WTF are you people talking about? This *IS* what next gen is all about. These models self bloody shadow, which is more than I have in my engine right now. The game has normal mapping, DOF, Bloom, per pixel shaders. Wtf more do you want? It is next goddam gen dammit.
this is ranma from FF11, some dude you can summon to help your party out. I got this from a viewer one of the dudes at mythic had. the textures for this guy are 2 256x256 as is with most of all of the characters and creatures in the game. whats really cool is how they made every pixel work for the model and the quality really shows, esp for a rpg/mmo type game. granted, it isnt next gen, but it does look really good and with animations rolling the character is awesome looking.
i dont know if these companies that release "awesomeness" like gothic dont have the time or budget to make something decent, but it may seem utterly ambitious these days to make an rpg type game without making it an mmo of some sort just to justify the time and effort needed for many of the characters and locations needed in the game, but that could be me
Gothic 3 rocks, i got it right when it was released here and its great, havnt finished it yet tho.
I highly reccomend it, way better than Oblivion. Ofcourse it has its flaws but if you get past them its really enjoyable.
The characters always looked and moved horrible in the gothic series... dunno why they never got a good character artist
But the game itself absolutely rocks!
I left the Gothic 3 team 10 months before the game was finished, but I know that at the end of the production the team still had some problems with the new engine and so a lot of detail and some features has to be cut down. A lot of textures has to be scaled down, especially the character textures (but I think the screenshot of DAZ show them with the lowest details on in the engine). There were also problems with the scaling of some character heads and the system for placing hair on their heads. We build LODs for every houses and items in Gothic 3, but in the end they use to much memory, so the team decide to use the lowest LOD for the houses the whole time.
On the other side the whole world is loaded into RAM, when you start the game there are will be no loading times when you enter a house or another region of the world. But for a decent performance you need a good system. I play the game on maximal settings with a Gainward Bliss 7800GS 512 RAM on a AGP system with a AMD Athlon 64 3400+ and 2 GB RAM.
Despite all these problems I still think Gothic 3 is a good game, but with additional weeks of developing time it could have been a very good game. If you have enough time and a fast internet connection you could download the english Gothic 3 demo from fileplanet.com, it is around 1 GB.
[ QUOTE ]
A lot of textures has to be scaled down, especially the character textures (but I think the screenshot of DAZ show them with the lowest details on in the engine).
[/ QUOTE ]
Thanks for the pics and some insight into some of the production problems. Actually though, my screenshots are taken at the absolute highest settings. My laptop is pretty beefy: 2ghz dual core2 with 2 gig of ram and and a 7900 card and it runs the game pretty well.
Incase i didn't stress it, it's the character Art that I take issue with and no, I don't think that it's very easy to 'look past' this level of quality. We pay for videogames and expect a certain standard that this is well below. Something somewhere went wrong. Downsizing of texture assets shouldn't be as huge a deal as it could be If stuff is UV'd efficiently, and something tells me that I would be horrified by the UV layouts of these characters.
It's great that people chime in with "but wait, look past that and it's a great game" but the fact that the need to stress that exists is just dumb, sorry. Why lose out on potential sales just because your character team don't have adequate knowledge and training? It's silly, and in my view, somebody somewhere on the team should have raised alarm bells. RPG's are character driven stories. You can't get away with the character content being unprofessional any more. The game could have been fantastic, but it looks like a budget title, and in my view sales will hurt because of it.
[ QUOTE ]
Why lose out on potential sales just because your character team don't have adequate knowledge and training?
[/ QUOTE ]
because good character artists cost actual money? because "we underestimated next-gen" again? because the publisher is well known for having no clue about their business? i'm sure there's a long list of reasons.
Yea, I think a lot of it must come from the whole budget thing. A lot of PC RPG's aren't as high budget as many other games, and there's only so many good character artists around, so they cost money. Combine that with the part about RPG's like these having shit loads of characters and you come to a problem. The game can't be made with great character art and still make a profit.
I mean really, as it is something like 20% of games are profitable, the other 80% just don't sell the numbers to make up for the cost of production. Given that, it's no real surprise that publishers are cutting corners and hiring cheaper and less skilled artists.
And as we all can see, it will backfire, and I'm not going to reward any company for sacrificing quality and any kind of good looks of graphics to have normalmapping, bloom, and parallaxmapping. O_o
So no matter how entertaining this game might be, I'm not going to buy it.
