I won’t belabour the point – de gustibus non disputandum est, after all.
But I’ve always found the character design in Age of Wonders 3 on the ugly side: poses stiff and the faces generically doll-like in appearance, with lifeless eyes. They’re similar to the type of badly made 3D CG characters you’d see in games from the 1990s. The rest of the graphics are fine, though – I love the way that the map looks, the structures, vegetation, etc.
Not that it matters, though.
I’d take a dozen games this ugly if they were this fun to play.
I didn’t think JoshoB was talking about the units on the battlefield, but rather when you’re designing the look/posture of your leader. This stuff:
Yep, exactly. The rest of the graphics, as I said, are absolutely fine.
Correct, but my greater point is you only see this screen once and then you play a 2-6 hour game never really having to look at the models this zoomed in again. Maybe in the inventory screen, but even that’s smaller and more tasteful than character creation. So the models don’t really have to look amazing zoomed in, and in fact, you can barely make them out once they are little figures on a horse, which is 95% of the time you play the game.
That’s fine and I generally agree, but I wouldn’t have posted the gameplay/isometric shot if that’s what you had written. You said the 3D characters looked poor, and everything else looked fine. And I agree they do from the character creation screen (well, some times, often I was able to make something I thought looked cool, but to each his own), but I don’t agree the 3D characters/units look poor from any other angle/screen.
And the general idea here is to point out that the 3D models, zoomed in during character creation once more, actually do look quite a bit better in Planetfall. And as for lifeless eyes in the image I posted, I think that’s intentional, like some sort of psychic thing or something. I mean, they didn’t just forget to give her pupils, I assume. :)
Yeah but look at it. It’s so bad. I mean… horrible. We’re not asking them to put in a Sim character creator here. How about just something that shifts from the horrific to the slightly bad territory.
Sure. I wasn’t making any other comment other than Age of Wonders 3’s character models are a bit rubbish when viewed up close. I don’t think we’re actually disagreeing here. :-P
We’re all looking forward to Planetfall anyway.
Eh, I guess. To me they are “okay” up close and totally nice looking in gameplay, but to each his or her own. They are still miles ahead of Elemental, I think we can all agree there.
Well I think they are pretty awful. I don’t think it would take much to bring them to… appealing status though. I mean Stellaris isn’t some kind of sim creator but I felt like it gave me some not hideous options, and I appreciated that too.
Stream should be starting in a few minutes.
Stream is live, totally forgot about the stream until I saw the email hit my inbox 5 minutes ago. My wife can’t get over the left guy’s huge man-bun.
Looking awfully well put together already from what I saw in the stream for a game that’s not releasing till next year.
I was able to watch the first 20 minutes, right up until the tech tree. Will have to catch the rest later.
They’ve been using the same engine for a decade now. They know it really well.
And the skeleton of the game is AoW3, something else they know very well.
Just saw the stream and it looks great! Though I fear I may bounce for the usual reason I bounce off of science fiction 4xs - I can never remember whether positron inverters come before photon displacers or after … or for that matter whether they’re techs or weapons or units.
(Fantasy 4xs may also be full of made-up gibberish but, at least their made-up gibberish is somewhat standardized across the genre.)
Yep, aware of that, you could tell from first glance it’s AOW3. That’s why I was wondering about the release date being next year. Guess it’s a case of polish and balance which is certainly fine by me.
I’m hoping for an extended beta.
They’ve introduced a range of new things, any one of which requires careful testing, because they are all game changers.
sector system radically alters the game.
Modded units.
Cosmite resource (as a t4 limiter and generator of conflict)
rollover production and research
racial tech trees ontop of secret tech trees
and ofcourse, the theming is sci-fi
@HumanTon never fear, if there is a beta and if I am in it, I will be sure to hammer on about the importance of making the tech tree memorable, intuitive and interesting. Triumph have already said they don’t want your tech improvements to be things like +1% energy, and would rather have research unlock new abilities.
I watched up to the Q&A (which I’ll check out later or look for a written recap online) and it looked very promising. Some early art assets (I assume) here and there but for the most part it looked great. I wish he’d played from a more pulled out zoom for more of the world map gameplay, but I know developers love to show off their 3D models.
I really liked all the gameplay mechanics/concepts they showed, from updating units with mods and saving them with custom names/icons to the sector and diplomacy mechanics (I think it’s smart as hell to have diplomatic options cost a resource and work if you can afford it instead of hoping for some sort of series of relationship modifiers influence a dice roll or something).
Here’s a shortened 30 minute version they put up on YouTube. I haven’t watched the original 1 1/2 hour version on Twitch, but this version, you can see they jump around a bit, I assume they jump to what they view as the most important key points:
As far as the portraits everyone mentioned up thread, I agreed with the criticism on the screenshot (and having played AOW3 recently, I think Triumph does something weird with their character’s eyes that make them look creepy. However, I thought the close up on the leader they choose in the stream looked just fine.
