Back to TOR... does the art style bug anyone else? It seems really off to me. Not even that it's just cartoony, it's very blocky and the animation looks stiff. Like a second rate version of that awful Clone Wars 3d cartoon.
Well, dont tempt me...
As its my job, I ofc have a pretty strong opinion on the SWTOR graphics.
EnvironnementsTo summarize a bit, there is at least one thing that is overall very good, and its landscapes and backgrounds : considering that almost everyone seems to really like them, I can say that they are well done and designed, and generally it does not surprise me because bioware have always been fucking good at environnements design. Anyway, the whole all hand painted textures and the style of these BGs are well rendered and colorful, but not too much, not too less. Rocks are surprisingly nice, and ambiants too (Nal Hutta, Dromund Kaas, for example).
WeaponsThe rest is very, very bad. Especially characters, but lets talk about the rest first. Even if they enormously decreased the size of weapons (especially lightsabers), its still a little oversized, and ridiculous on some cases. We know that they want to give a little cartoonish look to the whole thing, but its just getting a bit like LEGOs here.
ClothesJust terrible. Especially these ugly shoulder pads (looks like some bad japanimation remake, or a star wars dragon ball version or something...
). I perfectly know what they thought when designed that kind of clothes. Its for kids. But it is also such of bad taste that I am still amazed they dared to design this like that. But after all, most of that game is bad taste. Even the storyline is of bad taste, considering how cheesy and clonewars-esque it is (too bad, because the whole story background coming from kotor and the tales is nice). But will they beat clone wars 3D on the scale of bad taste ?
FacesThere is something, I suppose. It is original. But I also find it too cheesy or all lovey dovey. All the characters look almost cute (yes, even the bad ones). I am now merely expecting little butterflies and rainbows (and ponies ?) to appear out of nowhere. But yet again, graphically, its for kids. Though, even for kids, bad guys look evil, period. Here its... not always the case, especially for the playable characters.
CharactersHere they come. I do not know who designed the characters structure, but he has serious anatomy troubles. Characters are definitly all but human. Enough said for me, it is so poor and bad that I wonder where the artists working on this studied (or not).
AnimationThey have access to all the LA motion capture stuff and all shiney tech, and we get this ? I mean, what the hell ? Some animations are quite decent or nice, and others are just ludicrous. And considering how low poly are their characters, it does not help at all, so everything looks stiff, yes : no matter how good your animations are if the models are too low poly. And maybe they also screwed on the body rigging somewhere, wouldnt surprise me either.
Artistic DirectionThey screwed up somewhere. They seem to want something semi realistic (between full cartoon like say Dofus, and realistic like Mass Effect), so you normally end up with characters with human proportions, but exagerated or very loose (tightness, constitution, lenght of the legs, eyes, nose, whatever). Here it just does not work (especially anatomically). They also seem to suffer of the Lucas syndrome consisting to put every target audience in the same basket, much like it was the case in the prelogy : mixing space politics with jar jar binks and little boys, then mutilating these grown up little boys in a lava lake. Is that for children ? Teens ? Adults ?... Or aliens ? No they, just want clonewars 3000 years before, without any artistic variation like it was the case in the Tales for example (ships with solar sails, etc). What do we see ? Clonetroopers everywhere, boba fetts everywhere, clone wars 3D like obiwans everywhere, and even better, the new ugly darth vader alias Dark Malgus. Wtf. Ah yes, and Satele, which is not bad, but do feel like the female selling point of the whole design.
So yes Miz, Wow definitly works, because it remains coherent, unlike that game (and yet, I have doubts on wow too). I mean, look at their marketing : their selling asset is their storyline. They keep telling us "look how awesome our voiced class stories are going to be huge and awesome". They keep emphasizing on this, because they perfectly know that the rest has nothing original in itself. Eventually, they are doing some kind of online solo RPG.
Edit : slightly off topic, but for these that are interested and do not know them, just watch
these awesome reviews. Parodic by nature, of course, but they are so true in themselves (and hilarious)...
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Topic: SWTOR: Will/how will you play? (Read 17600 times)