LMAO people say graphics don't matter. So if a game was a MUD you would play it?Let's be serious of course they matter.The main core of being a 3D VIDEO game is graphics,without them it is not a 3D video game.
Graphics and animations need to be decent and respectable ,at least for myself i can't stand silliness like Korean games tend to go too far.
I have no doubt what so ever graphics will be solid and animations will solid,now if this was a KR developer i would be very skeptical.Too bad really KR games tend to have some nice games if only the developer did not think i was some 10 year old kid needing a super smash bros fix.
Smash Bros is the #1 Fighting game in the world and its not a kids game.
Just check Evo 2016 when it comes on later this year. Smash Bros gets the most views of all fighter games. Even more than Street Fighter and the people that are playing Smash are not kids.
I think the one thing that can be said for this thread is the following:
Most people who play games don't seem to have a clue how games are developed.
Though, the industry has only itself to blame for that these days -- thanks to all of these fake paid "alphas" and trying to dodge that bullet named criticism.
It's kind of funny how words like "alpha" and "beta" don't even have a real meaning anymore. Today's idea of beta is a launch-ready game that you get to play a few weeks early before it retails.
The incredible irony is that, while developers have found ways to milk extra money out of people with founder's packs and alpha/beta access fees, they've also pinned themselves down in a trench of expectations. And, we all know from history, it's hard to progress once entrenchment has begun.
I'm not sure if showing off genuine pre-alpha footage like this is really a good idea for them. If it were my game, I personally wouldn't show development footage, for the reasons mentioned above.
I'm glad they are proud of their work and want to prove to their backers that they are actually building something, but frankly, I think they should keep it locked down so only their actual backers can see anything, or they should just not show any footage until things are more polished. I say that as someone who hasn't given them a cent.
It's just a lose-lose situation. It's not like you can explain to people the way things work in development phases; once people have an idea of how things work stuck in their heads... well, good luck trying to get past those preconceived notions.
The worst part is the bobbing up and down when he ran. Its just so bad. All the stock unity assets are funny too. Combat looked very dull. If this is what some people are putting their hopes in then they will be disappointed. The game world looked super empty still and the mobs were all the same looking. I guess its still early, but Lucimia looks a lot better to me for the old EQ crowd.
I was actually wondering how many stock assets were used in that video, care to elaborate?
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
The worst part is the bobbing up and down when he ran. Its just so bad. All the stock unity assets are funny too. Combat looked very dull. If this is what some people are putting their hopes in then they will be disappointed. The game world looked super empty still and the mobs were all the same looking. I guess its still early, but Lucimia looks a lot better to me for the old EQ crowd.
I was actually wondering how many stock assets were used in that video, care to elaborate?
Little to no stock assets I'd guess. More likely some Unity store assets though. As someone who has used unity, I can tell you that you aren't making anything close to as nice as what you saw with what they provide.
The worst part is the bobbing up and down when he ran. Its just so bad. All the stock unity assets are funny too. Combat looked very dull. If this is what some people are putting their hopes in then they will be disappointed. The game world looked super empty still and the mobs were all the same looking. I guess its still early, but Lucimia looks a lot better to me for the old EQ crowd.
I was actually wondering how many stock assets were used in that video, care to elaborate?
Little to no stock assets I'd guess. More likely some Unity store assets though. As someone who has used unity, I can tell you that you aren't making anything close to as nice as what you saw with what they provide.
Gotcha, a lot of the background assets were nicely designed, was just curious whether that was their work (which would give a good indication of their artistic direction) or not.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Corpses disappearing under the world is something even Everquest fixed years ago.
It's also something you see in many launch versions of AAA games. Do you really think that's the priority for such a studio at this point, over background systems?
Post edited by Distopia on
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Dullahan said: Little to no stock assets I'd guess. More likely some Unity store assets though. As someone who has used unity, I can tell you that you aren't making anything close to as nice as what you saw with what they provide.
