wow killer
Seriously, don't start that "wow killer" or next gen nonsense plz.
There are two serious concerns that totally drops my lust for this game. This comes from a guy that was soo hyped before the presentation.
1. The cartoonish graphics is a turnoff... has nothing to do with the Everquest name at all. Yes Dragons Lair had cartoonish graphics 1983... but quess what this is 30 years later and we don't need them anymore in a MMO developed under the Everquest franchise.
2. The combat is sofar the worst I have seen.. The overwhelming effects of every skill the characters used in the game make it utterly annoying. Imo only magic spells and particle effects of weapons should give effects ingame. Regular attacks with sword, hammers and axes etc should only be different with the animations the provide when you do them. It doesn't need to look like you are having a personal firework show just because you make a swing with your weapon.
Then we have the lameass handholding with red lines that gives you a warning when a monster are about to make an attack so you know the exact range of where you are in danger. What wrong about the old school way, when you saw a monster and had no clue what he could do so you fought him and learned the hard way what his abilities does and you actually had to be watchful and careful to check the animations (or voice/text warnings) of his skills and by that learn to avoid his worst blows.
Next thing I dislike is this hack&slash thing I saw.... yes let one character maul through 20 enemies by a breeze by whirlwinding around and tossing them into the air dead before they land. In original EQ 1 monster usually was a challange in itself and 2-3 was often very very hard and more then that was flee or die.
Then finally we have the issue with only one hotbar of 8 skills.. I mean come on 8 skills is way to simplistic... I think this is a dumb down option to cater to the console players. Plain stupid since this limits your actual options to find different ways to handle encounters since you only have 8 skills available.
I shall bear in mind that it wasn't the release version that we saw, but if things doesn't change quite a bit then they have lost ALOT of customers even before release and I am 110% sure that the game will not live as long as EQ and EQ2 has done.
As exciting as all the combat and environment changes sound, I just can't stomach another stylized cartoony MMO. If someone makes an MMO with the mechanics of EQN and the art style of Age of Conan, I'd be there on launch.
"Because of the above stated goals, stylized art was chosen for several reasons: It ages more gracefully, it can evoke an emotional response and creates immersion and it allows the development team to give players a way to use senses other than vision to immerse themselves in the game world.
For characters, the stylized art allows for a weightier character, not so much in terms of gigantic oversized bulk, but more in the substance of a character. In addition, stylized art allows for better facial expressions. The team likened it to Pixar: Oversized eyes, lips, exaggerated body movements, etc."
Hmm so oversized "tony the tiger" cartoon characters and environment creates immersion?
Don't agree.
Making things in the environment useable, sitting in chairs, trees that fall when you chop them down, day and night cycles, one single world with no load screens, these create immersion.
While I am in awe of what the EQN team has come up with believing cartoonish art work creates immersion is just plain silly.
As an added note if cartoons created immersion than all the block buster movies, "Star Wars" etc. would have been made with cartoons.
Ohh you mean movies like toy story, or Brave? Those types of blockbusters? Which both of those were amazing movies..I read this and just had to comment.. I will now go back to reading comments before my own response to the panel review.
Ok onto my post... Great review of the panel. Finally we get something official. I have said it before and I will say it again. As a 39 year old Everquest 1 and 2 vet and fan as well as Vanguard. I was a bit shocked when I saw the more Disney like faces, at least at first. However shocked didnt mean I thought they were terrible or bad. Actually on the contrary. In thought they were good if. To great....ok the Kerran lion needs a little work. But from what little they showed I was hooked and wanting to see more, and hear more.
We still just don't know so much about what the game is going to offer in terms of progression. I mean people are saying its all horizontal. But the entire subject of actually being able to become a paladin based on your actions shows a depth to the world we have not seen in previous games. It's also something they have only touched upon. The fact is we still just don't know so much of what this game is truly going to offer. Yet this site esoecially is filling to the bursting points with rumors and people making claims about what to expect when we just truly don't know yet.
but yes great write up. This game looks like it could be great.
