Wow's Art is better, but EQ's world is better.

[starkind]

blacckrock spire looks exactly like EQoA with a bit hire rez textures and a taller ORC player character.

Sorry but this isometric stuff isn't flying

plz let me look up and target mobs crawling on the cielings without glowing rings surrounding everything

[unsunghero]

I much prefer EQ’s character art to WoW’s at least compared to how WoW’s character art has evolved over time

WoW just decided “let’s try to cram as much shit up on people’s shoulder pads as we possibly can”, like everyone is lady Gaga

[starkind]

I think a big boon to any MMO future would be collision boxes for mobs so they can't stack up directly on top of each other and would be individual targetable, and block other mobs/players from running thru I know EQ cheeped out and lets u run thru players but w/e

Originally Posted by unsunghero [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I much prefer EQ’s character art to WoW’s at least compared to how WoW’s character art has evolved over time

WoW just decided “let’s try to cram as much shit up on people’s shoulder pads as we possibly can”, like everyone is lady Gaga

wow has some good texture artists, but IDK i havent played shadowlands really to tell u how i feel, they slipped up a bit with MoP but the zone design made up for it there.

What kinda erks me the most about wow's 'level's and level design' is its cookiecutter, u been in one cave u been in them all, the king goblins throne room is the same as it was in the newbie yard.

The Freeport village or w/e in BFA with the pirates was a nice little thematic area, and so was the troll city, other then that I couldn't tell if I was in one part of wow or another. Those are the only two areas I felt were really unique.

Cataclysm had a few more unique spots, but Teldrassil 2.0 Hyjal was just like the newbie yard. It's hit ore miss, grizzly hills in that game stood out to me too.

[Tethler]

Originally Posted by unsunghero [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

WoW just decided “let’s try to cram as much shit up on people’s shoulder pads as we possibly can”, like everyone is lady Gaga

Good lord, this. I always thought the massive shoulderpads looked so stupid.

[Tunabros]

um cringe?

[unsunghero]

Originally Posted by starkind [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I think a big boon to any MMO future would be collision boxes for mobs so they can't stack up directly on top of each other and would be individual targetable, and block other mobs/players from running thru I know EQ cheeped out and lets u run thru players but w/e



wow has some good texture artists, but IDK i havent played shadowlands really to tell u how i feel, they slipped up a bit with MoP but the zone design made up for it there.

What kinda erks me the most about wow's 'level's and level design' is its cookiecutter, u been in one cave u been in them all, the king goblins throne room is the same as it was in the newbie yard.

The Freeport village or w/e in BFA with the pirates was a nice little thematic area, and so was the troll city, other then that I couldn't tell if I was in one part of wow or another. Those are the only two areas I felt were really unique.

Cataclysm had a few more unique spots, but Teldrassil 2.0 Hyjal was just like the newbie yard. It's hit ore miss, grizzly hills in that game stood out to me too.

I wouldn't know, I quit WoW mid-WOTLK, so I didn't see those zones I don't think. I thought stranglethorn and BRM were cool in design I guess. A few of the TBC zones were interesting, like the one with the big mushroom plants. I liked the first zone in TBC you start in, only because I thought the Fel Reavers stomping around killing people were one of the coolest mobs I had ever seen up to that point.

None of the WOTLK zones stick out but I quit that pretty early on. P99 has always been hard for me with no maps because I have absolutely no sense of direction. I get lost in my job just trying to find my way back to a high school's counseling office where I'm talking to a student from their nearest bathroom [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I will say to this day though, the WOTLK cinematic is the absolute best video game cinematic ever made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCr7y4SLhck

The fact Blizz didn't do the same style for their WoW movie is a travesty [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Second best video game cinematic ever made is Blizzard's BFA one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSJr3dXZfcg

Sylvanas' banshee scream gets me every time...

Third best is League of Legend's Warriors cinematic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR-KAldshAE

And fourth best ever made is League of Legends Awaken cinematic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF5Ddo9JdpY


It is known.

[Shawk]

It is kind of impossible to compare the two.

EQ1 is High Fantasy in my eyes, while WoW is more a Anime style.

EQ2 showed that High Fantasy can have a bit of an Uncanny Valley... I wish they would have tried again with EQ3.. It just takes a certain type of artist to make it happen on the modeling side and the conceptual side.

Probably also why things got so held up with EQ Next as it just couldn't find that middle ground..

Although, for example if you look at Keith Parkinson art compared to EQNext art.. It is kind of embarrassingly obvious where things kind of devolved into something more of a "game" rather than a realistic high fantasy.

Concept art really does matter.. Especially when you are working with a bunch of developers who are just looking for their next paycheck. With Brad, Smedley and all the other devs on EQ1 it was a very nerdy environment and a very arrogant stubborn kind of development where they were both hardcore D&D fans and they were trying to make a very high brow realistic looking style..

Obviously the pixelated art is not the same, but really.. It is odd how much better even the original P99 Modeling/Animation was compared to EQ:Next even.. EQ:Next was very blurry and had a ton of pixels, but none of this translated to anything but "Anime style.."


Obviously this is just concept art, but it matters when you are developing to that concept..


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[Mblake1981]

^
Those two are not even in the same league, same country or planet.

Originally Posted by Shawk [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

but none of this translated to anything but "Anime style.."

translated to a decline.

https://www.keithparkinson.com/produ...sold-sketches/

Note: The google image always chops the sides off, the original work has a siege-like device with Gnomes(?) on it, coming out of the woods.

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[Fammaden]

WoW in any given frame as you move through it is truly beautiful and delightful to feel, walk around in, and even interact with. But its not a world, its just a series of areas, impressive though they are they don't give you any punch. As someone said in a thread on these forums recently, an inch deep and a mile wide.

There's a lot of EQ that happens from the forced community too though. The resource scarcity and the range of conflicts that it creates go as far to create the living world feel as any part of the design of the game itself.

[starkind]

Yeah Keith's art belongs in Veeshans temple.

That said wow has a lot of cookiecutter copy-paste. But they are thematically mostly consistent. And burried in it is the occasional Vista or cool sky box. Or something neat. Void elf starting home (city, errr asteroids). Eternal palace. Vashjir. Deepholm. Looking out over Azeroth as it rotates from the Vindicar.

EQ could be better with stuff like this, it pulls it off a little bit with the combine empire's architecture, GoD, and Cazic Thule. But it's probably hard to find artists willing and able to work within the constraints of their engine. Dev tools, which are probably totally insane at this point and really do need to be retired.

Doubt they'll pull their heads out of their asses for EQ3 tho. Unless the find some genuis savant who gets that it's not about polys and targeting rings.

I saw some cool stuff in The Darkend Sea, but all those guys probably moved on or got burned out, quit.

I think ironically the focus originally in EQ was less some artistic thing and more like holy shit we can actually make a brick wall texture so it was more about texture and the world and the worlds elements. There was no need or desire for it to fit a product. It was fine to mash stuff together into something that told the story it didn't have to be... like this perfect trail of breadcrumbs designed to engage a poor person through a skinner box X # of hours. Balance was mostly irrelevant...like holy hell auto attack works, and necro and druids devs had permission to just be OP and everyone set their challenge individually without overly obsessing of fairness, so rathe mnts didn't need to be fair for everyone and every class with a static spawn, like the silly Ettin in Stormsong. Which just doesn't hold a candle to Rathe Mnts.