I am interested in the Chronicles of Elyria and will be sure to buy it if I'm still in the market for an MMO.
That said, I was less impressed with its pre-Alpha video than I was with Pantheon's.
CoA was in fact prettier and it did have from what I remember, some of the best cloak sway animations I've ever seen.. but there weren't any skills, any spells, any spawns or any npc's and the dev's showed off combat by attacking a tree.
However, that's not a criticism of CoA either. I can accept the fact that both teams have simply focused on different things during their early development.
We need to start thinking of MMO's as we do music or literature or the movies. There is not one MMO or one game that will be universally satisfactory to everyone's taste. MMO's don't come in one genre just as books or music doesn't come in one genre. Change and innovation is a good thing in the MMO industry just as it is in literature and music, but every MMO doesn't need to push the envelope or be cutting edge to be "good" or fun. It just needs to be good. The same is true for music. The same is true for books or for movies. Music evolves. MMO's evolve. Storytelling evolves. And in doing so, it doesn't make obsolete or not enjoyable everything that's been done before.
It's also something you see in many launch versions of AAA games. Do you really think that's the priority for such a studio at this point, over backgrounds systems?
They just lack the experience required to make a game.
I'll tell you where my heart lies on the subject and this should make it crystal clear.
I would rather look at pixels "Trove" than look at an archer shooting a bow like a minigun,that turns me off like you have no idea. When i see stupid ideas like rapid fire archers ,i want to take that game and stuff it in a jocks gym bag and let it catch mold for a month.I want to take that animator and system designers and let Conor McGregor slap the stupid out them.
So yes graphics matter but not to the point you turn a game into complete full retard.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Lol those nameplates definitely scale too much. Once they reach a certain size, they should stop scaling or disappear altogether when close to the player camera. That and the giant health bar overhead were definitely the most annoying things in the stream, but also probably the easiest things to fix.
"WoW has a very distinctive, stylised look to it’s graphics engine which is quite possibly one of the reasons for the huge number of subscribers that are currently playing the game – around 10 million people the last I heard! "
"however, once I did get talked into giving the WoW trial a go (by the same friend I mentioned earlier) I really started to appreciate the really, rather cool looking style of the WoW graphics. I’d played Everquest 2 just before that and more recently Age of Conan, both of which have pretty demanding photo-realistic graphics engines, which means you need a “beast” of a computer to play them and they just don’t have the same ‘fun’ element and character that the WoW graphics have."
"Every once in a while, I'll change it to high or ultra just to see what I am missing and it looks like a new game. Wow looks great on the high settings..."
Now, to be fair, there are a lot more (reasonable) people who complained about WoW having bad graphics, I was one them, but we constantly had people bombarding our threads telling us about how amazing wow's graphics were and we just "didn't get it", etc.
My point is people are incapable of differentiating a style preference over actual graphical quality.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
Seriously , anyone trying to judge the final game graphics on an early , first , quick video of something in pre-alpha , is not , NOT , the audience this game is being designed for.
Just really , really hoping McQuaid plans on doing it same as Jacobs and CU , box price and monthly sub fee.
If that's confirmed I'll be donating a few hundred to this one also , as between a game like this and CU , with real server communities and anyone playing is paying monthly to continue to do so , I might actually have a couple mmo communities and games I enjoy again.
Imo the op is being way to hard on the showing we saw. For early alpha I think the game looks fantastic and could not be happier and more excited to dive into this. Way to Go VR.
I even like the style of the armor that is shown, hopefully those are not place holder textures.
They need an animator and spend a few hours in a motion capture studio. Those animations are bad, they're bad even for an indie title.
Corpses disappearing under the world is something even Everquest fixed years ago.
Oh, corpses lost in the bitmap happen all the time, even through modern betas. People died in walls or fell through the scenery constantly. Granted, EQ had an early fix for it with corpse dragging ( /corpse ) or later necro summon corpse spell, but saying, even today, "a toon won't die with his legs sticking out of a hill or wall", isn't right.
