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Visual Art Direction of AoC | Concern
TheDarkSorcerer
Member, Alpha Two
Hey everyone,
I want to start by saying that I fully support Ashes of Creation and the overall direction the game is taking. The passion and creativity behind the project are evident, and it's exciting to see the world of Verra come to life. However, I’ve noticed something in the recent showcases that I think is worth discussing.
A little over two years ago, we were treated to the seasonal update of Verra, and it was nothing short of breathtaking. The world was vibrant, colorful, full of life, and rich in texture and detail. The environments felt alive, with a level of intricacy that truly set a high standard for what we could expect from the game’s art direction.
Fast forward to the most recent showcase, and I can’t help but feel that there’s been a noticeable shift in the visual quality. The textures and overall detail in the environment seemed less refined, less color, almost as if the graphics had been simplified or even downgraded compared to that earlier seasonal update and the past Commission showcase. This change has left me a bit concerned.
I’m wondering if this is because the area we saw is still a work in progress? Were the graphics toned down for performance reasons or to meet the deadlines of these showcases? Do we like Verra with less color and vibrancy with this new lighting change? Is it possible that the team is focusing on other aspects of development right now, and we’ll see the level of detail return as things progress? I’m all for giving the developers the benefit of the doubt, but I think it’s important to have a conversation about this to understand if others have noticed the same thing or if there’s a particular reason behind this shift.
Would love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this. (Please keep things cordial)
I want to start by saying that I fully support Ashes of Creation and the overall direction the game is taking. The passion and creativity behind the project are evident, and it's exciting to see the world of Verra come to life. However, I’ve noticed something in the recent showcases that I think is worth discussing.
A little over two years ago, we were treated to the seasonal update of Verra, and it was nothing short of breathtaking. The world was vibrant, colorful, full of life, and rich in texture and detail. The environments felt alive, with a level of intricacy that truly set a high standard for what we could expect from the game’s art direction.
Fast forward to the most recent showcase, and I can’t help but feel that there’s been a noticeable shift in the visual quality. The textures and overall detail in the environment seemed less refined, less color, almost as if the graphics had been simplified or even downgraded compared to that earlier seasonal update and the past Commission showcase. This change has left me a bit concerned.
I’m wondering if this is because the area we saw is still a work in progress? Were the graphics toned down for performance reasons or to meet the deadlines of these showcases? Do we like Verra with less color and vibrancy with this new lighting change? Is it possible that the team is focusing on other aspects of development right now, and we’ll see the level of detail return as things progress? I’m all for giving the developers the benefit of the doubt, but I think it’s important to have a conversation about this to understand if others have noticed the same thing or if there’s a particular reason behind this shift.
Would love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this. (Please keep things cordial)
Seasonal + Commission showcase showing a vibrant and detailed world.
Comparing above and below screenshots, you see a very dramatic change in color, richness and detail.
Recent Bard showcase showing a very desaturated world with a lot less detail and texture.
Example if today's lighting and color was applied to Commission showcase 5 months ago:
Comparing above and below screenshots, you see a very dramatic change in color, richness and detail.
Recent Bard showcase showing a very desaturated world with a lot less detail and texture.
Example if today's lighting and color was applied to Commission showcase 5 months ago:
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Comments
But do you like the direction they are heading in for lighting and colorgrading?
I hope this is still a WIP thing and they're tweaking back to the older colorfulness. The new lighting otherwise looks good, aside also from spell effects in dark areas, which was acknowledged.
Not just color, overall graphics. Felt like Elder Scrolls Online from 2014. Comparing screenshots below, they could be the same game.
Elder Scrolls Online:
Ashes of Creation:
trust me, I am very picky with graphics, its just the colors, the game is gorgeous and youtube videos dont make it justice, cant go into details but even based on the videos, colors and lightning bugs is the main reason posts like this exist, I wouldnt worry about it
Environment is nice, gameplay is critical.
Exactly.
Most players choose an MMO for the group content and camaraderie (not graphics).
Why would ESO still be hovering around the top 10 MMOs despite being 10+ years old?
There are plenty of threads to discuss gameplay. This thread is specifically about the visual art direction of AoC.
I'm a simple man and I write books. I do not do a first pass that's equal to toilet paper first because editing takes double the time otherwise. At the rate we're going the devs will have to create the game twice over to make the assets and world dynamics synergise better better.
How about we get an Option so we can choose a more colorful or more greyish World ?
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Kinda starting to look for a Guild right now. (German)
Of course, this is all just me guessing. However, I don't imagine intrepid going backwards in the environment design department after already getting players excited by previous showcases.
More to your point though, I loved the lush and vibrant aesthetic of the showcases prior far more compared to the recent one. Maybe it is exclusive to this one questing area since it has been taken over by undead and become destitute.
Either way, I have faith that intrepid will deliver a quality product and that it is all a work in progress.
For me though, the concern doesn't lie with the art direction of the environment/assets but with the character models, skill effects and animations. The character models still look out of place in the world. They don't look realistic enough for how realistic the environment looks. They look a bit 'drawn' to me. I'm not articulate enough to describe exactly what it is I see, but it's like they start with a realistic looking model then apply a 10% League of Legends filter to it. I can't go as far as to call the character models cartooney, but there's something there. I'm just not convinced yet that they belong on Verra.
