What EQNEXT should have looked like

Discussion in 'Off Topic Discussion' started by Anfis, Aug 26, 2013.

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  1. kela Member

    Would you have a problem playing as Motoko Kusanagi, Vash the Stampede, Mukuro, Spike Spiegel, Faye Valentine, or Rei Ayanami cause the art style of EQN has just as much in common with those characters as it does with any Disney Character, and I am willing to bet the stuff they do will have more in common with those characters then it does with Disney Characters as well.
  2. msgnomer Active Member

    About the cartoon thing, I'll just elaborate that it's because the characters have a kiddie cartoon look I personally can't relate to. All of the MMO's have animated characters, the difference is in the style. I think EQ Next and Landmark have features I would have really enjoyed, but it's not being designed for my aesthetic. Thing is, they already have me as an EQ2 customer for the moment, so they gain nothing in the short term by catering to me.

    I'd hoped EQN would be an evolution of the previous Everquest games, but it looks more like a teen-age Free Realms than EQ1 or 2 to me. Strangely, I'm almost glad. It spares me messing with upgrading a computer that's completely adequate in other ways, and certainly frees up more time than if I'd suddenly been all agog over the game.

    Some people are really liking the art style, and that's a good thing for SOE.
    Charlice likes this.
  3. kela Member

    I still don't get how you can say it is a kiddie cartoon look, when there are many examples of cartoons with JUST AS MUCH in common with the look more kid friendly cartoons that are FAR from kid friendly. Part of whether or not something is kiddie comes down to the Animation itself and the story...unless you are bias against ALL cartoony games and movies...in which case you are really missing out on some very good things.
  4. msgnomer Active Member


    I actually looked at some of those other names you mentioned, and while they don't appeal to me for other reasons, they don't look like much in common with EQ Next either to me. This LucasArts game character and Free Realms character is what I see when I look at EQ Next characters (along with Tony the Tiger):
    [IMG]
    [IMG]

    On the other hand, besides EQ and EQ2 character graphics, I've been attracted to the character art style of
    [IMG][IMG]


    Whatever you want to call it, the character art style of EQ Next is not going to appeal to everyone. They chose a style that happens to jar with a lot of EQ2 player's aesthetics, but not all of course. Style is personal, and liking or not liking it doesn't make you right or wrong, good or bad.
  5. Estred Well-Known Member

    I happen to like the style after seeing Landmark in action. It works well and frankly reminds me more of Torchlight and Torchlight II in art style than WoW or Free Realms.
    TarnaX likes this.
  6. msgnomer Active Member

    Well, there you go, more proof of varied tastes. I watched the in-game Landmark footage someone posted and it only confirmed my impressions the art style wasn't for me. In addition, all that sliding and tumbing looked cool the first dozen times I saw it, but in the in-game footage, it eventually just annoyed me. I'll just plod along with building in EQ2 for now. :)
    Charlice likes this.
  7. IceStormx New Member

  8. Cube Active Member

    Final fantasy spirts within....Sorta such rendering is not really possible..... in a MMO anyway.

    You can fake it though, But it;s not going to happen in a MMO.


    lets take a look at just the hair.


    [IMG]






    Ahh ya but wasnt this running in realtime on a geforce 3 once? Ya in a 100% scripted way to fake the look of a real render in a preset animation.




    you all want too many detail on screen at once. you want a single player or meduim sized detailed character (AKA 24 player first person shooter) into a MMO game that needs to show tons of them on screen.

    They are other types of games a first person shooter is made to spawn most the players on the map away from each other they very rare tons of players show up on screen at once and most of them would die when that happens.



    planetside you get big battle but tons of them die and have to walk back and there are objects to obscure characters and keep characters from showing on the screen they also are far away lots of the time and all have Level of detail that lowers the poly count as you shoot at them from far away.

    MMOs you will have all the detailed party characters and the monsters on screen with you at once 99% of the time and even more of them in towns or gathering areas it is just not going to happen with the PC power now. You think raid frame rate is bad now try to do super detail characters on super detail world objects and it will slow to a crawl.

    You can get something that looks better than everquest 2 but you are not going to get a pre rendered movie or crysis 3 level thing going on. everybody framerate will tank for years until there is GPUs that can handle it.
    msgnomer likes this.
  9. msgnomer Active Member

    Cube, I was trying to illustrate the style, not suggest the level of quality should be the same for an MMO as FF Spirits within. I was really trying to get at my preferred style, which includes more realistically proportioned and shaded faces. I'm not a fan of the style where, particularly the females, have overly large eyes, puffy lips, and tiny noses.

    It might have been better to use game examples, but when thinking of animated character art styles I like, those two films came to mind.

    I do like your explanation. I've worked on various projects over the years developing high speed real-time digital imaging pipelines in both software and hardware (and combos), so I definitely appreciate the limitations of hardware.
    Malleria likes this.
  10. ConcealFate Well-Known Member


    much MUCH better than cartoon characters...any time or day. Why mess with a good thing? (my opinion.)
  11. Cube Active Member

    Yes they can model a character with a real looking face and body. that is what they was trying to do on the final fantasy movie. Make real looking digital actors.

    But it is going to look fully strange and bizarre with out the skin shaders and correct lighting that eats up GPU power. That is why it has been avoided on most games and MMOs if possible.

    IF they did that style with out the shaders they are going to look creepy as hell (they already was creepy to some people when the movie came out in 2001.)


    with shaders.




