This was an early engine test. The guys made me promise to put a disclaimer that the final game will not look like this and that it’s MUCH better looking than this.
I like the graphic style too. Its fresh and clean and leaves a lot to the imagination. One quibble-I hope the roads to not retain that look. I too thought they were power lines. Now that I know they are fences, all I can think of is why? To keep deer off the road? To keep the elite troop of blind death knights from attaching the fields? To keep the beer wagons from going into the ditch?
ok enough
The fences are to give your politicians a place to sit.
ZING!
lol, I didn't grasped that fences on the road too just the ones inside the village. At first it looked to me as some old kind of railroad even tough there isn't going to be a train and it goes strait to the door, because I couldn't understand it.
Looks like there is a chest to northweast, a cyclop's house in the north and crystals to south; but just above the crystals, a pointy thing I didn't got too. And later on I noticed there is one person in the town, very nicely done in size.
That's a very interesting direction!
Sorry, couldn't resist...
I'm with pretty much everyone on this. You could leave this art alone, it looks great! Looks so clean, and easy on the eyes.
Maybe they're very small walls... If you think about it, historically many city walls were between 10-40' high (a few were higher). There's quite a few trees taller than that, especially in older forests. It's one reason people put cities and especially fortresses on high ground, and why you add towers: it lets you see threats further out.
I'd guess the walls were about 3-4 meters tallk, which I think is about 18'-20' tall (I can't judge imperial measurements). If you look at the doors to the buildings, and guess that is about 2 meters tall, and the wall is about twice that high, so 3-4 meters tall.
Question! Question! Oh, oh, me, me! Question!
Do we need to put walls around our cities? I've always preferred my cities wall-less, except maybe the inner courtyards or a keep. Or is it a 'building' like any other? The cities in my heartlands rarely have walls unless absolutely necessary.
And no, anyone that's thinking about ever meeting me in a multiplayer match didn't just hear that.
With the obvious exception of very specific temple cities and such. But those aren't 'real' cities.
And no matter what, wheter those walls came to be around a castle on a hilltop or a city that grew in the middle of a bloody forest, you cleared all trees around it. For obvious reasons. So the height of trees then or now is irrelevant.
I think this sounds absurd, but according to wikipedia, pines grow to between 3-80m. Yes. It actually says 80m. I first thought it was a typo for 8, but then it says that the average height of most species of pine is 15-45m. So yes.
Pines are huge.
Edit: They also live for a thousand years. Bastards.
"This tree is the largest species of pine, commonly growing to 40-60 meters (130-200 feet) tall, exceptionally up to 81 m (265 ft) tall, and with a trunk diameter of 1.5-2.5 m (5-8 ft), exceptionally 3.5 m (11 ft)." Sugar Pine - Wikipedia
And thats just pine trees. Redwoods grow up to 115.5 meters according to wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(tree)
Yep, trees are big when you don't cut them all down like we here in the USA did.
However, I would not expect trees to be much bigger than they are in the screenshot, since they have had a relatively short time to grow since that area was made habitable by a channeler... IMO they are just the right size. Big enough to give a decent sense of scale, small enough to not get in the way of looking at the map.
We have cut down less trees than most of the world That is why we have the redwoods. we should be pointing our fingers at the germans that have been taking trees from the black forests for thousands of years. (actually we shouldn't be pointing our fingers at anybody and just make a joined effort to perserve our old trees. We are all guilty of destroying our environment)
Many pines I've lived around were pretty big, so I didn't question it. They are still shorter than that wizard tower (I assume its a wizard tower.)
Its an early render so obviously the ending product will be different, but while we are in nit-picky zone of scale. Why is the most important looking structure on the outside of the enclosed space. I'd put my shiny white building at least near the center of the wall so that it had some protection. I guess this particular place is very protective of what looks like a big thatched roof hut.
I honestly think it looks fine just the way it is. I love the cel-art style and the way it makes the screen look a little like something out of a comic book. I know I'm probably in the minority here, but I love it if the art barely changed from this at all.
Ok, so I stopped reading after page one and apparently I'm NOT in the minority. =PKeep it close to this, guys. This art style might seem primitive, but it's a winner. I've never liked how modern companies put too much emphasis on making EVERYTHING "3D" - it more often than not just ends up looking ugly.
Look to the beautiful games of old for your inspiration, art team!
Yeah, I really like the direction the art is going in this screenshot. Obviously things can be tweaked and always look better, but this is refreshingly uncluttered.
I really like the art direction. Clear and leaves room for imagination.
Still its all about the gameplay, but I guess that's somewhat hard to show off with a screenshot. Looking forward to the beta test!
I think it looks fine. Leave it the way it is and focus on gameplay... Graphics aren't everything.
I ought to say that I LOVE the art direction in this game!
The consistency of the art through the game is so much more important than just getting the concept art done.
ha ha! I really like the look.Simple and stylish. I have always personaly preferred style over polygon counts. Really there is no point in making things look 'ultra realistic' if that is going to make it look 'real-life' and 'boring'. A good clean colorful sense of style is always better then super high res textures etc. Sure many game critics will whine about how 'dated' the graphics look, but honestly if you look at the market for people who actually buy and play TBS games, graphics is the least of their concerns.
lol april 15th-aug 26. Quite a necro post. Looking at the new screens im glad they are improving, but im with everyone else here - style is better than polygon count.
Graphics card producers would beg to differ.
(no vested interests there, nope, none at all )
I believe the reason the trees look different from the rest of the objects on the map is because the trees are Part of the map while the other black outlined objects were "placed" on the map.
Ach, I can't help thinking that I like this early screen better than the newer ones.
I think youll find that the game will look much much different when the 3D engine is implemented. Like almost nothing like this. You can only see the artistic style from this.
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