I do have to agree, if it is a budget thing they should've just left out the fancy bells and whistles and spent the money making it a solid game in all aspects. :P Ahh well, I'll still play through the demo if nothing else.
It's great that people chime in with "but wait, look past that and it's a great game" but the fact that the need to stress that exists is just dumb, sorry. Why lose out on potential sales just because your character team don't have adequate knowledge and training? It's silly, and in my view, somebody somewhere on the team should have raised alarm bells. RPG's are character driven stories. You can't get away with the character content being unprofessional any more. The game could have been fantastic, but it looks like a budget title, and in my view sales will hurt because of it.
[/ QUOTE ]
Doubt it, this looks better than oblivion is a lot more fun, yet sales wise that game went like shit off a shovel. i agree though that the characters here just need to be scrapped, but the environments and cities are excellent, alot of care and thought went into the world, shame they didn't put that into the people.
you know sometimes if you get a lot of environment guys in senior positions, they often don't give a rats arse about the characters. As far as they are concerned, they would rather save the textures for environments.
Its not always the case but I have seen it happen
Well, i'm not a developer or anything like that, nor will i pretend i'm all knowing. but from what i've read in interviews and seen of this game, they just tried to do too much, with too few, and not enough time. I'm a fan of pirahna bytes, i think they make great games, but the humans in GIII are a mess, no denying it.
I will ask the character artist to post some screenshots of the mehes and UVs of the
characters. Hope he can tell you more about what has happened at end of the production time.
When I look at the characters closely, I think they also did some poly crunching
beside the downsampling of the textures. I know that they had to do some rework
over and over again, because on one side, the engine and other techniques changed
during production time (but I think this is a common problem in the game industry)
and on the other side there where several people in the team who decided how the main
characters should look like. So in the end the charcter artist had to give up some control
about his work and had to accept a lot of compromise. Somehow the characters looked far
better when I left the team, than now, after the release. I am a friend of the character
artist, so I tend to defend his work. I know that his work has a higher quality standard
than what you can see finally in this game.
I worked as a freelancer on this project and so I couldn´t take part into the decision
making process. There were some decisions of the lead 3d artist and the rest of the
decision makers of the team, which I didn´t agree with. And now, after the end of the Gothic 3
production I heard there will be some changing in the hierachy of the team and the character
artsist can take more control about his work. I hope this will help him to raise the quality
of the ingame characters.
I know that my example of the house show some poly waste, but for this RPG we had a huge list of
assets which had to be created in short period of time. Each environment artist had to model something, make
the UVs, create the color and specular textures, build extra models for the normal maps and create them.
I didn´t like this kind of "work-sharing". I think it produced some inconsistency. But the team was to
small to have a specialist for each step in the working pipeline. So everyone had to make everything in
the shortest period of time possible. All in all, there were only about 20 people working on this game,
and now the developing team realizes that the world of Gothic 3 was to big and needed to much detail, actual
impossible to be created by such a small team. I think the next project of them, an Add-on, will deal with
a smaller world and they will handle this much better.
I think they decided to take the smallest LOD version of the houses because the LOD system of the engine
didn´t work properly and the LODs took to much memory. But on the other side, I still think that loading the
whole world into RAM is biggest problem of this game. There are 3 different climatic regions in this game,
all with their own sets of houses, items and so on. I would prefer a world divided into, at least, three
levels, with loading times but also with a higher polycount for near objects and a proper LOD system.
But that is just my opinion.
I'm really enjoying Gothic 3. It was a pain in the arse to get running properly with much tweaking in the config files. Even now its still pretty clunky but the quality of the game really -is- good enough to look past this and certainly good enough to look past a few rough textures. Its obviously unfortunate that the game will ose a lot of sales due to its general lack of polish, but RPG gamers have put up with far worse in the past. The Gothic 3 world is vast and full to the brim with detail and the story is compelling. Thats all I ask for. For a team as small as Pihrana, its an amazing piece of work.
[ QUOTE ]
I will ask the character artist to post some screenshots of the mehes and UVs of the
characters.
[/ QUOTE ]
There might be copyright issues with doing that, and I really dont think it's neccessary. I think I made my point. But I appreciate you taking the time out to describe some of the production pitfalls. They're all common scenarios.
