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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Texture Overhaul.... Character Texture Upres and environment model compexity.
Ryonis
Member, Alpha Two
I'm a texture artist from TV/Film... and their current face textures and models on AoC seem a little low res for our current capabilities. Using methods such as Texture XYZ... they could upres the look of character faces ten fold... and keep it modular enough to be applied across any face type (as long as they have a unified UV setup for the heads). Plus it wouldn't hurt the loading times/render rate nearly as much as you think if its a lower res texture file. Even more so if you wear a helmet which might turn off the head model anyway.
https://texturing.xyz/collections/multi-channel-faces
There also needs to be an upres in the hard surface models to compliment texture fidelity. In the alpha siege, the city models from what I've seen from the alpha (I know its an wip/alpha) are quite low poly. Our cities need to wow, and not be distracting simply due to bad graphics. Now a days we cant just rely on normal maps/color to make a brick wall look realistic-- there needs to be a certain amount of poly complexity on a rounded surface. Like I saw a city wall which literally was a box with four sides.... with a stone texture on it.
There really should be a model quality slider so that people stuck in the stone ages can play the game... but also give the gift of immersion to the games that have the system capable of next gen graphics. For me and likely many others, the overall look will make/break my willingness to play (since its not a stylized cartoon like WoW which kind of gets a free pass because of it).
Im super excited about this game.... but since we are few years away from it coming out.... the visuals will only look more dated as the years go by!
https://texturing.xyz/collections/multi-channel-faces
There also needs to be an upres in the hard surface models to compliment texture fidelity. In the alpha siege, the city models from what I've seen from the alpha (I know its an wip/alpha) are quite low poly. Our cities need to wow, and not be distracting simply due to bad graphics. Now a days we cant just rely on normal maps/color to make a brick wall look realistic-- there needs to be a certain amount of poly complexity on a rounded surface. Like I saw a city wall which literally was a box with four sides.... with a stone texture on it.
There really should be a model quality slider so that people stuck in the stone ages can play the game... but also give the gift of immersion to the games that have the system capable of next gen graphics. For me and likely many others, the overall look will make/break my willingness to play (since its not a stylized cartoon like WoW which kind of gets a free pass because of it).
Im super excited about this game.... but since we are few years away from it coming out.... the visuals will only look more dated as the years go by!
3
Comments
TV/Film level textures may not be possible to render and still have decent optimization.
Read the comic here!
I'm sure this is in the pipeline. Been awhile since I've checked but I'm unsure if there's currently texture sliders at all and if there were the game likely still runs best at max since nothing is getting optimized.
Looking closely at game assets in place now.
Some appear quite low poly count but more importantly disproportional poly counts so at times some items stand out from others..
Own pickups
Grasses
-Not adhered to the land below, floating in some areas
-Singular color, not a blend of 2-3 types
Shrubs
- low lying plants placed with same methodical placement as trees, not always an apparent parent, sibling relationship and/or hierarchy
Trees
-Low poly count
-Limited variety of same base model
-Repeated at same scale > should have a range of scaling ie 70-130%
-Repeated with model in same orientation > a bit no, no, inserting at different rotations assists giving illusion the trees are different.
- placed at regular intervals, not random and/or with groupings
Town
-one dimensional landscape, flat
-square / rectangular footprint > no relation to site
Buildings
-Base / Foundations end at ground level and on inclined terrain the buildings are floating with gaps under
Filler Assets
-Same asset repeated multiple times in close proximity. (alot) ie in starter area the fallen logs are the same -asset repeated 20-30x. with nil variety.
-Towns lack filler assets
Landscape
-landmarks > wayfinding and orientation is achieved through landmarks, be that man made objects or natural. FoV seems to impact that, perhaps longer reach
-would like to see greater significance to elevation, more drama with higher mountains, deeper valleys, ravines, tunnels. inaccessible areas
Whereas I agree w/ your premise I think the fact that we're on a dedicated A1 island and not even the actual game world kinda gives them a pretty huge pass on broken areas since the goal should be to get it just good enough to test raw mechanical systems
Artwork has had many passes already and will continue to do so. As Intrepid bothers to repeat extensively at the beginning of each stream.
Intrepid clearly does not think that the artwork is acceptable for launch in its current state.
If they are looking to bring back gamers to MMOs -- those who havent played any in a long while... the expectations need to be updated. We're used to blizzards monopoly on the genre, and bare minimum approach funding a project.
Akabears comment is a great way to look at it. A lot of this can be scripted when propagating it to be more randomized-- colour shifts of grass, rotation of assets to hide duplicates etc for simple fixes. The overall complexity of the model (especially in areas where are characters are going to be should be higher poly --and they can always keep the poly count trash way up a tower or off in the distance .
