This stuff melts my brain with goodness....after spending the last year or so working in a character create system for an mmo... I've got the most insane appreciation for whats been achieved here.
Ive always wondered why they even bothered with character customisation as a) you rarely study anyone other characters face and b) they usually tend to end up with the same gear for the same class, so you are a drone with 500 to 500,000 looking the same as you anyway. Look at APB they spent so much freaking time on the customisation and hyping it to everyone they actually kinda forgot about doing the game. You know a game is in trouble when they can't show the proper game, as in how it will look to play it.
On the art side of things, sure it looks great but I doubt it will look that good in game and to me looks a very very generic game.
korean mmo or asian game? i remember you the FF fiasco was outsourced to chinese guys, and err.. people thought it was a 100% japanese game.
A mmo without customization is a shit. That's only one thing to take care of. When i play a game like this, a mmo, i want to look different.
My brother have been with the korean version, and he says is pretty funny, but of course, laggy in the korean servers.
You can watch millions of videos in youtube with the gameplay, pk system etc.
The female characters are very good, but not much some castanic "ganguros".
I'm surprised to see people saying good things about this kind of animeish game here, haters gonna hate you know, and as far as i know, people hate korean/asian looking games here. There are too many great korean games such as vindictus that are unknown.
korean mmo or asian game? i remember you the FF fiasco was outsourced to chinese guys, and err.. people thought it was a 100% japanese game.
A mmo without customization is a shit. That's only one thing to take care of. When i play a game like this, a mmo, i want to look different.
My brother have been with the korean version, and he says is pretty funny, but of course, laggy in the korean servers.
You can watch millions of videos in youtube with the gameplay, pk system etc.
The female characters are very good, but not much some castanic "ganguros".
I'm surprised to see people saying good things about this kind of animeish game here, haters gonna hate you know, and as far as i know, people hate korean/asian looking games here. There are too many great korean games such as vindictus that are unknown.
I didn't necessarily mean the game is being made by Koreans, but a lot of these are made with the Korean market as their primary target. I mean, that's a Korean version of this game in the vids right?
Don't get me wrong, I love the visual style of these games and I often give new MMO's as much chance as I can. Aion for example, I really played quite a lot but when it comes down to it, if I'm honest... it's just not as good as the elephant in the room.
It must be difficult for any MMO to compete, and even when the genre is different, it's always gonna be compared to WoW, and regardless of how pretty it is, if there isn't a solid, enjoyable, and most importantly, long lasting gameplay experience driving it, then it's always destined for failure.
I agree though, character customisation/creation is definitely important, especially in an MMO. But as was mentioned, APB wowed us all with character creation.
I get the impression Hazardous was just posting in a 'hey guys, check out how freakin beautiful this shit is'... and in that regard, it's right on the money.
As far as the actual character itself is concerned, I think what they have is gross overkill. Nobody is ever going to see that you moved the nose up 0.001%, or made the lips 0.003% wider. It's a waste of time, and as you can see when the guy hits the Random button, it can give some real horrid results. I think you want an artist there creating a couple of variations, and that's about it.
But where the real customization should kick-in is with your gear. And that should be later on in the game. And this is also where lots of games, especially WoW, fall flat on their face. There's always that one set of armor that's ideal at any given moment for your class, and that's what you're going to look like. Together with the other thousands of people playing the same class as you.
The only game that did it semi-right is Warhammer, where you can equip two items for each slot. One for stats, one for looks. Gives you quite a variety to play with. The only down-side is that your customization is only visible to you and your faction, but not the enemy faction in fear of deception. Which is bull, but whatever.
Edit:
Yeah, seriously, there's something up with the Popori female video. I didn't watch it before. But watching it now, I was ready to say that they're just a small race, but the fact that they're flat-chested and their entire anatomy fits with that of a ~11 year old means that they're meant to visually look very young.
Edit2:
Wait, Popori females are 12-year-old girls, but the Popori males are some kind of Panda bears? Or maybe the videos are mixed up?
The characters look great, and the female 12 year old race and their pedo-friends male equivilent is a bit amusing. The different clothes are good, but does that mean no additional armour customization later on? I've seen a lot of anime-like mmos about but they don't look as good as this. Would be cool to see this in action.