I sympathise with the small team blues. It continues to prove harder to work around the biz guys in this industry all wanting the next magnun opus fantastico when aiming simply for a fun game produces a better product.
For what its worth, characters aside, theres still a nice overall opulence to the environment.
What doesn't make any sense at all, is that these studios could simply go with easier to make graphics. If you have a shoestring budget, two artists, and one month to make the game, DON'T TRY TO COMPETE WITH NEXT-GEN! How simple is it now to make a cel shaded character or a stylized cartoony one? You'd think it'd be a no brainer for the small shops, and it would probably look much better than trying to play with the big boys and failing miserably.
its the bums on seat mentality, it rules from high to low end studios. the illusion of doing our best looks impressive because theres always someone there working, but the reality of doing our best can only be appreciated by those with the vision to understand brains beat bums any day of the week.
And when the publisher comes to you and says "We need it to look real, you can't do cartoony stuff." What do you do then? I doubt it was really up to them. But i agree if you dont have the tallent or budget to do next gen art you shouldnt. And that seems to be the case here. Simlpy old school stuff would have looked a lot better.
[ QUOTE ]
What doesn't make any sense at all, is that these studios could simply go with easier to make graphics. If you have a shoestring budget, two artists, and one month to make the game, DON'T TRY TO COMPETE WITH NEXT-GEN! How simple is it now to make a cel shaded character or a stylized cartoony one? You'd think it'd be a no brainer for the small shops, and it would probably look much better than trying to play with the big boys and failing miserably.
[/ QUOTE ]
They were making a sequel, I don't think the fanbase would have appreciated it if they went with cel-shading or something like that.
Art like this is a really good example of "detail through texture"
Where detail is achieved at the micro level. There's a lot of neat things happening up close, but far away... it's still one solid shape. Check out the stone texture for the ground, the character's texture (shirt, strap, etc, etc)... the design of the roof. Photo textures and overlays are not the absolute answer to great ammounts of detail.
I see this a lot in games that try to be realistic.
Final Fantasy (using this IP because of the screenshot posted - but really, any major IP from the big japanese companies) is one of the best examples of "detail through design"
Their designs are given a lot of intricacies, color and tonal value that the entire thing reads well from far away. You get a variety of different shapes and colors. It's imaginative and so far from reality that it looks interesting.
Tried the demo today... it was taking forever on the loading screen, and I Alt-Tabbed out and found that there was an error after waiting about 3 minutes... deleted :P
Bleh, the old screenshots with the LOD buildings etc were looking sooo good, i really thought Gothic3 was gonna look awesome
[ QUOTE ]
Why lose out on potential sales just because your character team don't have adequate knowledge and training? It's silly, and in my view, somebody somewhere on the team should have raised alarm bells. RPG's are character driven stories. You can't get away with the character content being unprofessional any more. The game could have been fantastic, but it looks like a budget title, and in my view sales will hurt because of it.
[/ QUOTE ]
It's not as easy as it seems, i could tell stories about that.
Who would you blame for those characters ?
-The artist who maybe could have done much better but couldn't get bothered with it.
-The oblivious art lead who saw shit being done but didn't have a vision for the game and cared even less and couldn't bother setting any quality standards and/or doing anything necessary to get the best results possible with the available resources and time.
-Or the Project leads who might have or not seen the problem but couldn't bother either to do anything about it.
Raising alarm bells is easy, getting people to do their jobs in a professional manner in an industry full of nerds and geeks isn't, often no matter how many alarms go off.
I'm quite , Gothic 2 was an awesome game and pretty good looking for it's time, Gothic 3 looks like a bumpmapped step back.
*edit: How could they ever drop all the gorgeous stuff they had for having the whole retarded world loaded in at once ?
Whoever was making decisions there should be fired along with the programmers.
It's funny how the screenshots on the official site are still with the LOD environments that look awesome, talk about not getting what you see.
Publisher JoWood has been at the brink of dieing quite a few times for the last years and have been dragging any IP and Studio they touch down with them
JKMakowka: Maybe if I hadn't already wasted my money on the first two I would have given it more of a chance Besides, I already spend too much time trying to make the other things on my computer work :P
I really wanted to like each of these games, but they always ended up disappointing me. Third times the charm, I guess!
