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I also felt like 2 was really ugly until I finally replayed 1 for the first time in a while and realized that 1 gets away with a four color palette; brown, taupe, green and red by smearing so much DoF over everything that it hides what is a genuinely hideous game.
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May 19, 2023 20:48
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Forest of Fallen Giants actually has a decent amount going on, but the problem is that a lot of the more interesting details are up in the architecture (whereas you spend a lot of time in tight indoor spaces and/or moving downward) or set back in the skybox obscured by the actual level. But even so a lot of the areas do have some atmosphere and there's a lot of variety, it's just inconsistent. Scholar's better lighting helps. Al that said, DS2 does have a problem with scrungly texture work, though, I can't deny it.
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May 20, 2023 01:05
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John Murdoch posted:Scholar's better lighting helps. Cause that would explain a lot about DS2's weird look to it, if all the textures were designed for newer shaders/lighting then shoved into an older engine nearing the release date. edit: also a 'whoops we only have 1/10th the texture memory time to crush environment textures down' would hurt visuals a lot too It's sorta weird looking back on DS2 cause the version on release is very different to the SOTFS version we have available today. BadMedic fucked around with this message at 01:50 on May 20, 2023 |
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May 20, 2023 01:48
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The Network Test looked a lot better than the release.
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May 20, 2023 02:41
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I suspect they simply didn't have the time at the end of what was a notoriously long and torturous dev cycle to properly optimize everything, and they decided to prioritize a stable 60 FPS over graphical fidelity. I don't fault anyone for being upset over the rugpull, but I'm glad that gameplay won out at the end of the day.
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May 20, 2023 02:58
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Here is my cut at mapping the Peak -> Keep elevator. Going to kind of imagine the peak is at the base of a mountain slope and the elevator is set a ways into the mountain so the elevator goes up the inside. Overall DS2's varying colors and climates are straining my artistic abilities. I actually really like a lot of the areas but I can see the argument that there are a ton of indoor/stone/earthen areas that kind of run together. I actually thought DS3 was worse in terms of that same-ness honestly. But, the From that makes the Haligtree and Nokron and Caelid probably don't exist without years of studying and mastering all kinds of similar stone and masonry and all that for these games, at this point they've done it all. https://twitter.com/vgcartography/status/1660612853512937472?s=20
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May 22, 2023 13:56
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Electromax posted:I actually thought DS3 was worse in terms of that same-ness honestly. DS3 is a lot of cathedrals and yucky forests full of monsters that make gross squelching noises. It's not ugly. It all looks great, in fact, and I do think the boss fight design overall is more interesting, but a lot of the world design is undercut by how much the areas and bosses were shuffled around from their originally intended areas. There aren't any areas that are as visibly incomplete or dissonant like DS2's base game has, but that's partially because 3 has a narrower scope with less branches to juggle, and partly because you can tell they just compressed some of the final levels down to a smaller scope to polish better in the time they had left. This is all purely academic pros/cons ultimately though. All three Dark Souls games hit points where you can tell the time and budget were running short, and that's expressed differently across all 3 games. It's the nature of the games, I suppose. Elden Ring's main story path definitely feels the most evenly cleaned up, but that game could use maybe... 6? 7? less Ulcerated Tree Spirit boss fights to fill in the side dungeons. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 16:30 on May 22, 2023 |
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May 22, 2023 15:31
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Nuns with Guns posted:DS3 is a lot of cathedrals and yucky forests full of monsters that make gross squelching noises. It's not ugly. It all looks great, in fact, and I do think the boss fight design overall is more interesting, but a lot of the world design is undercut by how much the areas and bosses were shuffled around from their originally intended areas. There aren't any areas that are as visibly incomplete or dissonant like DS2's base game has, but that's partially because 3 has a narrower scope with less branches to juggle, and partly because you can tell they just compressed some of the final levels down to a smaller scope to polish better in the time they had left. alright boss, whatever you say *adds 6 or 7 cat statue bosses to fill in the side dungeons*
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May 22, 2023 15:41
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With Elden Ring it’s Mountaintops. No legacy dungeon, no new enemy types at all, if you’re lucky it’s snowy versions of guys you’ve seen before, even the garrison guardians are just named NPCs for uh…some reason. The zone is huge but they never make the whole fire monk/Flame Peak thing come together completely.