As a long-time player who cut his teeth on EQ and moved on to EQ2, my initial gut reaction to the graphic style was not positive. I have since, watched as many video as I could find showing gameplay, and my first reaction has been superceded by the thought that, well this could be ok.
I have determined that my initial dislike of the graphics was caused by the huge change to the Kerran model. The human female model actually looks pretty good to be honest. Granted it looks like they hired on an army of Disney character designers, but that's ok. The game's environmental graphics actually look really good, so I will really need to see more game footage of things like towns, and the other character races before I can really decide how much I like or dislike the graphics.
EQ2 had some of the worst looking character models ever, made only slightly better by the later released Korean model options, I honestly see this as an improvement so far.
And for all of the "it's a WoW clone" kids. This is an Everquest game we are talking about. You forget, or are just unaware, that WoW was an EQ clone. - So in essence, EQN can only clone it's self being as, for all intents and purposes, EQ started the mmorpg genre down the path that it has taken.
"Because of the above stated goals, stylized art was chosen for several reasons: It ages more gracefully, it can evoke an emotional response and creates immersion and it allows the development team to give players a way to use senses other than vision to immerse themselves in the game world.
For characters, the stylized art allows for a weightier character, not so much in terms of gigantic oversized bulk, but more in the substance of a character. In addition, stylized art allows for better facial expressions. The team likened it to Pixar: Oversized eyes, lips, exaggerated body movements, etc."
Hmm so oversized "tony the tiger" cartoon characters and environment creates immersion?
Don't agree.
Making things in the environment useable, sitting in chairs, trees that fall when you chop them down, day and night cycles, one single world with no load screens, these create immersion.
While I am in awe of what the EQN team has come up with believing cartoonish art work creates immersion is just plain silly.
As an added note if cartoons created immersion than all the block buster movies, "Star Wars" etc. would have been made with cartoons.
Looks good so far, but we all know that doesn't count for much in the world of MMORPGs.
As for those already bashing it for not being enough of a sandbox, your expectations are too high, really. No AAA game will be as dynamic and sandboxy as you want it, not at this point in the game of MMORPGs. I think that EQN is reaching beyond gimmicks and tapping into something pretty unique, which is more than I can say for almost all MMOs.
I don't mind the overall art style, 39 year old EQ1 vet here as well. I'm betting they have a way of tracking how many EQ2 players use the original vs anime styled character models and took that into account when making their design decisions. I would rather have a character that fits in with the world, that's much less jarring than a character skimming the edge of the uncanny valley. I made a long post yesterday that I unfortunately lost before I could post, but there are limitations with the voxels, specifically with how the textures are applied, that would be much more obvious if they used more photo real textures on the landscape. If you watched the live reveal you could see it on the huge sphere when they were showing off the difference between their voxels and something like Minecraft. Where the edges would be if that sphere was a cube you could see where the brick texture on the top surface mixed with the texture on the sides. I do 3D graphics for a living so I notice easily, but it really didn't look bad even on that huge expanse and with something obvious like a brick texture. But if that had been photo realistic textures on the sphere it would have looked completely wrong.
So.. in terms of increasing immersion by using more cartoonish character, yes, I think that's very valid. I do think they went a bit too far with the Kerans. I think the human looks fine. I prefer the more Asian style stylization over this western Disney style, but it's not a big deal and there are plenty of MMOs with the Asian style already. Hopefully SOE will read all the comments and rework the Kerran models before launch. Or people just won't play them.
I played a female dwarf in EQ1 (a rogue, none the less. Yes, they existed, but there was only two on the whole server that I knew of) My favorite player race/sex though is the Iksar females. Not because of anything specifically about the character model but because of their animations. Whoever made them is fricken brilliant. With a race that was so hard to tell the difference between male and female from the shape and size they had a lot to overcome, and in the end they ended up being the most feminine of all the character models because they just moved like females.
