Gothic III's Landscapes

[vazquez595654]

Anyone who has played Gothic III will tell you that the landscapes look amazingly complex and varied, with hanging cliffs, mesas, deep crevices, mountain-top keeps and castles, and so on.

I know they used the same engine as Oblivion, yet the lands look so different. I could only imagine what a real Elderscrolls team could have done with the Gothic 3 engine.

Morrowind Concept Art


Does anyone know exactly how they made the Gothic 3 landscape? Was it all hand made or was it procedural? Did they create it in the editor or use other software (i.e. 3dmax)?

 

[Nog Robbin]

Carefully crafted (but not mentioned) soil erosion?

 

[stargelman]

A handful of d10.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

I know they used the same engine as Oblivion?

nope, they coded their own (genome)

 

[Blacklung]

There really wasn't anything wrong with Oblivion's landscape other than the fact that it wasn't varied enough with either settings, or with much of a personal touch. I can understand leaving some areas alone, but they took TOO much of a hands off approach. Morrowind is full of landscape that also has a sort of hands off approach, but many of the towns and areas did have the "special touch." Plus, towns were continuous with the land (vs. being interiors in Oblivion because you know they did something wrong so they were FPS draggers).

BTW is that Gnissis? Sure looks like it.

 

[Admiral Rimjob POOBUM]

BTW is that Gnissis? Sure looks like it.

Look at the top left of the picture.

 

[Blacklung]

Too bad it didn't look more like that in the game. I like the whole cliff face thing. Come to think of it, do any of these landscape engines have the ability to create cliff or tunnel like landscape. From what I've seen they only make pretty hills and highly curved mountains.

 

[Sentenza]

I know they used the same engine as Oblivion

I guess they don't

i'll check my fonts....

 

[Klinn]

Come to think of it, do any of these landscape engines have the ability to create cliff or tunnel like landscape.

I haven't noticed any overhanging cliffs, but the two caves in the beginning region of G3 appear to be part of the same mesh as the above ground terrian. There are no 'load' doors or other transitions to get into the caves, and if you're backed up against a cave wall and the camera view angle mistakenly clips through the wall, you can see the 'ouside' world above you.

 

[Limorkil]

Too bad it didn't look more like that in the game. I like the whole cliff face thing. Come to think of it, do any of these landscape engines have the ability to create cliff or tunnel like landscape. From what I've seen they only make pretty hills and highly curved mountains.

I think cliffs are possible if you create them manually, rather than auto-generating landscape. Oblivion has some very good landscape mods created by fans, which really do show how extremely lazy Bethesda were. It's as if Beth auto-generated some hills and trees and said "Fuck, thost textures look great. OK that's a wrap."

But it would be true to say that cliffs and tunnels do not come as easy as hills.

The difference between Gothic and Oblivion has nothing to do with engines, and a lot to do with artisitic talent. Oblivion looks good, but it displays very little imagination. The Gothic engine is clearly 'worse' but the results are better because some people with some vision and talent put it together. Morrowind displayed far more imagination than Oblivion, even if Gnisis was nowhere near as cool as that concept art. I can only assume the talent quit, or they were not given any time to do their job (Morrowind was 6-7 years in the making, Oblivion was 3 or less).

 

[DarkSign]

It's funny you ask this question. I used to have a link on the subject. It was about how they used normal maps over sand pockets to make the dunes look more realistic (i havent played the game yet so Im not sure about the rest) - which is really more of a texture question than geographic formation come to think of it.

There are some simply amazing ways for game devs to make landscapes nowdays - heightmaps from actual satellite scans, fractalized process landscaping...etc.

My favorite program is GeoControl...well until Terragen2 is ready for primetime

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Everything in gothic 3 is using the lowest LOD models and textures that they made.

And everything is loaded into ram, if they split the world up, tarant / myrtana (like the previous games) etc they might of had more resources to play with, or it may of helped with the shitty performance troubles people are having.

I personally think the game should of had another 3 to 6 months in dev time to really get it spot on. Ahh well.

 

[sabishii]

And everything is loaded into ram, if they split the world up, tarant / myrtana (like the previous games) etc they might of had more resources to play with, or it may of helped with the shitty performance troubles people are having.

I personally think the game should of had another 3 to 6 months in dev time to really get it spot on. Ahh well.

TBH if they had optimized it more I would've played it more. Replayed it a few times, even. It just gets too frustrating to do so, but the game design just invites me to replay it.

 

[Naked_Lunch]

Damn, if Morrowind had stuck to the awesome nomadish-meets-fanatasy Dune style they had going on the game would've been 10 times better.

I've actually been itching to replay it for some reason, with the expansions added of course along with a few (dozen) mods. Am I going gaming senile or what? It's one of those games where taken at face value it's bland boring stupid and just plain not fun, yet when actually played it's not half-bad. I loved just walking through the wilderness and the atmosphere was very good at points (the south-western azura's region especially). oh boy getting rose-tinted glasses for a game that came out four years ago.