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May 22, 2023 15:48
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skasion posted:With Elden Ring it’s Mountaintops. No legacy dungeon, no new enemy types at all, if you’re lucky it’s snowy versions of guys you’ve seen before, even the garrison guardians are just named NPCs for uh…some reason. The zone is huge but they never make the whole fire monk/Flame Peak thing come together completely. And Consecrated Snowfield, too. ER was just too drat big and a lot of the map was just flat spaces with one or two minor enemies scattered around; I felt it really shined in the legacy dungeon areas and the underground, but otherwise I thought it was a slog for most of my run. I tried doing a new character a bit ago and I'd forgotten how they starve you for levels early on.
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May 22, 2023 15:59
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Elden Ring mod that adds archstones to the roundtable hold that move you into legacy dungeons
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May 22, 2023 16:02
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FireWorksWell posted:And Consecrated Snowfield, too. The more open world games I play, especially with recent titles having absolutely enormous maps, the more firm I am that devs need to chill out with scale and spend that dev time on the content instead. So many of these games have enormous maps with gently caress all for actually interesting things to do, it really sucks.
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May 22, 2023 16:13
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Much like DS3, I've strongly suspected that ER's fairly linear MSQ is a result of them running out of time to properly finalize real legacy dungeons for Mogh and Radahn, so the game pushes you along the rather simple Godrick -> Rennala -> Morgott -> CFA path and keeps everything else as somewhat obscure side content. Mountaintops was likely meant to be filled out with more content and offer an alternative ending involving the Giantsflame, but they ran out of budget to finish it and had to use it to (rather poorly) tie a bow on the narrative instead. Nuns with Guns posted:It's not ugly. For me, it's less that it's ugly and more that it's boring. I can forgive a game for going with such a washed-out palette in service of a particular mood - the prerelease material really made it feel like they were swinging for something original by leaning in to an end-of-the-world aesthetic with the glowering red sun and ruins on top of ruins - but what you got was, for the most part, DS1 with higher fidelity and an art direction that was clearly being handled by a team that had spent the last few years working on Bloodborne. In fairness, this was, again, likely From overextending themselves and having to fall back on rather staid ideas to get the game out the door. Ariandel and Ringed City are both miles better in terms of being visually pleasant to look at and building off of truly unique visual ideas.
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May 22, 2023 16:16
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Arrhythmia posted:alright boss, whatever you say *adds 6 or 7 cat statue bosses to fill in the side dungeons*  skasion posted:With Elden Ring it’s Mountaintops. No legacy dungeon, no new enemy types at all, if you’re lucky it’s snowy versions of guys you’ve seen before, even the garrison guardians are just named NPCs for uh…some reason. The zone is huge but they never make the whole fire monk/Flame Peak thing come together completely. Yeah the snow area is definitely the lowest point for me in ER. It's not the worst but there's not much new going on and you just want to motor through it to the end-run of the game. Vermain posted:For me, it's less that it's ugly and more that it's boring. I can forgive a game for going with such a washed-out palette in service of a particular mood - the prerelease material really made it feel like they were swinging for something original by leaning in to an end-of-the-world aesthetic with the glowering red sun and ruins on top of ruins - but what you got was, for the most part, DS1 with higher fidelity and an art direction that was clearly being handled by a team that had spent the last few years working on Bloodborne. I'd agree that there's not much new or exciting with 3. Visually I liked the design of the Ringed City better than the base game, where all the buildings just looked like Anor Londo or Central Yharnam. When things get really gross or weird it gets exciting, but a lot of that is in the end or pocketed in the DLCs.
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May 22, 2023 16:36
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Snowfield actually feels more to me like a finished zone than Mountaintops. It’s got a simple, open layout and doesn’t introduce much of anything new but there’s a good variety of things to do and it has some intriguing kind of “set-dressing” touches like the underworld-styled river and white-tree forest. The ice mine and the cave with the dragon frozen to death inside help its sense of place a lot. It feels like the last field zone of the game whereas Mountaintops feels like a gigantically long hallway to the boss.
