Very Bad Graphics

In the gaming world they call it polish, that comes way way later after the mechanics and structure are built. The game will look much better in the final stages. Remember these are experienced Devs that know the ropes and how to follow world building procedures. Polish comes last...

 

Make the polishing include high diversity in armors, NPCs, buildings etc. Then I am totally with you. I could live with the graphical "style" it has right now, but I'd like to see more variety in Beta.

 

We've already seen more variety month to month. I have no doubt they'll be as varied as most other games out there. 8 months to go and I know artists are working on them all the time.

 

Hi All,

I just want to jump in, say thanks for all the feedback and see if I can clear up any questions.

To Mutilator and others: Everyone who has mentioned that being able to see the game this early one is correct. We are working on systems. and while characters are important to me as the lead Character Artist. I will tell you we have a very small team. Most next gen game teams have hundreds of artists not to mention MMOs. For example: Skyrim cost 80 mill to make (http://www.statisticbrain.com/skyrim-the-elder-scrolls-v-statistics/) IT is rumored that Elder Scrolls online is costing 200 Million to make (http://www.ubergizmo.com/2014/01/the-elder-scrolls-online-rumored-to-have-cost-200-million/), and they have allot of content already done!

That said I hope I hope i can clear up some of the confusion for you.

• First of all, our character are 10 -20 x more polys and textures that the older game referenced before, so they are not super fast to make. That doesn't even count Concept Art.
• Getting characters in with all the customization functionality we (and you) want to put in is no easy task, but we are working on it. Even though I have created or lead character customization systems before (Guitar Hero's) this is from scratch, so its allot of work.
• After we have the Customization System in place we need to tweak the outfits and define what are the Min/Max borders of the pieces so we can have collision minimized. Lots of work that was usually done in Planning if you have a predefined Character system.
• Skin, hair, cloth sim/shaders are months of tweaking once you get anything you like.
• Rigs, which even if we had a common one for all characters (which we are working on) we still need to pay attention to the two sexes, monsters, Quadrapeds, spiders....etc.
  
• In our unique game we also have to listen to the community wants and can change our focus on a dime. For example; Even though our plan was to use the Unity store NPC until we could swing back around to clean them up, the community complained about how they looked. Soo we jumped in and cleaned them up for the current build... Except for (of course ) the commoner you posted in this forum. He has been on the fix list for weeks now.
• Lastly, Shaders. We have been testing and trying to use some of the shaders we bought from unity, but they all seemed to have flaws of there own. So we have been writing our own hair, skin, metal, reflection, eye, customization and so forth. All of these have to be tested and tweaked until they work right. Something that games usually have many months to do.

We are working an engine that has never had the things we need it in before, so we need to spend a great deal of time fixing the visual shaders stuff. But before that can happen we need to add all the systems and stress test the game. You see, we could fix all of the graphical issues and spend months on that only to find out the Fighting or some other system would force us to back track on the graphics. So most games, when working on new engines, we create all the art and wait until ALL the other game play systems are in to get in the stuff and tweak it.

Don't think we aren't tweaking the graphics right now, because we are just in very small safe ways for now.

I hope that helps,

Qball

 

Amazing post Qball I know you guys are working hard and we'll have an beautiful looking have when it's complete keep doing what you're doing!

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

 

I'm gonna repost what I wrote in another thread; this seems like a better place for it, anyhow.

I realize how much work custom shares are. We are using unity for our games as well and writing them is a challenge for our engineers.

 

I think what you have to realize is a lot of the people that are playing this have are older and most likely don't have gaming computers however I'm sure they'll push the bar for what has been seen on unity up till this point and it'll improve with each episode.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

 

Thank you for your answer, Qball. I am excited to see what you guys come up with.

 

Hey Guys,

Me again, Qball. First of all, no need to thank me, we are ALL new to this kinda development. We need to get used to SUPER early feedback and you guys need to get used to giving feedback on a game that is not ready for player consumption.... I wish I had more time to post, but my boss is a slave driver...(Now you have to answer who is my boss Me the lead or You the player? LOL)

So here's a few more tidbits of dev info that might help you understand what you are seeing, in this case with the NPCs. Because of the massive amounts of players possibly in the game at the same time, we have to conserve render passes for important stuff. Right now, Character have something like 15 + render passes each. So to prepare for the worst, we lock the NPCs down to 1-2 render passes. This only pertains to crowd NPCs. Important NPCs and monsters will get more. NPCs also have the smallest maps... once we get a feel for how things are working we will see if we can beef them up.

We have reworked all the NPC and some of the animals and will rework the rest as time allows. For now if you see one looking rough keep them noted but don't think that'they're finished. If they keep showing up start a thread and we will address it ASAP.

Here are some of the animals we did for example....






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Ok thats not an animal... but still it was fun to do from this...




There are NPCs too, just not with before and after. I will post as I get more time.

Qball

 

Thanks Qball! Amen.

 

The changes look good. I had thought about posting feedback about the horse, but I knew there was no way that thing was final. Same with the non-essential NPCs. It's obvious there's considerably less detail than the player character. I would like to see continued improvements, but I realize a polish patch is generally after all essential systems are in place and working well together.

 

Looks nice :>

I have a bit of an off-topic question, but I didn't see a better place to ask it. Have you talked about variations on some of the animals? So for instance, the deer there is a stag.. will we also see does and fawns? And maybe rabbits with winter coats (white). I think this would be cool and add detail to the game, but not necessary, of course.

 

Hey Qball, the improvements you made to those animals are great. Hope you and the others show more in the future.

 

Looking forward to see more of those.

 

Aye, I like seeing Old/New comparisons. Can't wait for a World Map Old/New picture....... *wink wink*

 

Look what i found xD:

http://www.ign.com/videos/2014/02/07/elder-scrolls-online-graphics-comparison-max-vs-low-settings

Interesting how does that game looks on minimun settings.

 

No suprise, textures are typically the first to go, since they are a major part of the bandwidth.

Love to see some wires on how much non-tessellation is happening in the low-res version.

 

I think it looks good so far. Cant wait!