    [IMG]




    Without shaders basic game level lighting.
    [IMG]
  12. Trex Drago New Member

    [quote="Makya, post: 5960393, member: 622"Realism in video games is way over-rated. Gameplay is and always has been king for the sustained success of a game. SOE is doing this the right way IMO and I'm looking forward to playing the result.[/quote]
    wish more people thought like that more about gameplay and not about graphics i mean gameplay is the reason to play a game...if you want to look at some thing realistic go out side or watch a movie which most games are turning into lol i can not wait to see how EQN turns out.i for one think gamplay is the reason to buy a game and graphics are a bonus!!
  13. Trex Drago New Member

    And imo i would rather be able to break buildings tree's bridges etc than have realistic graphics in that video i don't see em breaking any thing.i would trade graphics for a mmo where we can break stuff around us since there is no mmo i have seen that you can do it in but i have seen alotta mmo's with good graphics,and alotta system games with good graphics in the end most of the system games end up being movies not games so many cut scenes you can not skip blah.
  14. Makya Active Member

    I can tell you from playing the EQNext Landmark alpha this past week the graphics feel a lot more like EQ2 and nothing like WoW or a Disney cartoon.
  15. msgnomer Active Member


    The landscape has always looked good, in that generic auto-generated way. Gives it a natural look and the game will distinguish itself by it's handcrafted points of interest.

    I'm pleasantly surprised if there were some EQ2 like player character models. I watched some gameplay that players uploaded since the NDA lifted. They looked pretty Lucas arts adventure game to me still.

    Question for anyone in the game - I watched the character movement and noticed a whole lot of sliding and tumbling going on. Is this something that is controlled by the player?
  16. Mermut Well-Known Member

    I'm pretty sure it's not player controlled. It looks the whole 'heroic movement' they went on about in the early preview videos that is supposed to be 'cool' and 'exciting'.
  17. Vlahkmaak Active Member

    You can control the mid air flip. going down a steep incline will cause the slide.
    The graphics are Disneyish but not as bad as they seemed at Fanfaire last year. ESO still looks better overall imo.
  18. Astealoth Member

    Don't understand the fixation with graphics.

    I'd like to see someone do an MMORPG right gameplay wise after all these years. Maybe something like a cross between early Dark Age of Camelot and early Ultima in a stable and accurate modern game engine.

    Raiding has devolved into silly little scripted instanced adventures. This has been the industry standard for a good 8 years. Look at how DAoC did raids. You had the mega bosses that took huge groups of +/- 60 people to kill in the open world and you had their captains that gave good loot too but were more tuned to be attacked by 8-16 man raids. It was all open world and a lot of it was in nonconsentual PVP zones. So you had the challenge of a difficult boss with the risk of being jumped by enemy factions. It's just exciting and takes a lot of years to become uninteresting. Not to mention all the loot was freely tradable with very rare and sought after items in the loot tables so there was an economic interest there.

    Then look at Ultima Online's raiding. They had two distinct styles in game. PVP raiding and PVE raiding. PVP raiding awarded mostly power scrolls that were used to increase skill and stat caps. PVE raiding dropped mostly loot. A PVP raid involved spending Valor at a champion's altar in the open PVP world to summon an NPC army to fight. Once the NPC army was defeated their leader would spawn and most of them were hellishly hard bosses by themselves. Where this got really interesting was the competitive guild scene that arose around controlling these. Since the PVP boss loot was highly sought after by PVEers, a good PVP guild was a very rich PVP guild. And since all the best gear came from PVE bosses, and PVP guilds had to really focus on PVP bosses, PVEers could make just as much coin from PVE raiding by selling gear to PVPers. That, boys and girls, is what you call ingenious, truly perpetual end game content.

    Both games had low level caps that never significantly increased and focused on the social and economic aspects of raiding. Both games are still operating as successful subscription based games, I might add. Now all we have from one end of the market to the other is developers who think adding a new level cap and a few instances and quests every year or so is how you make rewarding end game. I shake my head in disapproval. I dare someone to release an actual MMORPG post WoW. Visuals be damned. The players are the content in an MMORPG, not some endless string of NPC chat bubbles. Somewhere that idea got lost.
  19. msgnomer Active Member

    by Astealoth: "Don't understand the fixation with graphics."

    I can answer for myself. I don't raid. Heck, I'm not even that into combat anymore. For me, MMOs have always been about immersing myself in an alternate world - exploring, questing and following character storylines, and in recent years crafting, building, and terraforming. I want that world to be someplace where I want to be. Simple as that. My visual experience is a big part of the game experience for me.

    I didn't play Ultima Online when it was released because I new I couldn't handle the ganking. PVP is really not something everyone is interested in. For me, I feel bad losing a PVP encounter and I feel bad winning one, knowing I messed up someone elses experience. It's a lose-lose for me.

    Not every player is like you, nor is every player like me. I guess that's kind of why I know my dislike of EQN graphical style isn't going to break the game, even I decide I just can't accept playing it.
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  20. Rhodris EQ2Wire Ninja

    This. Exactly the same for me. I play to be somewhere else for a while, to be someone else for a while, to immerse myself in an alternate "reality". Sure, it's pure escapism. I have a stressful job, and this is the way I relax and wind down. I don't want to look like a Disney cartoon. Graphics are important to me. The game has to be visually realistic enough for immersion. And it has to have beautiful art. EQ2 world art is dated for sure, but not so badly that it ruins immersion (like EQ1 - terrible graphics). I must admit that I miss the world and art of Matrix Online, including character creation. And the shoes.....oh, my - the shoes......
    Raff likes this.
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