Now, to be fair, there are a lot more (reasonable) people who complained about WoW having bad graphics, I was one them, but we constantly had people bombarding our threads telling us about how amazing wow's graphics were and we just "didn't get it", etc.
My point is people are incapable of differentiating a style preference over actual graphical quality.
I'll be the first to say I actually really liked WoW's art. It did have a very nice hand-crafted appeal(to me).
It's incredibly dated now, however. And, that old argument about stylized graphics aging better is total nonsense(this is the excuse everyone loved to use to defend it).
Granted, if given a choice of graphical styles, I would pick something more realistic and dark/grim. I like dark and gritty and dangerous game worlds. Nevertheless, I enjoyed WoW's graphics well enough, back when I played it.
I'm not overly fond of cartoon-y style, but if stylized is done right, it can be made to look pretty nice. As for WoW, it had a nice painted style to it, but it was also incredibly low poly and such to run on weak devices, which I'm sure is a big part of the reason people bashed it.
I guess the point is, I thought WoW's art was pretty nice, but you are definitely right about the low graphical quality at the same time. If they had gone high graphics, with their art style, it could have been incredible, imo. There's someone who has been re-creating WoW zones in UE4 over the last couple months, that I recall seeing, so maybe for anyone interested in what WoW would look like with HQ graphics, should check that out.
I think GW2 was a better example of higher quality stylization. Their landscape/environments were incredibly beautiful. Though, their character models... not so much.
I guess I'm sort of offhandedly agreeing with you, in the end of all that rambling. WoW definitely did not have "fantastic graphics" and it was always catering to the lowest possible settings, but it did have some nice art direction.
Maybe your final sentence is the real reason for the huge divide over it. But, alot of people just hate stylized graphics in general, so I don't know how much it would have mattered.
It's also something you see in many launch versions of AAA games. Do you really think that's the priority for such a studio at this point, over backgrounds systems?
They just lack the experience required to make a game.
What the hell am I looking at here?
As someone who has played plenty of alphas, I'd have to say you flew off your rocker when you posted this.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
For this point in development, it looks like it's coming along nicely. The animations may not be that great, but the world itself looks nice, and it kinda gives off a feeling of nostalgia for me, having played EQ, which they were obviously going for.
I'm referring to the longevity, hence why I moved to a comparison between EVE and EQ as it also uses that same core ownership/control mechanic. When players are playing because of the players around them, mechanics are less important, as is gear and player power, which are huge to progression type games like EQ. While one may be easier to pull off initially (Pantheon), it's much harder to keep those players happy as it's your additions that mean most to retention.
Power struggles are more dynamic meaning the under lying game-play stays more emergent and dynamic in turn. As we learned with EQ, it's when you start adding content and new gear and/or forms of "power" you risk alienating everything that was there before. Yet these things are also desired by a large portion of players, as encounters get old. It's a much harder balance to maintain, hence why the EVE player is still playing EVE and the EQ player is here saying all games suck...
Lets be honest, EQ players think games suck because we don't have a game like the EQ we loved. Most of us would still be playing EQ if they remained true to the game (or brand identity) that people fell in love with. And before you try to say "exactly, its hard to maintain", no that was not the case. What happened to EQ was no accident or the result of their "inability to balance or maintain" the game that they had, they sold out in an attempt to make the game more appealing to a casual audience.
The big casual shift in MMORPG's didn't really come until post WOW, looking at the old MMOcharts image shows EQ's decline before that, basically mid 03-04. They had a huge dip like most older games post 05, as that's when the casualization decline started.Yet something started to change before 04.. looked like a series of drastic falls to me..
In 03-04 a lot of guilds and players quit EQ because of issues with some of the content (i.e. initially unkillable boss in Txevu, Tacvi being too hard... Remember Uqua?). In addition, we already knew EQ2 and WoW were coming out soon, and Blizzard did require some guilds to Beta Test their game. I think EQ2 ran a beta for a while as well. People took breaks to wait on those games.