Didnt intend to turn the thread into a love / hate mmo's love / hate korean arts love / hate popoi female thread. Just thought I would share the awesomeness thats been done here.
Something ive learned in the past year - there is absolutely no way to please hundreds of thousands of people equally with design, customisation choices and even animation for your mmo toon. Trust me, ive heard it all, from 'this absolutely rocks!' to whoever designd this should be shot, and worse.
Regarding the Popori - I dont feel like I'm a pedophile when I'm watching, though I can see how others would feel that way haha!
I guess im just looking beyond that and appreciating the work thats gone in, and the quality thats come out. Until you work on something like this I guess its really hard to appreciate.
To put into perspective one aspect of how much work these guys have done - eace race, and class choice determines your armor set progression, so if you choose popori male Lancer - your armor will never look like any other races lancer armor, However youll look just like another popori if you started at the same time and were progressing similarly. Im guessing they will use Die for customisation in that regard but who knows!
The armor progression is roughly 15 - 20 deep ( have over 1 gb of psd's containing front sides back of many of these )
165 - 215 armor sets per class. there are 8 classes. 1300 - 1720 armor sets. Thats an absurd amount of work.
And they arent just 'the same armor / texture but now with with blue edging'
No idea how many head presets the game will ship with or how many hairstyles and other customisation options yet - but when you start thinking along the lines of lets say 8 unique heads per sex thats something like 100 heads just for player characters, probably that amount again in texture variants, maps and masks for shader blends for the face customisation etc throw normal maps into things and it rapidly builds up to an insane amount of work, which i totally give them full credit for being able to accomplish AND still come out so high quality across the board.
After looking at many of the armor sets - I wouldnt be surprised if much of the normals for the armor are simply crazy bumped, no high poly sculpts, but if so.. thats still a lot of painting!!
Anyway enough rambling... civil war concepts to paint!
There's some horrid taste at work there, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't want a closer look at the hair. It looks like it's just very dense with alpha test here and there, doesn't it?
Well, i have read very bad comments about asian games or anime in general here (some of them with hate hehe), that i'm always afraid of creating a thread about new korean or japanese mmos, like was the case for Vindictus (mabonogi heroes).
There is too much hype with actual next gen mmos, we could say the PC has only a few good games, that when people see games such as kingdom under fire 2, blade and soul, tera etc., they get pretty excited.
I saw my brother playing this game, and i look it like a generic 3rd person action game but with the typical asian style and unreal engine aspect, but with "roccoco" and ridiculous armors. Like some of you, with some characters i don't get a good feeling hehe. The unique characters i like are the females.
In blade and soul we have cuter and better "poporis", anyone watched some videos?
Something disturbing about the poporis are the males, why the heck they have animal furries? The don't match with the females, that's a huge fail in design like with the amani. Female and male look like from differen races.
I guess im just looking beyond that and appreciating the work thats gone in, and the quality thats come out. Until you work on something like this I guess its really hard to appreciate.
I dont think there is a lack of appreciation for the work done(which is amazingly fantastic), its the creepy minimally dressed children which are getting people.
The thing with the renders, note that even the armors that appear like texture only redos - arent. The mesh is always different, even in a really slight way.
Different belts, shoulder area, v veck, collar, gloves etc. Even those small tweaks make a nice visual difference and that stuff makes the 1700 odd armor sets just that much more work!!!
Im with Justin_Meisse - id love to know that stuff - I dont suppose anyones got any inside contacts ?!?!
Makes me wonder how are they managing to get all that stuff on screen within the memory budget? The average on GFX cards is still ~512 for the mid-range ones. Not even sure how it fits in RAM to be honest.
I just thought they looked pretty damn good technique wise. whatever your tastes you can surely appreciate the skill that it takes to make stuff like this.
I suppose there is a point where you throw away your game art head and put on your 'I am a customer head'
oh joy...I worked on a system like that before... It was quite a big challenge. Don't want to do this ever again...and then all the QA you need to invest to make sure all the quatrillion customization options and all the meshes and textures and everything fit together ...ugh
Splinter Cell convition uses unreal engine, but it has AA, Tera should have AA also. To play games without AA on these days is a shame.
Don't want to derail because this Tera game looks amazing, but...