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May 22, 2023 16:53
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Vermain posted:an art direction that was clearly being handled by a team that had spent the last few years working on Bloodborne. My #1 complaint with DS3's art direction has always been that it's too drat busy. None of it looks bad, it just gets to be a bit much, particularly in motion. Elden Ring pumped the brakes on that a little bit. Just a little.
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May 22, 2023 17:33
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King of Solomon posted:The more open world games I play, especially with recent titles having absolutely enormous maps, the more firm I am that devs need to chill out with scale and spend that dev time on the content instead. So many of these games have enormous maps with gently caress all for actually interesting things to do, it really sucks. It doesn't suck, actually. A dense honeycomb of interesting stuff is kind of immersion breaking to me, if that makes sense. Having stuff spaced out makes one appreciate the scale, I feel.
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May 23, 2023 01:53
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Ideally a careful balance can be achieved. Elden Ring is fascinating because it covers the whole spectrum pretty well, for better or worse.
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May 23, 2023 03:55
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John Murdoch posted:Ideally a careful balance can be achieved. Elden Ring is fascinating because it covers the whole spectrum pretty well, for better or worse. The horse helps a lot with that, I think. You have tons of room available for fighting and to put things to explore in, but the player can also drastically reduce transit time whenever they want to pass through instead.
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May 23, 2023 07:07
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John Murdoch posted:My #1 complaint with DS3's art direction has always been that it's too drat busy. None of it looks bad, it just gets to be a bit much, particularly in motion. Imagine being that person that's always been into flappy cloth and then they add it to the engine for Bloodborne
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May 23, 2023 13:06
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CAPT. Rainbowbeard posted:It doesn't suck, actually. Yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with large empty areas like Elden Ring has as long as a) you have a way to traverse them quickly and b) the game still has plenty of content, both of which Elden Ring covers well.
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May 23, 2023 13:23
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CAPT. Rainbowbeard posted:It doesn't suck, actually. It doesn't have to be small either, though, just not insanely massive like a lot of open world games have been recently. I know I'm in the minority on this, but I think Elden Ring is too big, and a lot of the content that they included to fill that space is pretty boring. They could have had a tighter game if the game was like 75% its current size and they focused that dev time on making more areas like the Mansion or the Academy.
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May 23, 2023 16:34
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I did every single thing that existed in Elden Ring and probably my only complaint was that there wasn't more Elden Ring.
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May 23, 2023 17:10
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The general impression I've gotten from reading comments and discussions about Elden Ring is that the people who enjoyed it the most primarily enjoyed it because of the impression given by the unfathomably vast scope: it genuinely does feel like the game goes on forever with how much the map opens up, and that sense of covering a tremendous distance and poking your nose in every spare corner has a certain appeal if you have that exploration/completionist mindset. I personally enjoyed From's more linear efforts far more, as the actual content available in that expansive world feels, at the best of times, like generative AI more than it does a carefully considered and hand-crafted experience. It's a tradeoff of quality for quantity, and whether you find that appealing or not is going to depend on how much more you're grabbed by atmosphere over gameplay. I fall far more on the gameplay side of the coin, so I tend to find the game a frustrating experience of impressive highs that you have to chew through a mountain of cardboard padding to get to. I think this may be part of the difference in reception between DS1 and DS2: the interconnected world of DS1 is great for building that sense of atmosphere, but DS2's focus on linear paths allows for a more curated escalation in challenge and greater freedom in creating stronger individual themes for each area, since there's less concern about how they logically fit together in the world.
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May 23, 2023 17:23
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I went from Forbidden West to Elden Ring on release and one thing that kept nagging at me was how ER's map was bigger and yet it was just much more dull and empty in comparison. Some areas like Caelid and the underground were awesome to me, though.
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May 23, 2023 17:37
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skasion posted:Snowfield actually feels more to me like a finished zone than Mountaintops. It’s got a simple, open layout and doesn’t introduce much of anything new but there’s a good variety of things to do and it has some intriguing kind of “set-dressing” touches like the underworld-styled river and white-tree forest. The ice mine and the cave with the dragon frozen to death inside help its sense of place a lot. It feels like the last field zone of the game whereas Mountaintops feels like a gigantically long hallway to the boss. there's a couple distinct interesting areas in mountaintops, like the graveyard, the blizzard lake, the fire monk garrison, and the area around the peak where giant corvids, trolls, and hands are fighting
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May 23, 2023 18:01
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The mountaintops are also a huge chunk of the map but most of that chunk is a big empty space with a skinny path running through it. As opposed to snowfields which is a big empty space that you can actually walk through.