"Because of the above stated goals, stylized art was chosen for several reasons: It ages more gracefully, it can evoke an emotional response and creates immersion and it allows the development team to give players a way to use senses other than vision to immerse themselves in the game world.
For characters, the stylized art allows for a weightier character, not so much in terms of gigantic oversized bulk, but more in the substance of a character. In addition, stylized art allows for better facial expressions. The team likened it to Pixar: Oversized eyes, lips, exaggerated body movements, etc."
Hmm so oversized "tony the tiger" cartoon characters and environment creates immersion?
Don't agree.
Making things in the environment useable, sitting in chairs, trees that fall when you chop them down, day and night cycles, one single world with no load screens, these create immersion.
While I am in awe of what the EQN team has come up with believing cartoonish art work creates immersion is just plain silly.
As an added note if cartoons created immersion than all the block buster movies, "Star Wars" etc. would have been made with cartoons.
Exactly. The thing is, they know that's BS. They are doing the game cartoony for it to age better period.
"Because of the above stated goals, stylized art was chosen for several reasons: It ages more gracefully, it can evoke an emotional response and creates immersion and it allows the development team to give players a way to use senses other than vision to immerse themselves in the game world.
For characters, the stylized art allows for a weightier character, not so much in terms of gigantic oversized bulk, but more in the substance of a character. In addition, stylized art allows for better facial expressions. The team likened it to Pixar: Oversized eyes, lips, exaggerated body movements, etc."
Hmm so oversized "tony the tiger" cartoon characters and environment creates immersion?
Don't agree.
Making things in the environment useable, sitting in chairs, trees that fall when you chop them down, day and night cycles, one single world with no load screens, these create immersion.
While I am in awe of what the EQN team has come up with believing cartoonish art work creates immersion is just plain silly.
As an added note if cartoons created immersion than all the block buster movies, "Star Wars" etc. would have been made with cartoons.
Exactly. The thing is, they know that's BS. They are doing the game cartoony for it to age better period.
"Ageing gracefully" seems like a BS justification for the model design. If they made the models look like normal human beings they'd age exactly same because of the engine. There really is no reason to have them looking like they do other than SOEmote thing, which most people could probably live without.
Before people start saying "WoW aged well" it's character models were crap to begin with, we've just gotten used to them for the past 8 years and it was done out of technical accessibility purposes.
"Because of the above stated goals, stylized art was chosen for several reasons: It ages more gracefully, it can evoke an emotional response and creates immersion and it allows the development team to give players a way to use senses other than vision to immerse themselves in the game world.
For characters, the stylized art allows for a weightier character, not so much in terms of gigantic oversized bulk, but more in the substance of a character. In addition, stylized art allows for better facial expressions. The team likened it to Pixar: Oversized eyes, lips, exaggerated body movements, etc."
Hmm so oversized "tony the tiger" cartoon characters and environment creates immersion?
Don't agree.
Making things in the environment useable, sitting in chairs, trees that fall when you chop them down, day and night cycles, one single world with no load screens, these create immersion.
While I am in awe of what the EQN team has come up with believing cartoonish art work creates immersion is just plain silly.
As an added note if cartoons created immersion than all the block buster movies, "Star Wars" etc. would have been made with cartoons.
Exactly. The thing is, they know that's BS. They are doing the game cartoony for it to age better period.
"Ageing gracefully" seems like a BS justification for the model design. If they made the models look like normal human beings they'd age exactly same because of the engine. There really is no reason to have them looking like they do other than SOEmote thing, which most people could probably live without.
Before people start saying "WoW aged well" it's character models were crap to begin with, we've just gotten used to them for the past 8 years and it was done out of technical accessibility purposes.
If they made the models look like normal human beings they would look absolutely stupid attempting to move in the ways that they want them to. Photorealism is great in a limited-movement image. Hell, we had that way back with Myst. Its horrible for being able to animate stuff and actually bring generated characters in a virtual world to life.
