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ESOs art style is very popular, EQNs not so much.
Sengi
Member CommonPosts: 350
This is a follow up thread to the one about the recant survey that was done about EQNs art style.: (link)
I was recently told, that:
"... People in the MMO community, especially this forum, never agree on anything. You could carry this same scenario over to the ESO forum, where you hear people complaining about the exact opposite thing. ... Your argument assumes there is some magic solution that creates a 90% or 100% satisfaction rate and I just do not see that, and have not seen that, in the MMO community. In todays climate just topping 50% in your favor is a boon. ..."
I thought this can be tested. So I made a poll on ESO forum so see what the people over there think about ESOs art style: (link)
As you see there is great consent on the realistic and gritty look of ESOs art style. If you ignore the people that wanted waffles (This includes myself, as I didn't what to influence the poll.) you see, that:
- 88,9% (88 people) like the art style as it is or wanted it to be even grittier.
- 8,1% (8 people) wanted it to be more stylized and cartoony
- 3% (3 people) are on the fence or don't care.
So there apparently is a "magic solution" that makes 88,9% of the users in this forum agree upon some art style.
If you compare this to the survey: (link) you see that in the last question:
- 47% (436 people) like the art style as it is.
- 40% (385 people) want it to be grittier or more realistic.
- 13% (132 people) dislike the art style for other reasons.
- 0% (2 people) want it to be even more cartoony.
You have to consider that there where 955 people involved in this survey until now. This is quite a large sample.
The survey correspondents quite well to a poll we had on this forum a while ago: (link)
- 41,8% (162 people) liked the art style.
- 37,1% (144 people) didn't like it.
- 21,1% (82 people) where undecided or did not care.
The art style is an important feature. I agree that gameplay is more important then graphics, but that does not mean that graphics don't matter. The art style sets the mood for the rest of the game, especially for the storytelling. You can't have serious storytelling with Mario and Princess Peach.
If you ask me, I believe that the dissent is actually even higher. I think many people only voted in favour of the art style because they don't what this discussion to overshadow an otherwise great game. I don't think there are that many people that honestly think, that this Kerra was what EQN needed.
Just look at the very first post in the poll about the art style of EQN:
"The amount of crying farce towards the graphics is hilarious, the game has some really ground breaking ideas while still inside the EQ universe. It was never meant to be an exact copy of the original EQ or EQ2 but instead to be a brand new game. ...
Why should EQ Next be thrown out? It is a new take on the same genre, albeit with different graphics. So much hate over something that actually looks and sounds like something fun to play."
Note that he doesn't even say the art style was good or that it suits EQN. He wants people to look beyond the fact that the art style is "different" and to remember it is still "something fun to play" He just doesn't like the whole discussion because he thinks it could damage the game. I don't want to say that wanting to defend EQN is not a noble cause, but to say it is beyond any doubts is not helping anyone.
Nobody wants to talk down EQN. I am the first to defend its awesome features, the Voxelfarm engine, StoryBricks and above all the attempt to revive the sandbox mmo and bring it to the mainstream, but as a loyal fan you have so spell things out that you believe to be wrong about the game you like.
Comments
Do you really think that SOE are going to scrap all of the work that they have done developing art assets for the game just to please (what is more than likely) a vocal minority who are butthurt over the art style? I don't think so. People can throw up as many straw polls as they want, the end results of a few hundred people voting are not going to be anywhere near representative of the hundreds of thousands/millions of people that will end up playing EQNext.
This art style topic is a dead horse that has been needlessly beaten into a pulp.
more beatings!
EQ2 fan sites
Pretty much this.
The art style is actually VERY popular in the entertainment industry. I know more adults that have seen movies like Shrek then movies like Final Fantasy or Beowulf.
Or as Kyllien here said: "Who cares?" Go play ESO when it's out and don't bother with EQN. No sleep will be lost by anyone over that.
looks like a far more advanced version of wow to me to be honest.
I think it will turn out to be one of those cases where you can do a lot more with less.
And that about sums up my opinion of this....Graphics don't make or break a game, mechanics do....And so far the proposed mechanics for EQN get my man juices flowing. Hence why people always defend really old games with stellar gameplay and storylines, like: Thief, Systemshock, Chrono Cross, Chrono Trigger, Fallout, Fallout 2, and even some MMOs like UO and DAOC. I could probably go on and on about less than stellar graphics in games that are amazing....Ninja Gaiden, Def Jam Fight for New York, Vampire the Masqurade: Bloodlines (if you install all the community patches and get it up to HD so it works), Black and White...etc etc. These games are fun not because they make your eyes bleed and ooze from their glorious might of beauty, but because they're engaging, well written, and have good mechanics.
Other games off the top of my head: Half-Life, Icewind Dale Trilogy, Planescape Torment, Neverwinter Nights.
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Lets not forget the awesome games that didn't even have graphics, Zork, The Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy etc.
ESO - Crap game design, boring old gameplay, great graphics.
EQN - Great game design, new and exciting gameplay, cartoony graphics.
I will be playing EQN.
Yes I think they are to stubborn to do that, but they could considering they scraped the entire game twice. I'm also asking myself why they keep showing us the same 4 characters in the same clothing over and over. At least it seems the haven't put the beards on the female dwarfs jet and they have nothing they would let anyone play except their own employees. Many things in EQN appear very unfinished. It looks much like an early alpha to me. So I think there is a good chance that they haven't come that far jet with the character models and that those we have seen are only prototypes.
