Game News Mass Effect 2 footage leaked

[DarkUnderlord]

A typical last-gen IE game:

PS: T was 'typical'? That's not what I hear.

It's engine was.

 

[Smarts]

A typical last-gen IE game:

PS: T was 'typical'? That's not what I hear.

It's engine was.

But we're not talking about the engine, are we? We're talking about the backdrops and the art direction, if anything.

 

[St. Toxic]

If there's no competing with 2d games, how come we don't see more of them?

 

[Jasede]

Well, Smarts, BG 1 and 2 had fantastic art direction/backdrops too.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

A typical last-gen IE game:

PS: T was 'typical'? That's not what I hear.

It's engine was.

But we're not talking about the engine, are we? We're talking about the backdrops and the art direction, if anything.

The back-drops and art direction were fairly typical of the time. PS:T uses the Infinity Engine, the same engine used in the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series:



Ultimately I agree with Skyway about the level of art direction droping some-what in more modern games. The older ones may have been low-tech but they looked damn nice. Today, it seems no-one can make a 3D world look all that pretty without bumping the system requirements up the wazoo.

 

[Fyz]

Except jRPGs.
Their art direction only profited from the leap to 3d (except ff7's character animation). Of course the early ones from kotor's, nwn's and morrowind's time mostly had pre-rendered backgrounds with 3d character models and animation, but those models and animations were way ahead of the ones in PC rpg's.

But even if the 3d engine is crap, and the models are ugly, one can still make colorful, interesting areas. Just take a look at mm6-8, or compare NWN's OC areas to ones from custom modules like honor amongst thieves, almraiven or shadewood.
Bioware's (and many other companies) art designers just got lazy at the jump to 3d.

 

[Mr. Teatime]

World of Warcraft has some nice art direction. And it runs very well.

 

[MetalCraze]

BG backdrops aren't even that hi-poly really - if you'll take a close look at DU screenshots you will pretty much notice that there is nothing a PC of 2003-2004 couldn't handle in realtime - the secret of BG backdrops is lots of varied objects and textures with every location being unique - and a very very nice lighting with dozens of light-sources which can be easily done with lightmaps in real-time 3d and lightmaps don't take any processing power.
Compare that to NWN OC and KotOR which had the whole areas looking exactly the same with the same texture copy-pasted at every possible corner (and even textures had no detail)
HL2, VtmB and UT2003 came out at the same period of time (not speaking about Far Cry) yet they had very varied locations with lots of textures with HL2 and FC being well detailed as well and HL2 was flying at my 64MB R9000Pro (which is 2002 vcard) while Far Cry was playable at max settings. So "tech limitations" is not an excuse for lazyness.
For special people here is a tl;dr explanation - note that I'm bitching not about the amount of shaders per square pixel, but about variety and lack of it.

 

[racofer]

"Except that statement that you quoted is 100% factual. ME *does* have choices, and consequences. This is UNDISPUTABLE."

No, it is not.

Besides, you failed at detecting the stupidity on his post, demonstrated by those two quotes of him.

 

[BethesdaLove]

So "tech limitations" is not an excuse for lazyness.

You assume lazyness. I guess its not it.