Even the best Pixar, DreamWorks, or whatever CGI animation pictures don't even bother trying to be photorealistic. Very detailed, yes. Photorealistic, no. And each has their art design specific to the film being made and they try to make each character unique.
I wholeheartedly agree that that's what the industry should be going after, its fools gold to try to make a generated character look, act, and feel like a human being solely via code. You would need *a lot* more processing power for that, and whats the point? Why not just make a real movie with an actor at that point? Even James Cameron, when making Avatar, simply advanced motion capture to capture the performance of actors, and then overlaid that performance with CGI to give it a stylized look and feel.
But hey, if you think putting out video games with actual 'realism' is so easy, feel free to go develop up your solution and prove them wrong.
And also, I would hope you don't try to claim any current Video Game as actually being 'realistic'. None of them are even close.
I have watched the reveal several times now. This is shaping up to be the game I have always dreamed about. I only wish they would have officially announced for PS4 along with Landmark. The PS4 delay is not that big of a deal because if I have to I will buy a pc to play this game. Landmark looks like a great idea, just like with all games its only going to get better. I think it will be interesting to see what people create and put into the world having never played the game before. I want to note too, I was one of the people that did not let the pre hype get to me. I didnt have any expectations and just took it all in as it came. I liked what they put on the slate. Now I can officially say I am hyped for 2015/2016 dont see it coming in 2014.
I am counting down to EQN, however not days instead im counting down QQ posts over the graphics.
Only about 4 billion more to go!
I'll help you out there: I'm really disappointed that this will be another stylized MMO. Having a cartoony art style in a few games was a welcome change seven years ago, but seeing most new MMOs choose the path is really boring. I was quite sad when SWTOR went that route but eventually put up with it. Then Neverwinter and FireFall did the same (albeit they use varying degrees of stylization) and it really put me off from playing those games - I was starting to get really sick of it. And now EQN...
It really boggles my mind that no mayor MMO since Age of Conan has used a gritty, realistic (or at least "not cartoony") art style and used it well (GW2 is kind of in the right direction, still not sure if I like it or not - need to play more of that game).
I understand that games are trying to look different by choosing stylized art instead of realistic, but if every developer goes that route thinking he'll differ from the majority, the majority ends up shifting to stylized graphics and all games look the same. There are other ways of looking unique than just making everything warped and pointy and adding funky colour. Again, just look at Age of Conan - that game chose a realistic art style and still looks great and unique five years later.
Comments
Since I live in Sweden I could not get into the US beta but I couldn't sign up on my old account on the European one (not sure why) and had to create a new account... A bit messy.
Then again, it could be worse.
The graphics look fine, I'd go so far as to say they look pretty.
I'm tired of graphics whores dooming a game just because the rock on the left doesn't look real enough for them. It's getting to the point where games are competing over which one looks the ugliest and not what looks the liveliest.
At this point it doesn't take much to ruin immersion for you people.
It seems that several people had an idea in their head of what EQN 'should be' and now they're disappointed. I'm not sure if they wanted EQ2.5 or what but I think the current planned EQN looks great so far.
I for one would not want EQ mixed with say Dark Souls. I would hate that.
That reminds me, have they mentioned death penalty yet?
Seriously, don't start that "wow killer" or next gen nonsense plz.
There are two serious concerns that totally drops my lust for this game. This comes from a guy that was soo hyped before the presentation.
1. The cartoonish graphics is a turnoff... has nothing to do with the Everquest name at all. Yes Dragons Lair had cartoonish graphics 1983... but quess what this is 30 years later and we don't need them anymore in a MMO developed under the Everquest franchise.
2. The combat is sofar the worst I have seen.. The overwhelming effects of every skill the characters used in the game make it utterly annoying. Imo only magic spells and particle effects of weapons should give effects ingame. Regular attacks with sword, hammers and axes etc should only be different with the animations the provide when you do them. It doesn't need to look like you are having a personal firework show just because you make a swing with your weapon.