If this is a vocal minority that please show me where the silent majority is. The survey had close to 1000 respondents. That is a sufficient large sample. A problem is that it only includes people that are already searching for the game on the web and no one who might casually discover it later on, but it is as representative as it could be under this circumstances. It may not be perfect, but it is certainly saying something.
Well, I think actually this whole art style is the dead horse or rather a dead parrot. We have to keep hitting it until everyone believes it is really dead.
Wow. There's a lot of problems with your poll there. For one, the people responding. A better measure of popularity would be players' response to the games themselves.
Wizard 101, Pirate 101, and Free Realms all have millions of players and are all active, profitable games. They rival any MMORPG running, possibly except WoW, and their art styles aren't just stylized, they are cartoonish.
The Star Wars Lego games have sold as many copies as the Elder Scrolls series, and those games are again not only stylized, but cartoonish. That doesn't even get into the Lego Harry Potter games.
Let's not forget WoW, which is not only stylized, but pretty primitive, and it's the most popular MMORPG by orders of magnitude, even just counting Western subscribers.
Maybe on this forum and others EQN's visual style is less popular, but gamers themselves seem to not be nearly as concerned about these things. The game play is going to be far more important to a game's sales than the visual style. The execution of the visual style is going to be far more important.
**
I love that Owl picture up there. :-)
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
The vocal majority don't even know it exists yet....Infact they don't even know this forum exists.
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a year ago, in may 2012, ESO was posting the first screenshots
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/349953/First-Screen-And-Details-On-Elders-Scrolls-Online.html
look back at the old ESO forum postings - gamers were commenting ESO looked terrible
you think its a fair poll?
comparing ESO with a year of screenshots/videos
vs a mmo recently revealed?
EQ2 fan sites
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
Optimizing PC games for consoles is kinda like outfitting your car for a bike trail.
SOE have been working on EQN for couple of years now, Smed himself said it. Zenimax started on ESO only after the release of skyrim. but that is not the point here, the poll is not even the point here, OP is trying to say that old thing again in a better way : "cartoony graphics sux".
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
I agree w you on Ops agenda
but even taking the Op at face value...theres tons of game footage for ESO
thats not true for EQN
when ESO was first showing its screenshots -- it was not met w player approval on these forums
EQ2 fan sites
This
The average gamer has no idea how long it takes to have a character design approved, modeled, textured, and rigged. Then to have the various idle, combat animations, and run/walk cycles made for that character (though often in cases those assets are shared across several different yet similar character models). I highly doubt they will just scrap the whole design aesthetic because of a biased poll or survey. That doesn't mean they won't make some non-invasive tweaks similar to what Bioware/EA did when they first started to show alpha character models from SWTOR several years ago. However, start over from scratch? Possible, sure but very unlikely.
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
Well, the customers care. It is not the case that EQN and ESO exist in two completely different markets. Instead they compete with several other titles for a quite similar target audients.
Especially if they are aiming for the casual F2P demographic they are dealing with people that will judge a game by the first impression, and if the first thing they see is the abominable man-cat, they are not going to find out anything about all the awesome features EQN has.
This art style will also alienate the hardcore crowd. These are the most loyal players and they are the ones that hype the game and post all those lets play videos on youtube.
Just...wow. I could make my own survey, vote 1000 times in it and it would be just as useful as the one you made. A survey placed only on one forum, that has specific community, with specific mindset... a niche. And from that community, you have a vocal part, that represents the extremes (love or hate). And from that group you pick ones that come only to a specific part of forum. So to add to all this stupidity one needs to take into account, that we have a game that has an art style that follows its predecessor and one that broken from predecessor style and created something new. So in this case the most vocal part on one side are old players that are angry because of that change. That adds even more unfairness to the retardness that is there already. And to add even more nonsense, you compare those two values, already useless and claim that there is a connection, disregarding all other factors.
To inject a little bit of reason to this comedy. Is a 1000 sufficient sample for a group of potential mmorpg players, which are now in millions? No, the smallest surveys about mmorpgs on web counts anything form 40000+ sample and it is still not taken seriously by many. You need to publish your survey in a place, where only people with interest to the game come to visit, not where people come to critisize and badmouth a game. You don't care about people that were not going to buy the game in the first place and just come in to vote how bad it is, you want to check if people who are interested in game don't like the graphics. You can't survey a niche, your survey needs to be on the web, not on forum.. There you have it, surveying for dummies.
If you wanted to prove that angry self proclaimed critics that post on this specific forum don't like the game, well good job.
The vocal minority are the ones that visit these forums and have forum discussions on a game that's a year away.
The silent majority do not.
The way I see it:
If you want an RPG in the vein of D&D, then you want graphics that evoke world full of drama that is serious within it's own immersion. Anything other than that goal is 4th Wall breaking. So for ESO with their IP it is mandatory to have such graphics that are dark, gritty and believably another world.
If you want a suite of highly recognizable and imaginatively diverse types with hypertrophic emphasized personalities expressed in the art then you will choose EQ:N's more cartoony proportioned designs which therefore are more mass market and younger demographics appeal. I don't know but I presume also female demographic friendly than what the artists would consider with the above darker/grittier also? The characters give off a more fun/friendly countenance also perhaps useful to lessen competion compared to cooperation?
These cynical boards and/or niche demographic I would expect to prefer the first choice in general, but the wider, larger population could well prefer the second?
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem