Eternity Avowed - Obsidian's first person action-RPG in the Pillars of Eternity setting - coming February 18th

[Nifft Batuff]

It's the post '00s Marvel's comics/movies superhero style.

 

[Roguey]

colour-blind Tim Cain was one of the game directors on The Outer Worlds and a lot of assets and colour choices look like that in Avoid footage or screenshots. copy/paste i assume.

Cain said he stayed away from art discussions because of his condition (other than insisting on a color blind mode), that's all on Boyarsky.

 

[Harthwain]

The problem isn't the colors.

The problem is that they don't mesh into a coherent visual canvas. It looks like a 3 year old who just discovered watercolors going wild on a piece of paper with no regard for how the colors work together.
And the shapes are worse than the colors. Everything looks off, like human faces designed by aliens who never saw a human before but are trying to reconstruct it after finding the Voyager Golden Record.

You are correct, but the way you're framing it sounds like it's an accident or the result of incompetence. That's not the case, Avowed, like the Outer Worlds and so many other modern games, is deliberately pursuing an art style revolving around triviality, whimsy, and baroque excess, which will prove coherent across all of its artistic disciplines - visual, interfaces, sound, narrative, take your pick. It's some kind of infantilised post-hipsterism and actually quite honest about what sort of "experience" you're in for, it's practically aposematic.

The problem is they went away from depicting a war-torn wasteland to the fantasy equivalent of the Maldives. And the latter has to be colorful. This means no contrast and no atmosphere or tension.

 

[JarlFrank]

Colorful doesn't necessarily mean no contrast, atmosphere, or tension. There are plenty of good-looking colorful games.

Been playing Far Cry 6 recently, and it's a pretty good-looking game. It's set on a Caribbean island with lush vegetation and some colorful architecture. There's other examples of AAA games in exotic locations that manage to look great. Especially during sunset, there's quite a bit of atmosphere in it, too.

And even Deadfire didn't look this garish - a pirate adventure in a tropical archipelago!

No, setting is not the problem. Outer Worlds also looked bad in a similar way, and that was sci-fi on an alien planet, they could have gone with any artstyle they wished for. But they chose this.

The problem is that whoever is responsible for art at Obsidian right now has absolutely no taste.

 

[Lyric Suite]

It's kinda funny how the art guy says white guys shouldn't get hired and bam, their art direction turns to shit.

 

[Gargaune]

Colorful doesn't necessarily mean no contrast, atmosphere, or tension. There are plenty of good-looking colorful games.

I agree, tons of games I've loved with varying degrees of tension and "edge" have been plenty colourful. Diablo 2, Icewind Dale, Drakan, Disciples 2 or, hell, The Witcher 3, none of these titles are colourless, desaturated, or otherwise trying to ape STALKER's visuals, but the way they used those colours - and the other artistic elements around them - was very different. What we're seeing today isn't down to hex codes, it goes deeper to a comprehensive stylistic sensibility that I (and others, apparently) find loathsome.

 

[JarlFrank]

The last time I felt so negative about a visual style was during the late 00s when giving everything a plastic-like sheen to show off fancy new lighting tech was all the rage. It looked offensively ugly.

This looks just as ugly, but it's not because Obsidian are trying to use any fancy modern visual effects. No, most games that use the fanciest new tech (raytracing) look pretty good, actually.
The artists at Obsidian simply have a terrible taste.

 

[notpl]

Yeah I'm way way way more concerned about things that actually matter like gameplay story mechanical depth world building writing etc than, say, the toning down of gore, or the lip sync being a bit off, or the character creator being a bit naff

Obviously we're discussing these things because they're what we know the game right now and we don't know about the other stuff, but let's not blow these things out of proportion either

TOW wasn't a bad a game because of lip sync. Or because of a lack of blood and guts flying about the place.

Those things are symptomatic of the lack of passion and creativity that went into the game, which is ultimately what caused it to be bad.

 

[Incognito]

The problem isn't the colors.

The problem is that they don't mesh into a coherent visual canvas. It looks like a 3 year old who just discovered watercolors going wild on a piece of paper with no regard for how the colors work together.
And the shapes are worse than the colors. Everything looks off, like human faces designed by aliens who never saw a human before but are trying to reconstruct it after finding the Voyager Golden Record.

Are you implying they put a few examples of shite portraits into an AI engine and effortlessly generated 30 faces? How dare you?!

 

[JarlFrank]

To be fair the people working at Obsidian nowadays are indistinguishable from AIs.

 

[Infinitron]

Hi.





Thanks,
Sherry

This video is rather childish, but I would like to point out that it's nice that they didn't "LOTR-ize" the Aedyran Empire the same way Bethesda did to Cyrodiil in Oblivion.

Look at the jungles and those clothes. The Aedyrans look like white Aztecs. It's cool.

 

[cvv]

No, setting is not the problem. Outer Worlds also looked bad in a similar way

Totally agree, it's off. Occam razor explanation is artistic incompetence.