I think to get AA in the UE engine you have to hack it in because of deferred lighting. People have said you can make a semi-deferred lighting technique that allows AA though.
Does Splinter Cell Conviction use deferred lighting of any kind with AA on?
Splinter Cell: Conviction uses a modified version of the Unreal 2 engine, apparently it's been modified enough that they refer to it as the LEAD Engine at Ubisoft.
Didn't see any other threads for this...anyone here playing Tera? Would like to hear how it plays as an MMO, was thinking of getting it myself Looks ace!
Im a huge fan of grindfests especially korean flavoured ones I played Aion over WoW and Lineage beffore that.
I also liked vindictus and was pretty impressed with it.
I cant wait for this and Lineage 3.
I think the point about the tweaking is not just about looks, if someone buys the game and sits down and tweaks the crap out of it, it might look the same as everyone else 20 yards away BUT, that person has invested time and thought in the character and to them it doesnt matter if it looks the same in thier mind its unique. and thats a good thing when it comes to longevity, and subscription based models.
It's pretty much a more polished version of Vidictus, the only thing is while the Combat is next-gen, the general archytype isn't, and suffers from 'getting off the bat' too long as well the questing feeling more dated from WoW in general.
The best way I can describe is basically "The Opposite of Star Wars" if that makes sense.
It's all very nice technically, lot of work, etc...
But I still find this to be very bland looking, it's all so typical. And then those loli characters and the fat furry bears look COMPLETELY out of place with the rest of the characters. it's just bizarre. I'd have liked it a lot more if the game had only the furry fat animal characters, they look a lot more original than all the others.
I'm gonna get in trouble for talking too much, but if you want epic boss fights and cool combat then I think Tera has GW2's number... There are a lot of people who are going to hate on Tera for a variety of reasons, but it's the only MMO since WoW that has kept my attention. Graphically, I don't think there's another MMO coming out this year that is going to top Tera this year (except maybe Blade & Soul in Korea). It boggles my mind how high res and high poly their models are and the game still performs like a champ. Definitely worth a look if you're on the fence.
But yea, if you have a prejudice against eastern stylized art then don't bother. Please.
I'm gonna get in trouble for talking too much, but if you want epic boss fights and cool combat then I think Tera has GW2's number... There are a lot of people who are going to hate on Tera for a variety of reasons, but it's the only MMO since WoW that has kept my attention. Graphically, I don't think there's another MMO coming out this year that is going to top Tera this year (except maybe Blade & Soul in Korea). It boggles my mind how high res and high poly their models are and the game still performs like a champ. Definitely worth a look if you're on the fence.
But yea, if you have a prejudice against eastern stylized art then don't bother. Please.
Gotta agree with this man.
There is so much impressive stuff about tera from a development standpoint that has me literally baffled.
The combat alone is reason enough for anyone whose looking for a much more action oriented fight as opposed to the standard dice roll affair. I like to be able to block and take NO DAMAGE. I like to feel in control of whether my character lives or dies, or takes damage because I didnt have the skill to roll or evade an attack in time, in the same way that I would block a fireball in streetfighter and counterattack afterwards.
What playing tera made me realise is actually how boring a new zone is in most mmos - you reach a new zone and you do essentially exactly what you did in the last zone, just it looks different. the bulk of your time is spent running around slaying hordes of relatively mindless creatures exchanging blows until it dies. its a very kind of.... mindnumbing approach to combat.
In Tera nearly EVERY single new enemy I come across is interesting, not only to look at, but in how it fights. Not only do you come across enemies that behave like other players would behave ( lancers and beserkers etc which is fucking awesome in and of itself ) but theres all kinds of alien looking things, plants and animals, creatures big and small. And because of the unknown arcadey combat element, it means each new creature is like ... okay whats this guy going to do!?
Even the smallest difference can be a nice surprise. I pull agro and the dude instantly spits an AOE poison blob around me... its like SHIT! or I pull aggro and the dude comes barnstorming straight at me from 50m away and im not automatically hitunless im not quick enough to react. Or my DPS is massive enough to enrage him, he pumps up, becomes electrically charged and starts hurling bolts of lighting at me like Thor on steroids.. like FUUUUUUUUUU!!! WTF!!!!!