It's not as easy as it seems, i could tell stories about that.
[/ QUOTE ]
We all could. We've all experienced production nightmares.
I've had to deal with many different hands of cards as an Art lead: I've been provided with artists that were just plain truly abysmal, artists on my team that couldn't paint for shit 'cos they were from film, yet their ILM resume meant they were getting paid more than me, female artists with political issues about depicting scantily clad attractive females whilst working on a bond game, artists that couldn't read and write fully, artists that were just plain stupid, artists stealing textures from Return to Castle Wolfenstein and putting them in our game and then management 'siding' with them after I'd raised the alarm, world leads crying to production that the character team were using way too many resources leading to us having to downsize, even though our shit was WAY more optimal than theirs, artists quitting on us close to the end, shitty engines, *really* shitty engines, choice of engine changing part way through the project, Art directors from film that didn't have a fucking clue how we make games, Art managers that didn't know what LOD's were, Art managers outsourcing to really *really* shitty sources, franchise interests constantly changing content on our asses, talent approval nightmares, clueless idiot producers making impossible to keep promises to higher ups, fundamental design changes close to ship, lead programmers changing polycounts on us after we were done, absurd deadlines,...I think you get my point.
A LOT of unpleasent unexpected shit has the potential to and usually does go down in a production cycle, so I'm still not buying that argument as an excuse for this level of quality in a professional videogame. I've got zero time for that excuse after some of the crap I've been through. Sorry to be so harsh, it's tough out there.
I don't have much tolerance for any of that at all myself, but sadly, there's always someone in the chain that's a retard and negates all efforts to fix anything.
was just giving those LODs a closer look... they modelled the single stones. Seriously, whoever was the art lead there should be fired and someone with a hint of clue hired.
Publisher JoWood has been at the brink of dieing quite a few times for the last years and have been dragging any IP and Studio they touch down with them
[/ QUOTE ]
Sooo true And they insist on including the most horrible copy-rotections that keep legit buyers from actually playing their games (or you have to wait for 15 minutes every time you start the game etc ).
Replies
in the voice of comic book guy 'Could those textures be any more low res?'
this is ranma from FF11, some dude you can summon to help your party out. I got this from a viewer one of the dudes at mythic had. the textures for this guy are 2 256x256 as is with most of all of the characters and creatures in the game. whats really cool is how they made every pixel work for the model and the quality really shows, esp for a rpg/mmo type game. granted, it isnt next gen, but it does look really good and with animations rolling the character is awesome looking.
i dont know if these companies that release "awesomeness" like gothic dont have the time or budget to make something decent, but it may seem utterly ambitious these days to make an rpg type game without making it an mmo of some sort just to justify the time and effort needed for many of the characters and locations needed in the game, but that could be me
I highly reccomend it, way better than Oblivion. Ofcourse it has its flaws but if you get past them its really enjoyable.
But the game itself absolutely rocks!
On the other side the whole world is loaded into RAM, when you start the game there are will be no loading times when you enter a house or another region of the world. But for a decent performance you need a good system. I play the game on maximal settings with a Gainward Bliss 7800GS 512 RAM on a AGP system with a AMD Athlon 64 3400+ and 2 GB RAM.
Despite all these problems I still think Gothic 3 is a good game, but with additional weeks of developing time it could have been a very good game. If you have enough time and a fast internet connection you could download the english Gothic 3 demo from fileplanet.com, it is around 1 GB.
http://www.fileplanet.com/170222/170000/fileinfo/Gothic-3-Demo
daz rawks.
A lot of textures has to be scaled down, especially the character textures (but I think the screenshot of DAZ show them with the lowest details on in the engine).
[/ QUOTE ]
Thanks for the pics and some insight into some of the production problems. Actually though, my screenshots are taken at the absolute highest settings. My laptop is pretty beefy: 2ghz dual core2 with 2 gig of ram and and a 7900 card and it runs the game pretty well.
Incase i didn't stress it, it's the character Art that I take issue with and no, I don't think that it's very easy to 'look past' this level of quality. We pay for videogames and expect a certain standard that this is well below. Something somewhere went wrong. Downsizing of texture assets shouldn't be as huge a deal as it could be If stuff is UV'd efficiently, and something tells me that I would be horrified by the UV layouts of these characters.
