There was a post to say about empires being in some german magazine, so im just saying there was one in PC gamer here in the UK. They called the maps bland and i see Deiform on the pic!
The maps arent exactly super rich in debree and such, thats all left up to the mappers, and the restrains on the engine... I mean look at Crysis, now that is as far away from bland as you can get...
Bwahaha, bland maps. I suppose so. I find it refreshing there's big outdoor maps for a change, and they don't look half bad either, considering the awkward bsp system that clearly prefers indoor maps. Oh well, could you scan the article and post it up? I'd like to read it.
Are you crazy? What will our precious game be without 2048X2048 virtual textures that are rendered realtime in a moving battle arena with lots of explosions that require at least Quad 7900GTXs? Oh right, nothing. :p (please note that this post is covered in sarcistic goodness)
*sigh* I hate all that crap that all they care about is graphics. Damn graphics whores! *shakes fist angrily* I prefer gameplay to graphics, so why do reviewers often ignore the gameplay of a lot of games?
PCG reviews the game as a whole in comparison to other games in it's genre. This game needs a lot of work and wont even be reviewed in the USA PCG. But it likely wouldn't get a good review due to "bugs, dated graphics, poor audio" but the gameplay department would probably say "needs work". EMP has potential. hence it is a beta.
Press on with the Empires Blitzkreig... When we will all play games with our DirectX 1231 Cards we will go: "Maaan, what hapened to gameplay... Now a shiny helment is all the counts "
You can't blame people for wanting games to look nice. If we had never progressed past 8-bit, the industry would be dead by now. Sure, gameplay is a huge part of a game, but if you're starting at the same stale graphics for 10 years without any improvements, it would get REAL old.
Part of the problem with the industry is that they are willing to hack up gameplay to push out something that looks shiny and has bad gameplay/ bugs aka battlefield 2. I mean sure it looks pretty good but 1942 still plays better and given the choice I still play 1942 even if it has not near the graphics of the newer game... A game that runs with few issues and and has been ironed out balance wise keeps me wanting to play.
What's worse is that people fall for the pretty graphics over poor gameplay. Gameplay aside, though, the mag is right. The maps are somewhat bland. There are ways to fix this, though. First off, the lighting on a lot of the official maps is, and I sincerely hope I do not offend the mapper(s), atrocious. It is flat, drab, and has no atmosphere whatsoever. That, however, is very easily remedied. There's also the problem of the scarcity of details on the battlefields. Go start up Warcraft 3 and take a look at the maps. Trees, rocks, and debris go a long way, even when sparsely distributed. A few grass sprites smattered on to the terrain textures would also give it a little flair. If you want to see a map that demonstrates what can be done to make it look interesting, go check out R_yell's map in the Mapping forum. It manages to break free of the somewhat limited set of visual tools available to Empires mappers.
Empires really isn't in a position to be fairly reviewed. Any kind of "official" editorial seems pretty silly at the moment. >;S
Well, keeping in mind that Empires is still in its early beta stages, Its going good :D, I dont remeber any mod it in its beta stages with few of the planned features getting this much attention
I do agree it's still way too early for any kind of official review. If PCGamer had officially reviewed CS during its first couple of releases when the maps looked like poo, who knows what they would have said, and how many people would have avoided playing it based on a poor review.
