I have the absolute best argument agains this thread ever: http://www.armatechsquad.com/ArmA2Class/warfare/ The quality of the model affects the aesthetic appeal, not the style.
You should probably read the post before you reply. I'd like to say I completely agree with the OP. Even professional games today are going towards the over-stylized (TF2, Spore, etc.) Will Wright has discussed how the relative explosion of data size on distributable media (CD's , DVDs etc.) has led to heavy content quality/quantity focus to fill up games. It has become less about the gameplay. Some games that were made stylistically in the past still have a huge user-base today (Starcraft).
'Our modellers aren't putting the effort in so we shouldn't have good art' isn't an excuse. Also will wright is responsible for spore so you should automatically ignore all business advice he gives.
he messed up the game of the millennium, if they had just kept to the original concept : / anyway, on topic i like those models but dont really see the relevance and your point wityh them, care to explain?. also lawl thats not a seagull http://www.armatechsquad.com/ArmA2Class/Units/animals/full/SeaGull.jpg
I'm not sure he has one, I think he just saw the title of the thread, then posted those pictures. And Chris, the problem lies in the comparison, not the model quality itself. Even if our models are 95% of the quality of commercial games (which I think is a lofty goal considering there aren't really any amazing modelers here), if we make it WWII style everyone will see those 95% models and compare them to the commercial game and say "Those look worse", even if the graphics are perfectly fine. Don't hijack threads with stuff not relevant to OP. He's just saying that he doesn't see any reason why the game has to be realistic. If you disagree with this, you could just say "I'd rather have Empires look realistic".
if we "are" gonna restyle the game i vote for cold war looking weaponry for be AND nf, if needed nf can be the early cold war Russian stuff and be can be a blend of American cold war stuff and German ww2 engineering techniques (those are still valid even now, some companies use them for building tanks afaik also jet air planes are based on them somewhat) cold war with some imagination and fantasy isnt really done to death yet this is IF ofc, i like the designs just the way they are but if people could pull it off and want to put the work into it i am not gonna stop them
If games always get compared to other games then making it stylised will simply mean it gets compared to stylised games, which by your logic still means it will look crap because there are better looking stylised games out there.
Those models arent realistic, it the pseudo realism that we think is real because we dont have more realistic stuff now in games. Crysis for example isnt realistic it will look outdated and old atm we get a better "realism" 3D gaming engine. On the other hand the only thing that makes windwaker for the game cube looking old is the low resolution of the console (TV resolution) and that wouldnt be a problem on the pc. Do you start to use statements without a meaning just to "win" a argument agian?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Porta_john_hescos.JPG http://www.armatechsquad.com/ArmA2Class/warfare/full/USMC_WarfareBBarracks.jpg No not realistic at all. The game is based off of a military training simulation, it's about as realistic as you're likely to get outside of being in a warzone. The company spends most of their time copying things exactly from the military so they can sell the result back to the military, I think they're probably going to be fairly realistic. Also what is difficult to understand about 'quality matters more than style'? If something is of high quality it will look good regardless of what style it's in. If something is of poor quality it will look bad regardless of what style it's in. For thousands of years artists have been inspired by the world around them, by reality. As game artists we have the ability to take reality, and to cut off the boring parts, and then to put it into a game. Reality has a lot of beauty in it and the fact that we're still enjoying it thousands of years later suggests that the beauty of it never gets old. Everything we create in real life has a beauty of its own, therefore to echo that in a game with skill and attention to detail will produce a beautiful game.
You're right, I don't, because I entirely disagree with its premise, which is that realistic things date while unrealistic things somehow never look worse than they did when they were made. You show me a picture of zelda wind waker and I see a bunch of low resolution textures, aliasing issues, and graphics artefacts. You show me the things I posted and I see places where it needs more polygons, especially on the sandbags, but I see a lot less wrong with it than I do with wind waker. If you show me dawn of war 2 I see just as many issues with the resolution of the modelling as I do with the ones I showed you, I see that it is still a game for all that it's about aliens and dudes in power armor and magic mind powers. Old good things look old, no matter how good they were when they came out, and new good things look better, but they won't last forever, nothing does. Even if you used vector graphics to eliminate polygon counts and aliasing, newer games would still have more complex vector graphics, more definition in their models, more colour, more effects, more things on screen at once. Until we reach the limit of human perception, as in we build a game that even if you played from birth you would never find the limits, never find the smallest possible part, never find the edge of the level, never hit the top of the skybox, until we do that we will always have old things looking bad because of age, regardless of what sort of style they're in.