As well, the core assets really shouldn't be so low poly in this isolated testing environment if we are accurately stress testing the game. If their goal currently is just to see if things don't crash, and abilites/spells fire and hit others correctly... then that's great.
They just need to pay a really good character artist like Hossein diba... who did the game characters for diablo 2 reimagined.. to do a bunch of high quality generic characters to shift skin tones on.
I have a feeling they have a lot of TD's and technical people, and not alot of artists on the crew yet.
In the streams, they talked about how its so impressive that so many characters can be involved in a battle without lag... which is easier to say when your character textures and models are quite low.... and the environments are extremely simple geo wise.
In terms of the link I provided to XYZ, those are the same quality we see in meta-human which run on Unreal 5.... and are made for game engine requirements. The devs on AoC already said what their quality goal is in terms of matching graphics seen on an other MMO (cant think of the name).. and its kind of busted in comparison to what we can do now.
Meta Human Realtime Characters for games.... (doesnt even need to be this detailed)
In the end-- Id rather have a more realistic experience, with elevated models/textures with a reduced amount of total players being able to siege. At which then they can work out a balance to large scale battles later..... if that's the sacrifice we have to pay it would be worth it in my opinion.
Honestly, there is no point.
Intrepid absolutely could spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars in bringing the graphics up to today's standard for single player games.
Problem is, when the game launches in 2 - 3 years, those standards would have shifted and Ashes will be years behind on release.
Since an MMO takes between 2 and 4 times as long to make as most other genres, they tend to aim for cutting edge when the project starts work, rather than cutting edge for when it releases.
Since Ashes started real work in 2018, expect 2018 standards to be met, and not much more.
That is just the nature of the genre.
To be fair there are 12 year old's experimenting with services like Meta Human-- making videos and animations quickly with their setup. I don't think it would be super difficult to swap in the head models (especially in the infancy stage where they might not even have rigged faces/expressions). Everything is so modular in games, they could upgrade certain parts and leave others a little dated.
Also depending on what sort of engine they are using... a lot of aspects which make our modern games complex are scripted. It would then come down to directing modelers to put energy in where it counts.... they are modelling these beautiful towers.... make the lower part detailed... and the upper crap. Its just practices that can be adopted while creating the assets which will make a huge difference!
They can also make a collection of say rocks and bushes.... and just make them higher poly... then apply colour shifts, scale changes, and rotations to mask how modular things are.
They just need to get creative-- and it wont change the time and money spent.
I think in the end, characters can be updated with just improving the skin texture which can be done easily enough and they wouldn't lose any work... just add onto what they have.... but overall... they likely will be wearing helmets or hats so its a little less important than the environments... which definitely need some love.... and will be the main thing we are looking at.
The problem is that things look dated within even a few years. I think I remember ARK was a beast to run for the first few years of its life. After some time, hardware caught up to the game and Wildcard was able to replace old textures with higher res one's closer to the source textures. This was possible because the developers worked with high-res textures the whole time and just kept them for when the time was right to use them. I also believe I have heard that WOW never kept their high-res textures around, which is part of the reason they don't care to update old items. True or not, that is the reality for some games.
As someone who is no stranger to tweaking graphics settings to squeeze a few FPS out of a crappy GFX card, I know the one thing you never want to turn down is texture quality. If Intrepid's process is to work with really high-res textures for the source files, I would like to see them at least save them for the future. Things look okay now, but our eyes will adjust and things will look like crap.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
An interesting aside to this discussion, SoE attempted to make EQ2 a more forward looking game. They looked at where hardware had been, where it was heading, and made an educated guess as to what hardware would be like a year or two after the game launched.
The thing is, they were looking at this around 2002. In 2002, Intel and AMD were putting everything in to clockspeed. They were at about 3Ghz, and it was going up really fast.
So, SoE optimized EQ2 for the CPU they expected to see in around 2005/2006 - a single core CPU with a clock speed of around 7Ghz.
Needless to say, that CPU never arrived, and EQ2 actually removed the max settings from the game for a few years while they retooled it to make use of this new fangled dual core CPU thing that jumped up on them and took over. This lack of optimization was one of the things that saw WoW overtake it in the first 6 months (EQ2 started out stronger than WoW).
Needless to say, no MMO has ever made that mistake again. Most will stick to tried and tested methods and hardware, not wanting to be the one to push the envelope at all.
It's one of the reasons the choice to go realistic over stylized can be dangerous and actually end up hurting AoC a few years after launch as the age starts to show
I have to agree. As much as I dislike stylized graphics (especially WoW's), it does mean your game dates slower.
I think the plan with EQ2 was to update the graphics after a few years, but that didn't happen.
That said, the environments did get stepped up a notch after a few years.
The thing with graphics in an MMO though, is that no one expects them to be up to date.