Preview New Mage-Related Media For Dragon Age

[wrathofdog]

Maybe they're using low-poly models so they can render more units on screen at once. This would make for epic, dark, gritty battles!

 

[Mister Arkham]

It looks so friggin' bland. It isn't even an issue of graphical quality, it's that everything is brown. I'm sick to shit of everything in games being brown these days, and DA isn't doing anything to alleviate that.

 

[Micmu]

Shit comes brown

 

[wrathofdog]

No no that's a feature. It's dark and gritty, see?

 

[Mister Arkham]

Friggin' whatever, man...

In all seriousness though, the "dark and gritty" thing is a bunch of wash when it comes to color palette. Having a fantasy world with darker, theoretically adult, themes can certainly allow such a thing to influence visual aesthetic (war influences architecture, design, etc.), but it's amateurish to allow it to dictate the design of your entire world.

Look at The Witcher, for example. As a game, it is relatively dark in tone and features a variety of adult themes (it handles them with all of the maturity of a twelve year old, but still...) and has a realistic, wonderfully vibrant color palette. The fact of the matter is that having a dark world doesn't mean that all of the trees have lost their color and everybody has started wearing brown.

That isn't to say that a limited color palette can't be effective, of course. They can be extremely useful in portraying totalitarian regimes, for example, or in post-apocalyptic settings. I'm not saying that a limited, particular color scheme can't be used elsewhere... one just hasn't been used properly elsewhere thus far, and Dragon Age doesn't look to be changing the trend.

:preachingtothechoir:

 

[SuicideBunny]

I saw such visuals in PoP2:WW, a 2004 game made for a console with 2001 tech.
This is bad. Bioware got ridiculously lazy.

indeed, graphics are the most relevant aspect of any kind of video game.

 

[MetalCraze]

Art design is an important part of the atmosphere - which was my point (in both PoPWW and DA everything is brown and empty)
Just what was the last game to truly have an atmosphere? Made of nice art design, colours, lighting.

 

[SuicideBunny]

(good) art design doesn't save an otherwise shitty game, and a good game can manage without it.

in games with complex gameplay it is essentially just a tool for added flavor, and while i'll grant you that the da artists seem to be oblivious as to how to properly utilize said tool, wasting more than a single sentence on it will just make you look like a whiny bitch and a consolekiddo-grade graphics whore.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Game looks like Biowares B team is making it, i'm not feeling this at all.

 

[poocolator]

Hey, the fuglier it looks, the more likely it'll actually run on my graying PC.

Very unlikely. Remember NWN2? Sprinkle that with more polygons, complex graphical effects and shaders (and quite probably, bigger texture size), and you have yourself... a true role-playing game.

I'm trying to stay fucking optimistic, because that's what my psychologist suggested.