It reminds me of the oldschool days in ghouls and ghosts or wonderboy or numerous other games where youd be introduced to a new enemy and die a few times until you learned to exploit its weakness, learn its attack patterns and how to survive against its attacks.
In the same way that traditional mmo's have made world bosses a fun and exciting fight, Tera has brought that down to the standard mob level on a smaller scale, and combined it with a more action orientated combat system where i feel much more in tune with where my character lives or dies. And then taken it up to an extreme level when you are fighting dungeon bosses or world bosses.
Naga lord anyone... Enrage him and snakes grow up out of his back and introduce new attacks to deal with, energy starts pulsing out of his axes, he can shoot sonic booms of dark energy etc, put away his weapons and pound you with his fists, smack you with his tail if the dps from the rear is too high, hes got like a zig zag jump charge thing that covers probably about 100m etc so much coolness and effort put into just a guy you can walk up to and fight in the open haha.
I think bringing that to the typical fantasy mmo genre is the best advancement in a long time for players like me anyway.
I'm hoping with more of these mmos and online games with more action focuses that it will set a trend with MMO games having the same feel as offline/single players games do finally.
Phantasy Star Online 2 isn't exactly an MMO, but it's also pushing the super actiony gameplay with giant bosses, and since bosses in PSO2 can spawn randomly causing 2 bosses to appear at once, things can get pretty intense.
If I had the time or money I'd probably be playing Tera right now, looks really great.
A mmo without customization is a shit. That's only one thing to take care of. When i play a game like this, a mmo, i want to look different.
I know this is just your opinion, but it seems to be kind of "common sense" amongst most people working on MMOs and imo it's just not true. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Lineage 2 had no customization. It had male/female of 3 different races, and that was it. And it was at one time the number 2 MMO in terms of subscribers, something like 6 million subs I believe.
At this point players have been trained to expect customization because of how many games have had it in it, but I'm just not convinced that a fun to play MMO with well done, one-off, non-customizable characters would fail by virtue of lacking character customization.
Replies
On the art side of things, sure it looks great but I doubt it will look that good in game and to me looks a very very generic game.
Let's hope the game is fun!
A mmo without customization is a shit. That's only one thing to take care of. When i play a game like this, a mmo, i want to look different.
My brother have been with the korean version, and he says is pretty funny, but of course, laggy in the korean servers.
You can watch millions of videos in youtube with the gameplay, pk system etc.
The female characters are very good, but not much some castanic "ganguros".
I'm surprised to see people saying good things about this kind of animeish game here, haters gonna hate you know, and as far as i know, people hate korean/asian looking games here. There are too many great korean games such as vindictus that are unknown.
I didn't necessarily mean the game is being made by Koreans, but a lot of these are made with the Korean market as their primary target. I mean, that's a Korean version of this game in the vids right?
Don't get me wrong, I love the visual style of these games and I often give new MMO's as much chance as I can. Aion for example, I really played quite a lot but when it comes down to it, if I'm honest... it's just not as good as the elephant in the room.
It must be difficult for any MMO to compete, and even when the genre is different, it's always gonna be compared to WoW, and regardless of how pretty it is, if there isn't a solid, enjoyable, and most importantly, long lasting gameplay experience driving it, then it's always destined for failure.
I agree though, character customisation/creation is definitely important, especially in an MMO. But as was mentioned, APB wowed us all with character creation.
I get the impression Hazardous was just posting in a 'hey guys, check out how freakin beautiful this shit is'... and in that regard, it's right on the money.
Whats with the popori female?
But where the real customization should kick-in is with your gear. And that should be later on in the game. And this is also where lots of games, especially WoW, fall flat on their face. There's always that one set of armor that's ideal at any given moment for your class, and that's what you're going to look like. Together with the other thousands of people playing the same class as you.
The only game that did it semi-right is Warhammer, where you can equip two items for each slot. One for stats, one for looks. Gives you quite a variety to play with. The only down-side is that your customization is only visible to you and your faction, but not the enemy faction in fear of deception. Which is bull, but whatever.
Edit:
Yeah, seriously, there's something up with the Popori female video. I didn't watch it before. But watching it now, I was ready to say that they're just a small race, but the fact that they're flat-chested and their entire anatomy fits with that of a ~11 year old means that they're meant to visually look very young.