But EQ's player numbers actually peaked in 2004, so I think your numbers are a bit off, though not completely so. Late 2004 is when they had to start doing server mergers, so the "exodus" probably started somewhere in the middle of that year.
OP has to be trolling... no one is this stupid normally.
While one would think so, I am not so sure, I was absolutely
amazed how many people demanded refunds when EQLM Alpha launched because it was
an unfinished game.
I at that point thought most people understood the
difference between Alpha and say a feature complete “beta” stress test/advertisement.
It’s become clear to me that way more people than I realized
do not understand. Not a case of just trolling but actually spent money on that
misconception.
OP has to be trolling... no one is this stupid normally.
I kinda feel that OPs problem is that he didn't try EQ until a few years after release and compare that game to a game still in aplha state. EQ was far from a proffesional product even at launch, what it had was lot of pioneer spirit and good ideas. I am not sure "proffesional" is something you ever could call EQ but that was part of it's charm, it was made for players that wanted a different experience from games like M59 and the Realm.
If Pantheon have that or if it just is another EQ clone (yeah, we havn't seen many of those for a long time but they were once pretty common) is too early to say with the knowledge I have, but I can say that OPs argument just isn't true.
I actually think that Pantheon looks at least as good for it's time as any alpha footage I saw of EQ before it's launch (I was into M59 back then).
In any case was not looks what made EQ great, it was gameplay and Pantheons success or failure depends on that same thing. If Pantheon just is the exact same we seen many times before with improved graphics it will at best get a small loyal fanbase but if it actually evolves the EQ type of gameplay in another direction then Wow did and make it so it is fun the game will do well. Not Wow well, the only chanse a MMO have to beat Wow would be with new technology (like making the first large VR MMO for example) or completelly new ideas and experiences (like taking a P&P RPG like Shadowrun or Call of Cthulhu and directly re translate it for computer players).
Just making a slightly different improved MMO would never become that large no matter what MMO you base it on (EQ, UO, SWG, Wow or whatever).
Still, it would be really nice if Pantheon could pull of a million players or 2. That isn't impossible even if it is hard work.
OP has to be trolling... no one is this stupid normally.
I kinda feel that OPs problem is that he didn't try EQ until a few years after release and compare that game to a game still in aplha state. EQ was far from a proffesional product even at launch, what it had was lot of pioneer spirit and good ideas. I am not sure "proffesional" is something you ever could call EQ but that was part of it's charm, it was made for players that wanted a different experience from games like M59 and the Realm.
If Pantheon have that or if it just is another EQ clone (yeah, we havn't seen many of those for a long time but they were once pretty common) is too early to say with the knowledge I have, but I can say that OPs argument just isn't true.
I actually think that Pantheon looks at least as good for it's time as any alpha footage I saw of EQ before it's launch (I was into M59 back then).
In any case was not looks what made EQ great, it was gameplay and Pantheons success or failure depends on that same thing. If Pantheon just is the exact same we seen many times before with improved graphics it will at best get a small loyal fanbase but if it actually evolves the EQ type of gameplay in another direction then Wow did and make it so it is fun the game will do well. Not Wow well, the only chanse a MMO have to beat Wow would be with new technology (like making the first large VR MMO for example) or completelly new ideas and experiences (like taking a P&P RPG like Shadowrun or Call of Cthulhu and directly re translate it for computer players).
Just making a slightly different improved MMO would never become that large no matter what MMO you base it on (EQ, UO, SWG, Wow or whatever).
Still, it would be really nice if Pantheon could pull of a million players or 2. That isn't impossible even if it is hard work.
Agree with Loke
The last line " if Pantheon can pull off a million players or 2 ".
I would like to add " and keep them ".