As far as skill effects, it's pretty much the same issue that I have with the character models. They still look out of place. Not painted on, but not realistic or convincing. I'm even okay with visual soup, I just don't want Vegas flashbacks. I'd say the skill effect colors are too vibrant, but I don't think that's it. It's like they need more blending of the edges with the background. The best I've seen so far is reworked chain lightning, that's going in the right direction.
For animations, I'll just say there are frames during the fighter showcase where all at the same time...his torso is facing forward, his head is facing backward and his hips/legs are facing sideways. I think that says enough. Oh and sometimes characters look like they have a dump in their pants while they're running. And the cape really needs to chill, just calm down.
- Shaiya circa 2007-2008 - Guild Wars 2 circa 2014-2016 - ArcheAge circa 2016-2018
- Black Desert 2019-2024 - ESO 2021-2024 - FFXIV(fake pvp)2021-2022
There's a somewhat high chance that this showcase was done in the build that's currently being tested by A1 people. And having 1.5k people on the server would definitely require good optimization. And that requires worse graphics.
I'm sure that by the time we reach true release, the game might look closer to those more saturated screenshots, cause the optimization will allow people to get their settings to a point where the game looks like that. But I think A2 will look real bland for the majority of its life.
I hope so! I was so turned off by recent showcase because it looked like ESO in terms of quality and color grading. Comparing the screenshots above is day and night and look like two different games.
Most games tend to look pretty much the same or even better than pre-release footage. That's why everyone always has to point to the same few games like Watch Dogs, The Division, and Killzone 2 when they talk about how games always look worse at release. Because in reality those are the few games that actually do look significantly worse.
The color pallete is similar, but look at the repeating terrain textures and lack of foliage in your ESO screenshot. Ashes looks way better than that.
To be fair that screenshot of ESO doesn't do the game justice at all as it looks like it might be on low/medium settings, not to mention Cyrodiil specifically is designed to be pretty sparse to try and minimize the advantage that changing graphics settings can bring. This is ESO on max settings
Also ESO started development in 2007.
Ashes of Creation is still in the middle of development.
It’s an apples to oranges comparison.
Which is why the OP was reminded that it’s still a popular MMO despite its age.
Definitley agree with this post, alot of people seem to think that its just the area the shot was taken or that its an in game graphics setting making it look different, i disagree
the games don't only look different graphically they look different in almost every single way, the video's/pictures that we have in the bard reveal or the node war for example, the character models look terrible, the characters to in game assets scaling looks way off, there looks to be the same asset copy and pasted multiple times as just a lazy way of making the world look more full
in the streams that you are refering, for example the weathering system showcase, or the crafting showcase or gathering, the world looks full, it looks like it has a soul and it looks like you could get lost in the riverlands, the terrain seems to fit with the scale of the character models, the colors are better and more vibrant
now i know people are going to say, that a different client that is just basics will be used for testing purposes, and that is 100% true, it is very likley that alot of this stuff has been taken out so they can only test the essentials, the issue that i have with this is, the better looking showcases are years old at this point and i don't see why it would be beneficial to use a client that is pushing 3 years old to do current tests
intrepid are showing us gameplay of the weathering systems for example, whilst in the same livestream saying '' this is a work in progress and still needs polish'' implying that, THAT is the version of the game they are currently working with, but then when we see real footage the game looks worse than it did in alpha 1, it looks like a game released in 2005, and now we are expecting it to look as good as they are claiming
i would add that the character models look so out of place for the world that they are in, they are WAY to realistic looking but just don't fit in at all, the dwarf just looks like a shrunk down model of the kaelar
however i think that we should give them the benefit of the doubt until A2 drops, but i also think that A1 got a free pass because it was an alpha 1, A2 by this stage should be starting to have polish added, especially if they claim to have teams working on multiple things in the background, and if it doesn't we need to start asking the questions as to what is going on, i think the people that are defending this every post are hurting the game in the long run
i would also like to see intrepid using some sort of stylistic artwork of their own, its time that verra got its own art style
I hate to break it to you but all of those things you think look worse don't actually look worse. They also absolutely don't look like different games, they just look like different areas in the same game during different times of day and year.
Well this is just untrue, it's a matter of fact that the weathering showcase looks better than the node war showcase, people like you saying " it's just a different area" you realise it's the exact same biome? And it just happens to be a different area every time we see any real footage lol, even look at the photos the OP linked you can clearly see differences
Just look at the grass in the OPs photo I'm pretty sure their the same model, and one looks leagues infront of the other
You can clearly see the name of the area they're in and it is fact different between videos. While this may be shocking to some people, just because you're in the same "biome" doesn't mean everything is going to be identical and the time of day and the time of year have a big impact on what the outside world actually looks like. The only fact that you've stated here is that you think the showcase that was specifically set up to show the graphical effects of the weather system looked better than one that wasn't focused on showing off anything related to the graphics or art.
That said, I think the ‘dullness’ has a lot to do with them making general lightning adjustments and demo’ing more in man-made areas where vegetation is cleared and buildings are a lot of grey brick