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May 23, 2023 18:36
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Limgrave, at least imo, is a great example of an area that has a good balance of empty space to cool stuff to find. Meanwhile right next door Weeping Peninsula is a weird mish-mash of stuff randomly crammed together and pacing-wise it's a mess. I'm generally pro empty spaces, but critically they have to be in service of *something* and there's a fuzzy line where they can start intruding on the experience. Number one benefit of open spaces is modulating the pacing and shaping the overall feel of a game. The problem with Mountaintops is that it's right in the middle of ER's rushed and weirdly-paced endgame. For me at least, it's less that Mountaintops is singularly bad and more that the game as a whole starts to lose steam around that point. (Not all that dissimilar to DS1.) Mountaintops also straddles a weird split between being a linear, climatic trek up to the Fire Giant to do some Really Significant poo poo and throwing in a bunch more Open World stuff after the point where it feels like it's time to start focusing the player towards the climax of the game. Though another thing I don't really see anyone else talk about is how a lot of "empty" spaces in Elden Ring actually still reward you with rare crafting ingredients. 9 times out of 10 if you go poking around some seemingly pointless ledge there will be a Trina's Lily there. Granted, basically nobody gives a poo poo about the crafting system outside of 2-3 specific things but it does stick out to me that ER can fall back on lesser rewards to make otherwise meaningless nooks and crannies interesting. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 20:31 on May 23, 2023 |
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May 23, 2023 20:28
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I blame liurnia more than the mountaintops honestly. It has the most poo poo in it and is a crossroads for a lot of different paths through the game. Its the point where you can easily get sidetracked for dozens of hours without even progressing to Altus and burn yourself out exploring.
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May 24, 2023 02:40
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Not so coincidentally I do also hate Liurnia. I'm smack dab in the middle of it in my replay right now and my opinion has not improved much.
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May 24, 2023 20:02
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You guys are frenzied, Liurnia rules
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May 24, 2023 20:19
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Liurnia is dark fantasy Louisiana
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May 24, 2023 20:33
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I like liurnia in retrospect but I feel like it was too easy to run past everything.
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May 24, 2023 23:12
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Vermain posted:The general impression I've gotten from reading comments and discussions about Elden Ring is that the people who enjoyed it the most primarily enjoyed it because of the impression given by the unfathomably vast scope: it genuinely does feel like the game goes on forever with how much the map opens up, and that sense of covering a tremendous distance and poking your nose in every spare corner has a certain appeal if you have that exploration/completionist mindset. I personally enjoyed From's more linear efforts far more, as the actual content available in that expansive world feels, at the best of times, like generative AI more than it does a carefully considered and hand-crafted experience. It's a tradeoff of quality for quantity, and whether you find that appealing or not is going to depend on how much more you're grabbed by atmosphere over gameplay. I fall far more on the gameplay side of the coin, so I tend to find the game a frustrating experience of impressive highs that you have to chew through a mountain of cardboard padding to get to. Yeah, the thing that made Elden Ring jaw dropping for me rather than merely extremely good like most From games was the sheer scale. I don't think every From game needs to be anywhere near that big going forward, but I'm glad they made Elden Ring the way they did.
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May 24, 2023 23:30
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Gimmie that Elden Sekiro
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May 24, 2023 23:32
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My beef with Liurnia is that navigating it sucks a whole lot in one way or another and there's a lot of copy and paste abuse in the lake. Ironically, the Academy is probably my favorite legacy dungeon.
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May 25, 2023 00:06
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I love Stormveil because it's Boletaria again.
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May 25, 2023 03:25
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MonsieurChoc posted:I love Stormveil because it's Boletaria again. I do love Boletaria.
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May 25, 2023 03:27
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Sometimes I say boletaria to the tune of Metallica singing sanitarium
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May 25, 2023 03:33
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Just randomly in public I hope
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May 25, 2023 03:33
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