The only way to keep them, would be to allow players to own the world around them. Random world encounters, traps, caves and extra hard monsters or even that hard to get at chest way on top of that mountain. The key word here is " random ". Maybe a quest to get at them maybe not.
But definitely NOT built into a long story path that everyone is doing. Like part 67, time to get the chest where 30 people are in line to knock off another part of their story.
Comments
Smash Bros is the #1 Fighting game in the world and its not a kids game.
Just check Evo 2016 when it comes on later this year. Smash Bros gets the most views of all fighter games. Even more than Street Fighter and the people that are playing Smash are not kids.
Most people who play games don't seem to have a clue how games are developed.
Though, the industry has only itself to blame for that these days -- thanks to all of these fake paid "alphas" and trying to dodge that bullet named criticism.
It's kind of funny how words like "alpha" and "beta" don't even have a real meaning anymore. Today's idea of beta is a launch-ready game that you get to play a few weeks early before it retails.
The incredible irony is that, while developers have found ways to milk extra money out of people with founder's packs and alpha/beta access fees, they've also pinned themselves down in a trench of expectations. And, we all know from history, it's hard to progress once entrenchment has begun.
I'm not sure if showing off genuine pre-alpha footage like this is really a good idea for them. If it were my game, I personally wouldn't show development footage, for the reasons mentioned above.
I'm glad they are proud of their work and want to prove to their backers that they are actually building something, but frankly, I think they should keep it locked down so only their actual backers can see anything, or they should just not show any footage until things are more polished. I say that as someone who hasn't given them a cent.
It's just a lose-lose situation. It's not like you can explain to people the way things work in development phases; once people have an idea of how things work stuck in their heads... well, good luck trying to get past those preconceived notions.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Corpses disappearing under the world is something even Everquest fixed years ago.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I am interested in the Chronicles of Elyria and will be sure to buy it if I'm still in the market for an MMO.
That said, I was less impressed with its pre-Alpha video than I was with Pantheon's.
CoA was in fact prettier and it did have from what I remember, some of the best cloak sway animations I've ever seen.. but there weren't any skills, any spells, any spawns or any npc's and the dev's showed off combat by attacking a tree.
However, that's not a criticism of CoA either. I can accept the fact that both teams have simply focused on different things during their early development.
What the hell am I looking at here?
I would rather look at pixels "Trove" than look at an archer shooting a bow like a minigun,that turns me off like you have no idea.
When i see stupid ideas like rapid fire archers ,i want to take that game and stuff it in a jocks gym bag and let it catch mold for a month.I want to take that animator and system designers and let Conor McGregor slap the stupid out them.
So yes graphics matter but not to the point you turn a game into complete full retard.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Come on man, I could find you a mountain of links within 30 seconds of googling.
People said that CONSTANTLY, particularly when the game came out, but still did 5+ years into the game.
http://www.zath.co.uk/world-of-warcraft-graphics-upgrade/
"WoW has a very distinctive, stylised look to it’s graphics engine which is quite possibly one of the reasons for the huge number of subscribers that are currently playing the game – around 10 million people the last I heard! "
"however, once I did get talked into giving the WoW trial a go (by the same friend I mentioned earlier) I really started to appreciate the really, rather cool looking style of the WoW graphics. I’d played Everquest 2 just before that and more recently Age of Conan, both of which have pretty demanding photo-realistic graphics engines, which means you need a “beast” of a computer to play them and they just don’t have the same ‘fun’ element and character that the WoW graphics have."
"If you read the recent articles over at VideoGamer.com, particularly the Wrath of the Lich King preview interview with Blizzard in which say that a graphical reboot of WoW may never be necessary."
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/18300014303
"Every once in a while, I'll change it to high or ultra just to see what I am missing and it looks like a new game. Wow looks great on the high settings..."
Now, to be fair, there are a lot more (reasonable) people who complained about WoW having bad graphics, I was one them, but we constantly had people bombarding our threads telling us about how amazing wow's graphics were and we just "didn't get it", etc.