It's great that people chime in with "but wait, look past that and it's a great game" but the fact that the need to stress that exists is just dumb, sorry. Why lose out on potential sales just because your character team don't have adequate knowledge and training? It's silly, and in my view, somebody somewhere on the team should have raised alarm bells. RPG's are character driven stories. You can't get away with the character content being unprofessional any more. The game could have been fantastic, but it looks like a budget title, and in my view sales will hurt because of it.
[ QUOTE ]
Why lose out on potential sales just because your character team don't have adequate knowledge and training?
[/ QUOTE ]
because good character artists cost actual money? because "we underestimated next-gen" again? because the publisher is well known for having no clue about their business? i'm sure there's a long list of reasons.
I mean really, as it is something like 20% of games are profitable, the other 80% just don't sell the numbers to make up for the cost of production. Given that, it's no real surprise that publishers are cutting corners and hiring cheaper and less skilled artists.
Anyways, that's just my theory.
So no matter how entertaining this game might be, I'm not going to buy it.
Simple and wellmade, thats what I like.
It's great that people chime in with "but wait, look past that and it's a great game" but the fact that the need to stress that exists is just dumb, sorry. Why lose out on potential sales just because your character team don't have adequate knowledge and training? It's silly, and in my view, somebody somewhere on the team should have raised alarm bells. RPG's are character driven stories. You can't get away with the character content being unprofessional any more. The game could have been fantastic, but it looks like a budget title, and in my view sales will hurt because of it.
[/ QUOTE ]
Doubt it, this looks better than oblivion is a lot more fun, yet sales wise that game went like shit off a shovel. i agree though that the characters here just need to be scrapped, but the environments and cities are excellent, alot of care and thought went into the world, shame they didn't put that into the people.
Its not always the case but I have seen it happen
characters. Hope he can tell you more about what has happened at end of the production time.
When I look at the characters closely, I think they also did some poly crunching
beside the downsampling of the textures. I know that they had to do some rework
over and over again, because on one side, the engine and other techniques changed
during production time (but I think this is a common problem in the game industry)
and on the other side there where several people in the team who decided how the main
characters should look like. So in the end the charcter artist had to give up some control
about his work and had to accept a lot of compromise. Somehow the characters looked far
better when I left the team, than now, after the release. I am a friend of the character
artist, so I tend to defend his work. I know that his work has a higher quality standard
than what you can see finally in this game.
I worked as a freelancer on this project and so I couldn´t take part into the decision
making process. There were some decisions of the lead 3d artist and the rest of the
decision makers of the team, which I didn´t agree with. And now, after the end of the Gothic 3
production I heard there will be some changing in the hierachy of the team and the character
artsist can take more control about his work. I hope this will help him to raise the quality
of the ingame characters.
I know that my example of the house show some poly waste, but for this RPG we had a huge list of
assets which had to be created in short period of time. Each environment artist had to model something, make
the UVs, create the color and specular textures, build extra models for the normal maps and create them.
I didn´t like this kind of "work-sharing". I think it produced some inconsistency. But the team was to
small to have a specialist for each step in the working pipeline. So everyone had to make everything in
the shortest period of time possible. All in all, there were only about 20 people working on this game,
and now the developing team realizes that the world of Gothic 3 was to big and needed to much detail, actual
impossible to be created by such a small team. I think the next project of them, an Add-on, will deal with
a smaller world and they will handle this much better.
I think they decided to take the smallest LOD version of the houses because the LOD system of the engine
didn´t work properly and the LODs took to much memory. But on the other side, I still think that loading the
whole world into RAM is biggest problem of this game. There are 3 different climatic regions in this game,
all with their own sets of houses, items and so on. I would prefer a world divided into, at least, three
levels, with loading times but also with a higher polycount for near objects and a proper LOD system.
But that is just my opinion.
I will ask the character artist to post some screenshots of the mehes and UVs of the
characters.
[/ QUOTE ]
There might be copyright issues with doing that, and I really dont think it's neccessary. I think I made my point. But I appreciate you taking the time out to describe some of the production pitfalls. They're all common scenarios.
For what its worth, characters aside, theres still a nice overall opulence to the environment.
r.
r.
