KickStarter Black Geyser, a brand-new RTwP RPG - beta coming in late June

I just hope that both games will be released and good.

 

they started sending hardware specs surveys. Yeah, you heard me right. They. Started. Sending. Hardware. Surveys. Now.

 

I never fucking got one what the fuck?

 

They deemed you not worthy of the Black Geyser.

 

Neither did I, but whatever, I'll have a new rig anyway when this comes out in 2024.

 

The release of the combat beta of Realms Beyond after so much delay makes me kinda hopeful that maybe we will also be covered in the glorious incline that is worthy of the name Black GAYsir... SOON?!

 

It will be amazing if Black Gayser will be better game than POE in the end.

 

One can only hope.. if it ever gets released

 

You can't contain the Black Geyser for too long...

 

After PFK I've grown disenchanted with the strict isometric thing. I like spinny-rotatey and zoomey-in-and-outey now (with mod and high rez NPC textures - kindly supplied to the modder by Owlcat).

The art quality difference is still there a bit. POE2 really does look amazing in places. But it's not like the difference is night and day (like it used to be with NWN vs. BGII, for example) and the D:OS games and PFK (and DA:I's Frostbite loveliness for that matter) show that full 3-d is very close to being just as artistically pretty as the modern Infinity-inspired games. Going back and playing POE recently, it felt quite psychologically cramped by comparison.

 

'Once you play Geyser Black,
you'll never want to return to Deadfire back.'

- Oracle of Black Geyser

 

Full 3d games can look good, but they still can't be compared to what can be (and has been) achieved in terms of beauty with 2d pre-rendered hand-painted backgrounds. D:OS 2 can be gorgeous at times, but it still looks plastic and cartoonish (in a bad way) when compared to old IE games or to the two PoE games.

They can't be compared because they use two completely different artistic mediums. It's like comparing two different forms of art: there obviously are magnificent sculptures, but, since I'm more of a painting guy, I will always take a good painting over a good sculpture.

 

"Oracle" or "orifice"?

 

That's a low bar to overcome. PoE's greatest failure was its stillborn (Hollowborn? lol) mechanics. They don't have Sawyer on their team, so there is reason to be optimistic.

 

lewd

 

So, is this Big Black Cock coming out or what?

 

The real question is: what is it coming out from?

 

I don't think that's the essential difference - I said this on the other thread in which I responded on this topic, but I'll reiterate it again. There's no artistic difference, and the building blocks are the same (the 2-d environments are done in 3-d first, after all, and digital painting is digital painting, whether directly on a 2-d surface or on a texture to be used over a mesh).

The difference is that each environment in the 2-d isometric system can afford to look absolutely unique. There's less necessity to re-use assets for the sake of economy (e.g. the grass, the bottles, the knick-knacks, the doodadery, can afford to look completely different in one area than in another). That means there's more artistic freedom in a sense, but it's just a function of time, effort and higher resolution, not some magic fairy dust pertaining only to to 2-d.

 

The true Baldur's Gate III, cleverly disguised under another name, but the initials betray it to the wise!

 

Urmom.

 

Jesus Christ, so is this a game about necrophilia?

 

It's about soooo much more

 

To start with.

 

Take any single area in Deadfire and any single area in Kingmaker, ignoring assets reuse (we are looking at a single area, after all). The Deadfire one will always look a thousand times better.

First four Kingmaker screenshots I found on Google:

Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler

The same thing, but for Deadfire:

Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler

I mean, come on. Look at a single column in a Kingmaker screenshot and then do the same in a Deadfire one.

I agree with you that it's a function of time and effort, but those two things are a function of the same resource: money. With infinite money, Wrath of the Righteous could look better than Deadfire, but money is always finite and Owlcat will never be able to reach the same level of detail Obsidian did, because they need to make low-detail reusable assets that needs to be viewable from any angle (a sculpture), while in Deadfire you have a fixed image that you can look at only in a single way (a painting). Again, take a brick from a Kingmaker screenshot and compare it to one from Deadfire: not only they don't feel unique because they have to be reused, they also are simply uglier, because the same level of detail is unattainable in 3d without a huge investment of resources.

 

I think we're largely in agreement (and I'm sorry I didn't clock your scuplture/painting analogy in my response, of course you're right and it's very apt - in fact one might almost say it's the time difference between having to paint all sides of a thing vs just one side of a thing! ). Shadows and the luxury of more shadow complexity at no performance hit also has a lot to do with it too.

But I still maintain that the trade-off point isn't unpleasant to make nowadays (not as it was with, say, NWN vs. BGII). For example if you look at the building on the bottom left in the last picture, it's not really that far off something from D:OS2. The main charm is in the more-bespoke nature of the environments in the isometric games.

And as to convergence, I'd say that the 3-d games now look as good as, if not better than, many of the environments from the first BG - again, it's partly a function of resolution. If you zoom in on the ground in PFK, it's like 512x512 or whatever, and in the original game the NPCs are somewhat of a similar resolution. But if you get the high rez 2048x2048 NPC texture pack (same rez as one's characters), it's quite a noticeable difference looking at the NPCs zoomed out, they're more "jewelline." If you could have the same resolution for ground textures and building textures, then the convergence would be even closer.