Then we have the lameass handholding with red lines that gives you a warning when a monster are about to make an attack so you know the exact range of where you are in danger. What wrong about the old school way, when you saw a monster and had no clue what he could do so you fought him and learned the hard way what his abilities does and you actually had to be watchful and careful to check the animations (or voice/text warnings) of his skills and by that learn to avoid his worst blows.
Next thing I dislike is this hack&slash thing I saw.... yes let one character maul through 20 enemies by a breeze by whirlwinding around and tossing them into the air dead before they land. In original EQ 1 monster usually was a challange in itself and 2-3 was often very very hard and more then that was flee or die.
Then finally we have the issue with only one hotbar of 8 skills.. I mean come on 8 skills is way to simplistic... I think this is a dumb down option to cater to the console players. Plain stupid since this limits your actual options to find different ways to handle encounters since you only have 8 skills available.
I shall bear in mind that it wasn't the release version that we saw, but if things doesn't change quite a bit then they have lost ALOT of customers even before release and I am 110% sure that the game will not live as long as EQ and EQ2 has done.
/E
Ohh you mean movies like toy story, or Brave? Those types of blockbusters? Which both of those were amazing movies..I read this and just had to comment.. I will now go back to reading comments before my own response to the panel review.
Ok onto my post... Great review of the panel. Finally we get something official. I have said it before and I will say it again. As a 39 year old Everquest 1 and 2 vet and fan as well as Vanguard. I was a bit shocked when I saw the more Disney like faces, at least at first. However shocked didnt mean I thought they were terrible or bad. Actually on the contrary. In thought they were good if. To great....ok the Kerran lion needs a little work. But from what little they showed I was hooked and wanting to see more, and hear more.
We still just don't know so much about what the game is going to offer in terms of progression. I mean people are saying its all horizontal. But the entire subject of actually being able to become a paladin based on your actions shows a depth to the world we have not seen in previous games. It's also something they have only touched upon. The fact is we still just don't know so much of what this game is truly going to offer. Yet this site esoecially is filling to the bursting points with rumors and people making claims about what to expect when we just truly don't know yet.
but yes great write up. This game looks like it could be great.
As a long-time player who cut his teeth on EQ and moved on to EQ2, my initial gut reaction to the graphic style was not positive. I have since, watched as many video as I could find showing gameplay, and my first reaction has been superceded by the thought that, well this could be ok.
I have determined that my initial dislike of the graphics was caused by the huge change to the Kerran model. The human female model actually looks pretty good to be honest. Granted it looks like they hired on an army of Disney character designers, but that's ok. The game's environmental graphics actually look really good, so I will really need to see more game footage of things like towns, and the other character races before I can really decide how much I like or dislike the graphics.
EQ2 had some of the worst looking character models ever, made only slightly better by the later released Korean model options, I honestly see this as an improvement so far.
And for all of the "it's a WoW clone" kids. This is an Everquest game we are talking about. You forget, or are just unaware, that WoW was an EQ clone. - So in essence, EQN can only clone it's self being as, for all intents and purposes, EQ started the mmorpg genre down the path that it has taken.
^This^ +1
Looks good so far, but we all know that doesn't count for much in the world of MMORPGs.
As for those already bashing it for not being enough of a sandbox, your expectations are too high, really. No AAA game will be as dynamic and sandboxy as you want it, not at this point in the game of MMORPGs. I think that EQN is reaching beyond gimmicks and tapping into something pretty unique, which is more than I can say for almost all MMOs.
Play as your fav retro characters: cnd-online.net. My site: www.lysle.net. Blog: creatingaworld.blogspot.com.