Yeah, I've gone nuts.

 

[Blacklung]

Yeah, you're not alone. I played Oblivion, hated it, and then felt like playing Morrowind to see if I had just played it too much...It was definitely the poor quality of Oblivion. Morrowind just had more of that "special touch" to it. It was far from perfect, but at least the leveling of the enemies was retarded, at least I felt like I could really clear out a dungeon, at least the skills system was better, at least the inventory was better, at least...well you get my point.

Oh, and Daggerfall gives me the same feeling of Oblivion...so much is randomly generated that despite all this "at least they put some soul into it" talk some people here have about it, it felt pretty soulless to me.

Oh yeah, and my computer doesn't run Morrowind like a slideshow...

 

[Ahzaruuk]

Yeah. In spite of some of it;s shortcommings (or just my personal preferences) I really can;t help but love the game.

And I haven't even gotten started with mods yet! I can't wait to get a computer...

 

[Admiral Rimjob POOBUM]

I've always loved Morrowind. Call me heathen, but it's the game that really got me into RPGs , and it was great with a hundred and twenty or so mods.
And... of course... if you like mods, and you like muffins, you can't go wrong with MUFFINWIND!

 

[Littlefizz]

It's one of those games where taken at face value it's bland boring stupid and just plain not fun, yet when actually played it's not half-bad.

It's actually exactly the opposite for me, I used to love making plans about what kind of character I would create and what different options I would take and when I finally started playing I realized it didn't really matter, you ended up with a mage-warrior-thief head of all guilds. Having to chose between redoran-hlaalu-whatever was nice though. Never tried the expansions and only a handful of mods so maybe those will fix some of the problems.

The not-so-generic fantasy setting was probably what kept me playing the most.

 

[kris]

Morrowind could have been redeemed if it had any memorable or in any way interesting characters in it.

 

[Admiral Rimjob POOBUM]

Vivec's an interesting character, though you have to read (TEH HARD) the in-game books and other "unofficial" lore posted by Michael Kirkbride (who pretty much made ES lore what it is anyway) to "get" him in the slightest.

 

[The Vanished One]

Vivec's an interesting character...

It's a shame you aren't given a quest to kill him at the end of bloodmoon. It would be nice if you could destroy the whole tribunal, and become a god. Morrowind is great, but you always end up being a normal citizen. I wish I was called "My God" and I could take the Stilt strider for free...

 

[Romanian_Dude2005]

Speaking of Vivec, I just wanted to note that Dagoth Ur is prehaps one of the best villans ever placed in a video game.

I'm talking only about the concept, they way they implemented him into the game was god-awfull though.

 

[Ahzaruuk]

Speaking of Vivec, I just wanted to note that Dagoth Ur is prehaps one of the best villans ever placed in a video game.

I'm talking only about the concept, they way they implemented him into the game was god-awfull though.

Yeah. A lot of interesting elements in Morrowind kind of fell flat on their face when it came to presentation. It was well thought enough, but they were hardly given any justice.

 

[Admiral Rimjob POOBUM]

Vivec's an interesting character...

It's a shame you aren't given a quest to kill him at the end of bloodmoon. It would be nice if you could destroy the whole tribunal, and become a god. Morrowind is great, but you always end up being a normal citizen. I wish I was called "My God" and I could take the Stilt strider for free...

I think they really wanted to leave it up to decide whether he should die or not. Read the books, listen to what he says, judge people's opinions of him, his motives etc, and decide to kill him from there. Giving you a quest to kill him would be... eh.

 

[The Vanished One]

Vivec's an interesting character...

It's a shame you aren't given a quest to kill him at the end of bloodmoon. It would be nice if you could destroy the whole tribunal, and become a god. Morrowind is great, but you always end up being a normal citizen. I wish I was called "My God" and I could take the Stilt strider for free...

I think they really wanted to leave it up to decide whether he should die or not. Read the books, listen to what he says, judge people's opinions of him, his motives etc, and decide to kill him from there. Giving you a quest to kill him would be... eh.

You're right, in this quest you should be able to choose. But after all they force you to kill Almalexia.

 

[Admiral Rimjob POOBUM]

Vivec's an interesting character...

It's a shame you aren't given a quest to kill him at the end of bloodmoon. It would be nice if you could destroy the whole tribunal, and become a god. Morrowind is great, but you always end up being a normal citizen. I wish I was called "My God" and I could take the Stilt strider for free...

I think they really wanted to leave it up to decide whether he should die or not. Read the books, listen to what he says, judge people's opinions of him, his motives etc, and decide to kill him from there. Giving you a quest to kill him would be... eh.

You're right, in this quest you should be able to choose. But after all they force you to kill Almalexia.

Well, she was a psychotic murderess.

 

[Lumpy]

Now, if only there was some consequence to killing Vivec.