Edit2:
Wait, Popori females are 12-year-old girls, but the Popori males are some kind of Panda bears? Or maybe the videos are mixed up?
Something ive learned in the past year - there is absolutely no way to please hundreds of thousands of people equally with design, customisation choices and even animation for your mmo toon. Trust me, ive heard it all, from 'this absolutely rocks!' to whoever designd this should be shot, and worse.
Regarding the Popori - I dont feel like I'm a pedophile when I'm watching, though I can see how others would feel that way haha!
I guess im just looking beyond that and appreciating the work thats gone in, and the quality thats come out. Until you work on something like this I guess its really hard to appreciate.
To put into perspective one aspect of how much work these guys have done - eace race, and class choice determines your armor set progression, so if you choose popori male Lancer - your armor will never look like any other races lancer armor, However youll look just like another popori if you started at the same time and were progressing similarly. Im guessing they will use Die for customisation in that regard but who knows!
The armor progression is roughly 15 - 20 deep ( have over 1 gb of psd's containing front sides back of many of these )
165 - 215 armor sets per class. there are 8 classes. 1300 - 1720 armor sets. Thats an absurd amount of work.
And they arent just 'the same armor / texture but now with with blue edging'
No idea how many head presets the game will ship with or how many hairstyles and other customisation options yet - but when you start thinking along the lines of lets say 8 unique heads per sex thats something like 100 heads just for player characters, probably that amount again in texture variants, maps and masks for shader blends for the face customisation etc throw normal maps into things and it rapidly builds up to an insane amount of work, which i totally give them full credit for being able to accomplish AND still come out so high quality across the board.
After looking at many of the armor sets - I wouldnt be surprised if much of the normals for the armor are simply crazy bumped, no high poly sculpts, but if so.. thats still a lot of painting!!
Anyway enough rambling... civil war concepts to paint!
Not sure where you got this idea that polycount doesn't like anime, I've seen you mention it a few times in the past.
on the topic of customization: I prefer more macro customizations, if it isn't noticeable from 20 feet away it isn't worth it.
There is too much hype with actual next gen mmos, we could say the PC has only a few good games, that when people see games such as kingdom under fire 2, blade and soul, tera etc., they get pretty excited.
I saw my brother playing this game, and i look it like a generic 3rd person action game but with the typical asian style and unreal engine aspect, but with "roccoco" and ridiculous armors. Like some of you, with some characters i don't get a good feeling hehe. The unique characters i like are the females.
In blade and soul we have cuter and better "poporis", anyone watched some videos?
Something disturbing about the poporis are the males, why the heck they have animal furries? The don't match with the females, that's a huge fail in design like with the amani. Female and male look like from differen races.
Oh man, would love to get my hands on those .psd's you got dere!
Edit: WOW! the males are straight furries?? even creepier... This game looks pretty though.
I dont think there is a lack of appreciation for the work done(which is amazingly fantastic), its the creepy minimally dressed children which are getting people.
I'm also curious to see how large the zones are, all the videos ever show 1-4 people fighting monsters in fairly sparse looking areas.
Different belts, shoulder area, v veck, collar, gloves etc. Even those small tweaks make a nice visual difference and that stuff makes the 1700 odd armor sets just that much more work!!!
Im with Justin_Meisse - id love to know that stuff - I dont suppose anyones got any inside contacts ?!?!
I suppose there is a point where you throw away your game art head and put on your 'I am a customer head'
http://tera.hangame.com/pds/kit.nhn
In the japanese site you also can find some good wallpapers, like this one:
http://images.hangame.co.jp/hangame/core/tera/teaser/r01/wallpaper03.zip
But there were better ones long time ago, they deleted them :S
http://tera.hangame.co.jp/ts/index.nhn
In the library there are some cool videos too, one with the making.
Splinter Cell convition uses unreal engine, but it has AA, Tera should have AA also. To play games without AA on these days is a shame.
I think to get AA in the UE engine you have to hack it in because of deferred lighting. People have said you can make a semi-deferred lighting technique that allows AA though.
Does Splinter Cell Conviction use deferred lighting of any kind with AA on?
I also liked vindictus and was pretty impressed with it.
I cant wait for this and Lineage 3.