I don't mind the overall art style, 39 year old EQ1 vet here as well. I'm betting they have a way of tracking how many EQ2 players use the original vs anime styled character models and took that into account when making their design decisions. I would rather have a character that fits in with the world, that's much less jarring than a character skimming the edge of the uncanny valley. I made a long post yesterday that I unfortunately lost before I could post, but there are limitations with the voxels, specifically with how the textures are applied, that would be much more obvious if they used more photo real textures on the landscape. If you watched the live reveal you could see it on the huge sphere when they were showing off the difference between their voxels and something like Minecraft. Where the edges would be if that sphere was a cube you could see where the brick texture on the top surface mixed with the texture on the sides. I do 3D graphics for a living so I notice easily, but it really didn't look bad even on that huge expanse and with something obvious like a brick texture. But if that had been photo realistic textures on the sphere it would have looked completely wrong.
So.. in terms of increasing immersion by using more cartoonish character, yes, I think that's very valid. I do think they went a bit too far with the Kerans. I think the human looks fine. I prefer the more Asian style stylization over this western Disney style, but it's not a big deal and there are plenty of MMOs with the Asian style already. Hopefully SOE will read all the comments and rework the Kerran models before launch. Or people just won't play them.
I played a female dwarf in EQ1 (a rogue, none the less. Yes, they existed, but there was only two on the whole server that I knew of) My favorite player race/sex though is the Iksar females. Not because of anything specifically about the character model but because of their animations. Whoever made them is fricken brilliant. With a race that was so hard to tell the difference between male and female from the shape and size they had a lot to overcome, and in the end they ended up being the most feminine of all the character models because they just moved like females.
Exactly. The thing is, they know that's BS. They are doing the game cartoony for it to age better period.
"Ageing gracefully" seems like a BS justification for the model design. If they made the models look like normal human beings they'd age exactly same because of the engine. There really is no reason to have them looking like they do other than SOEmote thing, which most people could probably live without.
Before people start saying "WoW aged well" it's character models were crap to begin with, we've just gotten used to them for the past 8 years and it was done out of technical accessibility purposes.
I am counting down to EQN, however not days instead im counting down QQ posts over the graphics.
Only about 4 billion more to go!
If they made the models look like normal human beings they would look absolutely stupid attempting to move in the ways that they want them to. Photorealism is great in a limited-movement image. Hell, we had that way back with Myst. Its horrible for being able to animate stuff and actually bring generated characters in a virtual world to life.
Even the best Pixar, DreamWorks, or whatever CGI animation pictures don't even bother trying to be photorealistic. Very detailed, yes. Photorealistic, no. And each has their art design specific to the film being made and they try to make each character unique.
I wholeheartedly agree that that's what the industry should be going after, its fools gold to try to make a generated character look, act, and feel like a human being solely via code. You would need *a lot* more processing power for that, and whats the point? Why not just make a real movie with an actor at that point? Even James Cameron, when making Avatar, simply advanced motion capture to capture the performance of actors, and then overlaid that performance with CGI to give it a stylized look and feel.
But hey, if you think putting out video games with actual 'realism' is so easy, feel free to go develop up your solution and prove them wrong.
And also, I would hope you don't try to claim any current Video Game as actually being 'realistic'. None of them are even close.
I'll help you out there: I'm really disappointed that this will be another stylized MMO. Having a cartoony art style in a few games was a welcome change seven years ago, but seeing most new MMOs choose the path is really boring. I was quite sad when SWTOR went that route but eventually put up with it. Then Neverwinter and FireFall did the same (albeit they use varying degrees of stylization) and it really put me off from playing those games - I was starting to get really sick of it. And now EQN...
It really boggles my mind that no mayor MMO since Age of Conan has used a gritty, realistic (or at least "not cartoony") art style and used it well (GW2 is kind of in the right direction, still not sure if I like it or not - need to play more of that game).
I understand that games are trying to look different by choosing stylized art instead of realistic, but if every developer goes that route thinking he'll differ from the majority, the majority ends up shifting to stylized graphics and all games look the same. There are other ways of looking unique than just making everything warped and pointy and adding funky colour. Again, just look at Age of Conan - that game chose a realistic art style and still looks great and unique five years later.