Beamdog working on a new D&D CRPG (cancelled)

It's not RPG-exclusive but pretty good at cataloguing games of all genres.

Of course, it's missing some of the games collected in the "Really Obscure RPGs" thread here.

 

Can honestly say I've never referenced the site in my life. Landed on it a few times accidentally over the years, but never learned anything from it.

No great loss. The usual reason for an RPG being obscure is because it's shit.

 

Well, the entire purpose of the site is to serve as a catalogue listing all games that exist, along with release date, companies involed, individuals listed in the credits, platforms it was released on, etc etc. There's no commentary there or anything of that sort.

Mobygames is like a library catalogue for games. It tells you which games exist, but if you want to know more about the game than just the genre and release date, you need to play it yourself.

 

Mobygames is actually way ahead in terms of cataloging niche titles across all platforms, and they have a pretty comprehensive backend of screenshots, descriptions, developer and publisher information, etc.. It's not perfect, but I usually find what I'm looking for from them. The screenshots alone are worth the service of the site.

 

"Interesting" hires from early this year.

Andrew Scholotiuk, Project Director: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-scholotiuk-a843162b/

He worked at film and cinematography related fields before Beamdog, no apparent prior video game experience.


Derek French, Live Ops Producer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derek-french/

He worked at Bioware for almost 20 years, on the technical side of production/publishing team. It's unlikely they hired him as "Live Ops" Producer for the Axis & Allies game, so maybe their unannounced project features some degree of multiplayer features.

 

Also Live Ops programmer:

Also Trent Oster confirms their unannounced project is Beamdog's own new IP.

 

kill them all
god(s) won't spend much time sorting them out

 

The art really tells everything you need to know about their projects, doesn't it.

 

IIRC that art has been on the site for a few years. Probably not related to the unannounced project if you're talking about that.

 

Not sure about this. Art is targeted at possible employee which might be of unrelated cultural background.

 

What problems does anyone have with that particular piece of artwork? I can definitely spot some... oddities, but I'm curious what others see when they look at that.

 

It's a style with a colorful modern happy vibe with certain character design the gaming conservatives in general associates with modern leftist artists which of course can only mean decline in their book.

 

Or it's just generic uninspired garbage ...

 

Nothing really except some kind of childish style. Don’t know about any agenda that is associated with it.

 

That piece of art is to art what Siege of Dragonspear is to BG.

Postmodern cringe. Fully fits Beammod.

 

Why are they smiling although they have their weapons at the ready ?
Why does the guy that seems to be covering the back of the girl, look in the same direction as the girl ?
Why does he hold his weapon in a way that would disable any sort of quick motion ?

Basic reasoning will apparently play no part in the design, taking this piece of artwork as representative.

 

...meanwhile, you studied the blade.

 

Basic reasoning will have you conclude that the answer to all of those is that this is art intended as a promotional poster instead of actual gameplay, like movie theater poster.

 

The anatomy is pretty bad.
1: The guy's left elbow appears to be bent backwards
2: His neck is quite puzzling.
3: The woman's arms don't align to the tilt of her torso
4: Likewise, the boots don't align with the legs

In general, it looks like several pieces that would be OK on their own stitched together in a non-functional way.

 

he looks like buzz lightyear

 

5. Her legs don't join her body correctly.

I don't have much of an eye for this stuff and this picture bugs me in many ways since nothing fits together properly.

 

I hate the faces. Too happy and cartoony. Looks like I'm looking at a Disney movie.

 

Kudos to deuxhero and mediocrepoet
I thought there would be more non-descript answers and few people noticing the... problems. The two problems I noticed earliest were the male character's visible pauldron growing larger as it moves away (seemingly impossibly, unless it is VERY oddly shaped... to the point of not being useful) and his.... sword is foreshortened in a very... strange manner. Now that I've read what you guys said, her right leg (the one that we see on the left side of the image) has a freakishly long femur.

My guess is this is evidence of the industry racing at lightspeed towards photobashing and away from fine art:

 

video is tl;dr but if anything, I'd say most art labeled as 'concept art' was never concept art to begin with -- it was promo art.