Chris0132, are you saying that you like very realistic games? And others in here disagree. Some people like their games distanced from reality, just like many people like comedy films over horror. Someone make a poll, about whether Empires should go for ultra-realistic visuals or slightly stylized.
its impossible to make it ultra realistic, i would prefer a blend, something with ultra realistic features where it fits the gameplay and magic and unicorns in other spots where it fits the gameplay
No. I like lots of games. I like armed assault, but I also like overlord. I like battlefield and I like dungeons and dragons. The point is that I don't think realistic graphic styles make a game age faster. Battlefield 2 looks good to me, crysis looks better, TF2 looks about as good as battlefield 2, episode 2 looks better than TF2, black and white 2 looks better than all source games, overlord 2 is the same, very similar to black and white 2 in fact. Red alert looks like ass, renegade looks a bit like ass, the new renegade mod for UT3 looks awesome, as does UT3 in general. Graphical detail makes a game look good, not how realistic it is or isn't.
So what does make a game realistic? You telling us that Super Mario Galaxy can be realistic, even if it lacks detail? It might have realistic characters, yes, and still be realistic. But the stylized visuals (imagine Mario acting like a real person) will still break immersion and realism. Solution: consistant level of realism and stylisation, good suspension of disbelief. Players (readers, movie-watchers) will notice when something is out of line with everything else. Take TF2 as an example. It has silly characters, saying silly things, using silly weapons. Now put the Spy from Team Fortress into Half-Life2, and you get something strange. In Empires, there are established rules. There is Engineer revival, tanks built right on the battlefield, buildings constructed with only a calculator. Still there are things that appear unrealistic to players. Like tanks flipping with ease, that breaks realism for many. Or that a tank can be driven by only one person. Or that people should die when hit by a scout rifle bullet in the head. That breaks realism for them. Even if we got in-universe scientific explanations for everything else. But the developers cannot just make this a game of total realism. A totally realistic battle between tanks and infantry of Empires scale would probably be over real soon, ending with one side failing some maneuvre, and being overwhelmed to a point where they reaise the white flag and capitulate. There would be no vehicle factories on the frontlines, no scout-hide. And when you die, the game uninstalls itself and won't ever work again for you. Bad end.
A realistic game is one which takes most of its rules and art from reality and does not change them, and includes enough of them so that the game can be said to 'simulate' reality. Armed assault is pretty realistic, it simulates bullet ballistics, has realistic damage, and is set in a realistic place with realistic weapons and vehicles. Of course it isn't 'real' because you can't leave the battlefield and go home to your family but what things it does have are supposed to be close to reality. Empires is less realistic because it takes twenty bullets to kill someone and people run around with rocket launchers and in magic tanks which can be controlled by one person and none of it is based off real life except in a very general sense. Dungeons and dragons is very unrealistic because it makes up a lot of its own rules from scratch, very little of it can be said to apply to reality. However, artistically. Realism can either mean 'copying from reality' or it can mean 'following the rules of reality'. DnD has structures which are held up by magic, so it isn't realistic. TF2 doesn't follow realistic rules because the characters are all malformed and the sentry guns don't seem to have any power source or motorisation. Empires is more realistic in that sense, the guns are built like real weapons and the tanks look as though they could be constructed, but as I said at the start it's all done quite badly at low resolution and polycount so you can't really see that, although if you look at megel's high poly versions it is more obvious. What does this have to do with anything by the way?
i agree with chris, it needs to look good to look good. style is just a word used to group simmilar looking things. now empires shouldnt go with a "style", it shouldnt try to look like other games, people will make that comparison on their own when they try to describe it. empires should look like empires. all art should be based on the story and the universe it is in. every game is realistic. it is just realistic in the reality that its characters exist in. everything is related even in tf2 all elements of the art work together to complement gameplay and make it make sense. in a game you should never ask "why cant i do that" or "why doesnt this work" because in that universe everything makes sense together. ( a prime example of this going wrong is the existance of bipods on guns in empires in this reality bipods exist and are commonly used but in the empires reality you cannot use a bipod so you find yourself asking why cant i do this) if the art gets an overhaul everything needs to be related based on the established backstory of the empires universe ( and it has to look good too) but it is more important that it is realistic for that reality