My point is people are incapable of differentiating a style preference over actual graphical quality.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Just really , really hoping McQuaid plans on doing it same as Jacobs and CU , box price and monthly sub fee.
If that's confirmed I'll be donating a few hundred to this one also , as between a game like this and CU , with real server communities and anyone playing is paying monthly to continue to do so , I might actually have a couple mmo communities and games I enjoy again.
I even like the style of the armor that is shown, hopefully those are not place holder textures.
It's incredibly dated now, however. And, that old argument about stylized graphics aging better is total nonsense(this is the excuse everyone loved to use to defend it).
Granted, if given a choice of graphical styles, I would pick something more realistic and dark/grim. I like dark and gritty and dangerous game worlds. Nevertheless, I enjoyed WoW's graphics well enough, back when I played it.
I'm not overly fond of cartoon-y style, but if stylized is done right, it can be made to look pretty nice. As for WoW, it had a nice painted style to it, but it was also incredibly low poly and such to run on weak devices, which I'm sure is a big part of the reason people bashed it.
I guess the point is, I thought WoW's art was pretty nice, but you are definitely right about the low graphical quality at the same time. If they had gone high graphics, with their art style, it could have been incredible, imo. There's someone who has been re-creating WoW zones in UE4 over the last couple months, that I recall seeing, so maybe for anyone interested in what WoW would look like with HQ graphics, should check that out.
I think GW2 was a better example of higher quality stylization. Their landscape/environments were incredibly beautiful. Though, their character models... not so much.
I guess I'm sort of offhandedly agreeing with you, in the end of all that rambling. WoW definitely did not have "fantastic graphics" and it was always catering to the lowest possible settings, but it did have some nice art direction.
Maybe your final sentence is the real reason for the huge divide over it. But, alot of people just hate stylized graphics in general, so I don't know how much it would have mattered.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
But EQ's player numbers actually peaked in 2004, so I think your numbers are a bit off, though not completely so. Late 2004 is when they had to start doing server mergers, so the "exodus" probably started somewhere in the middle of that year.
While one would think so, I am not so sure, I was absolutely amazed how many people demanded refunds when EQLM Alpha launched because it was an unfinished game.
I at that point thought most people understood the difference between Alpha and say a feature complete “beta” stress test/advertisement.
It’s become clear to me that way more people than I realized do not understand. Not a case of just trolling but actually spent money on that misconception.
If Pantheon have that or if it just is another EQ clone (yeah, we havn't seen many of those for a long time but they were once pretty common) is too early to say with the knowledge I have, but I can say that OPs argument just isn't true.
I actually think that Pantheon looks at least as good for it's time as any alpha footage I saw of EQ before it's launch (I was into M59 back then).
In any case was not looks what made EQ great, it was gameplay and Pantheons success or failure depends on that same thing. If Pantheon just is the exact same we seen many times before with improved graphics it will at best get a small loyal fanbase but if it actually evolves the EQ type of gameplay in another direction then Wow did and make it so it is fun the game will do well. Not Wow well, the only chanse a MMO have to beat Wow would be with new technology (like making the first large VR MMO for example) or completelly new ideas and experiences (like taking a P&P RPG like Shadowrun or Call of Cthulhu and directly re translate it for computer players).
Just making a slightly different improved MMO would never become that large no matter what MMO you base it on (EQ, UO, SWG, Wow or whatever).
Still, it would be really nice if Pantheon could pull of a million players or 2.
Agree with Loke
The last line " if Pantheon can pull off a million players or 2 ".
I would like to add " and keep them ".
The only way to keep them, would be to allow players to own the world around them. Random world encounters, traps, caves and extra hard monsters or even that hard to get at chest way on top of that mountain. The key word here is " random ". Maybe a quest to get at them maybe not.
But definitely NOT built into a long story path that everyone is doing. Like part 67, time to get the chest where 30 people are in line to knock off another part of their story.