 

[Takamori]

With the people involved and promotional material published I have no desire for it even if I played PoE 1 and 2.
Its a copy of skyrim basically and I already hated skyrim, why the fuck I would put money in this? At this point better its better to just buy starfield if I'm in a wish to dive into a pile of shit.
I wouldn't call generic Unreal Engine assets by looking the characters they at least tried to resemble stuff that you saw in previous pillars the Orians at least, but the scenario and enemies look meh, the animations also look souless, no gore, no blood, nothing that I can say wow at least the animation team had a hard on doing this. All clean bullshit that you see in every game even if they are slapped with a 17+ tag.

Hi.

There is gore. There is blood.

Although it is dependent on what ferocious monster you are up against. A Kith that is frozen in mid attack and killed will spew blood and explode in icy shards around you, while a Skeleton sheds no blood at all.

It's a bloody mess, but someone's gotta do it!

Thanks,
Sherry

I appreciate your answer, personally I find it fangless violence. Growing up with Soldier of Fortune and being able to enjoy recently Doom and even an indie game Half Sword, it feels like the bigger studios has the budget for good animations but they run away from it because they fear getting slapped with a +18 tag and lose sales with younger audiences where they don't realize that probably the average age of the people enjoying those single player rpg experience are probably sitting at 20+.
Kith should be able to be decapitated, dismember, set on fire, break into meaty ice chunks, fried with lightning and so on. You are probably spending a good chunk of your time doing combat in these kind games so you need to keep that shit entertaining.

Best regards,

Takamori

Your house is on fire and you are lamenting the draperies.

Its more like being able to enjoy the circus on fire, I'm not gonna lie played several games with really shitty storylines but they provided excellent game experience and one that I will always remember being the best of example of it its a game called Shadow of Rome from PS2.

 

[Tyranicon]

This thing is going to be neutered nu-fantasy without any offensive edges whatsoever. You can just tell.

Grounded 2 is going to save Obsidian.

 

[Dishonoredbr]

Grounded 2 is going to save Obsidian.

Instead of 12 people working on it , they gonna put 24 on it now. 2026 GOTY.

 

[Roguey]

It's kinda funny how the art guy says white guys shouldn't get hired and bam, their art direction turns to shit.

Just a mediocre man sending social signals. One of Obsidian's best art directors was this queer fellow https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Justin_Cherry

 

[aweigh]

lighting and color are political activism now. they call it "queer-coded lighting" or "bisexual lighting".

i.e. it's why Veilguard is all purple.

 

[Incognito]

lighting and color are political activism now. they call it "queer-coded lighting" or "bisexual lighting".

i.e. it's why Veilguard is all purple.

Holy shit... you were not taking the piss:

Wikipedia - Bissexual Lighting

Does the decline have no end? Didn't you Amerifags elect Trump to round up and intern these people? Do your fucking job!

 

[Nifft Batuff]

But Outer Worlds color scheme is just a chaotic mess, with no identity, apart being chaotic for the sake of it. My main problem with the game was exactly the colour clashes. I had to stop playing it after a while, because I started to feel nauseous.

 

[cvv]

But Outer Worlds color scheme is just a chaotic mess, with no identity, apart being chaotic for the sake of it. My main problem with the game was exactly the colour clashes. I had to stop playing it after a while, because I started to feel nauseous.

Yea this, it's one of the first thing I commented about ITT years ago.

 

[Bastardchops]

Anyone who thinks this looks good should go and get tested for STD's.

 

[Hellraiser]

I had to stop playing it after a while, because I started to feel nauseous.

If you ask me the game did you favors with that. I somehow finished TOW and I regret it. Should have dropped the game the moment I landed on Monarch, there's just no pay off in story, gameplay or building the character. It's just offensively bland and flat all the way to the end in nearly every aspect of the game, with one, just one interesting plot point introduced across who knows how many hours into the main quest.

 

[Wesp5]

What annoys me about alien game colors is that they seem so random. I mean there are scientific reasons why some colors on Earth are like they are, e. g. most plant leaves are green because of Chlorophyll. On another planet this might be different, but it's unreasonable to expect to have several different color for the same purpose. The most efficient colored molecule would have surplanted all others.

 

[JarlFrank]

I've read up on chlorophyll when I wrote a sci-fi short story set on a tidally locked planet, wondering how plants would change in the twilight area of the planet where it's basically eternal evening light.
And it took me about 5 minutes of googling to find out that plants in low light planets would develop darker colors because darker colors absorb more light. So I made them a dark purple.

It takes literally 5 minutes of looking something up to create a coherent vibe for your sci-fi or fantasy game. But the people behind this one are either too dumb or too lazy. Or they think being quirky lolrandom is cool.

 

[Sherry]

Hi.

Some new images to share that are making the rounds and causing a lot of excitement toward the release date. Some beautiful detail on display. I can feel the cold thickness of the shield the fighter holds out before him just as the strike is about to happen, or the rippled ridges of the ranger's godlike protrusion, to the heavy layers of the wizard's padded armor.

Three's Company

Thanks,
Sherry