I think the point about the tweaking is not just about looks, if someone buys the game and sits down and tweaks the crap out of it, it might look the same as everyone else 20 yards away BUT, that person has invested time and thought in the character and to them it doesnt matter if it looks the same in thier mind its unique. and thats a good thing when it comes to longevity, and subscription based models.
And I think eld is right tweaking is here to stay
The best way I can describe is basically "The Opposite of Star Wars" if that makes sense.
But I still find this to be very bland looking, it's all so typical. And then those loli characters and the fat furry bears look COMPLETELY out of place with the rest of the characters. it's just bizarre. I'd have liked it a lot more if the game had only the furry fat animal characters, they look a lot more original than all the others.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUVLclPDCBE"]Guild Wars 2 HQ (Shatterer Attacks @ Gamescom 2010).avi - YouTube[/ame]
But yea, if you have a prejudice against eastern stylized art then don't bother. Please.
Gotta agree with this man.
There is so much impressive stuff about tera from a development standpoint that has me literally baffled.
The combat alone is reason enough for anyone whose looking for a much more action oriented fight as opposed to the standard dice roll affair. I like to be able to block and take NO DAMAGE. I like to feel in control of whether my character lives or dies, or takes damage because I didnt have the skill to roll or evade an attack in time, in the same way that I would block a fireball in streetfighter and counterattack afterwards.
What playing tera made me realise is actually how boring a new zone is in most mmos - you reach a new zone and you do essentially exactly what you did in the last zone, just it looks different. the bulk of your time is spent running around slaying hordes of relatively mindless creatures exchanging blows until it dies. its a very kind of.... mindnumbing approach to combat.
In Tera nearly EVERY single new enemy I come across is interesting, not only to look at, but in how it fights. Not only do you come across enemies that behave like other players would behave ( lancers and beserkers etc which is fucking awesome in and of itself ) but theres all kinds of alien looking things, plants and animals, creatures big and small. And because of the unknown arcadey combat element, it means each new creature is like ... okay whats this guy going to do!?
Even the smallest difference can be a nice surprise. I pull agro and the dude instantly spits an AOE poison blob around me... its like SHIT! or I pull aggro and the dude comes barnstorming straight at me from 50m away and im not automatically hit unless im not quick enough to react. Or my DPS is massive enough to enrage him, he pumps up, becomes electrically charged and starts hurling bolts of lighting at me like Thor on steroids.. like FUUUUUUUUUU!!! WTF!!!!!
It reminds me of the oldschool days in ghouls and ghosts or wonderboy or numerous other games where youd be introduced to a new enemy and die a few times until you learned to exploit its weakness, learn its attack patterns and how to survive against its attacks.
In the same way that traditional mmo's have made world bosses a fun and exciting fight, Tera has brought that down to the standard mob level on a smaller scale, and combined it with a more action orientated combat system where i feel much more in tune with where my character lives or dies. And then taken it up to an extreme level when you are fighting dungeon bosses or world bosses.
Naga lord anyone... Enrage him and snakes grow up out of his back and introduce new attacks to deal with, energy starts pulsing out of his axes, he can shoot sonic booms of dark energy etc, put away his weapons and pound you with his fists, smack you with his tail if the dps from the rear is too high, hes got like a zig zag jump charge thing that covers probably about 100m etc so much coolness and effort put into just a guy you can walk up to and fight in the open haha.
I think bringing that to the typical fantasy mmo genre is the best advancement in a long time for players like me anyway.
You just gotta give it a try!!
Phantasy Star Online 2 isn't exactly an MMO, but it's also pushing the super actiony gameplay with giant bosses, and since bosses in PSO2 can spawn randomly causing 2 bosses to appear at once, things can get pretty intense.
If I had the time or money I'd probably be playing Tera right now, looks really great.
I know this is just your opinion, but it seems to be kind of "common sense" amongst most people working on MMOs and imo it's just not true. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Lineage 2 had no customization. It had male/female of 3 different races, and that was it. And it was at one time the number 2 MMO in terms of subscribers, something like 6 million subs I believe.
At this point players have been trained to expect customization because of how many games have had it in it, but I'm just not convinced that a fun to play MMO with well done, one-off, non-customizable characters would fail by virtue of lacking character customization.