What doesn't make any sense at all, is that these studios could simply go with easier to make graphics. If you have a shoestring budget, two artists, and one month to make the game, DON'T TRY TO COMPETE WITH NEXT-GEN! How simple is it now to make a cel shaded character or a stylized cartoony one? You'd think it'd be a no brainer for the small shops, and it would probably look much better than trying to play with the big boys and failing miserably.
[/ QUOTE ]
They were making a sequel, I don't think the fanbase would have appreciated it if they went with cel-shading or something like that.
I don't think that with gothic 2 and 1, that the fanbase would've been too demanding on shadereffects.
Anyone wish to name some other games that were released the same year as gothic2?
Where detail is achieved at the micro level. There's a lot of neat things happening up close, but far away... it's still one solid shape. Check out the stone texture for the ground, the character's texture (shirt, strap, etc, etc)... the design of the roof. Photo textures and overlays are not the absolute answer to great ammounts of detail.
I see this a lot in games that try to be realistic.
Final Fantasy (using this IP because of the screenshot posted - but really, any major IP from the big japanese companies) is one of the best examples of "detail through design"
Their designs are given a lot of intricacies, color and tonal value that the entire thing reads well from far away. You get a variety of different shapes and colors. It's imaginative and so far from reality that it looks interesting.
*mumbled the old guy*
[ QUOTE ]
Why lose out on potential sales just because your character team don't have adequate knowledge and training? It's silly, and in my view, somebody somewhere on the team should have raised alarm bells. RPG's are character driven stories. You can't get away with the character content being unprofessional any more. The game could have been fantastic, but it looks like a budget title, and in my view sales will hurt because of it.
[/ QUOTE ]
It's not as easy as it seems, i could tell stories about that.
Who would you blame for those characters ?
-The artist who maybe could have done much better but couldn't get bothered with it.
-The oblivious art lead who saw shit being done but didn't have a vision for the game and cared even less and couldn't bother setting any quality standards and/or doing anything necessary to get the best results possible with the available resources and time.
-Or the Project leads who might have or not seen the problem but couldn't bother either to do anything about it.
Raising alarm bells is easy, getting people to do their jobs in a professional manner in an industry full of nerds and geeks isn't, often no matter how many alarms go off.
I'm quite
*edit: How could they ever drop all the gorgeous stuff they had for having the whole retarded world loaded in at once ?
Whoever was making decisions there should be fired along with the programmers.
It's funny how the screenshots on the official site are still with the LOD environments that look awesome, talk about not getting what you see.
Publisher JoWood has been at the brink of dieing quite a few times for the last years and have been dragging any IP and Studio they touch down with them
I really wanted to like each of these games, but they always ended up disappointing me. Third times the charm, I guess!
It's not as easy as it seems, i could tell stories about that.
[/ QUOTE ]
We all could. We've all experienced production nightmares.
I've had to deal with many different hands of cards as an Art lead: I've been provided with artists that were just plain truly abysmal, artists on my team that couldn't paint for shit 'cos they were from film, yet their ILM resume meant they were getting paid more than me, female artists with political issues about depicting scantily clad attractive females whilst working on a bond game, artists that couldn't read and write fully, artists that were just plain stupid, artists stealing textures from Return to Castle Wolfenstein and putting them in our game and then management 'siding' with them after I'd raised the alarm, world leads crying to production that the character team were using way too many resources leading to us having to downsize, even though our shit was WAY more optimal than theirs, artists quitting on us close to the end, shitty engines, *really* shitty engines, choice of engine changing part way through the project, Art directors from film that didn't have a fucking clue how we make games, Art managers that didn't know what LOD's were, Art managers outsourcing to really *really* shitty sources, franchise interests constantly changing content on our asses, talent approval nightmares, clueless idiot producers making impossible to keep promises to higher ups, fundamental design changes close to ship, lead programmers changing polycounts on us after we were done, absurd deadlines,...I think you get my point.
A LOT of unpleasent unexpected shit has the potential to and usually does go down in a production cycle, so I'm still not buying that argument as an excuse for this level of quality in a professional videogame. I've got zero time for that excuse after some of the crap I've been through. Sorry to be so harsh, it's tough out there.
I don't have much tolerance for any of that at all myself, but sadly, there's always someone in the chain that's a retard and negates all efforts to fix anything.
Publisher JoWood has been at the brink of dieing quite a few times for the last years and have been dragging any IP and Studio they touch down with them
[/ QUOTE ]
Sooo true