EQ2: First Look at Shard of Fear

[xmod2]

Is that a dragon or a statue of a dragon? Maybe a dragon who got turned to stone?

[Hateyou]

Good lord that looks like shit.

[Lost Ranger]

I think they were going for the rotting flesh look but failed heh.

That needs a retexture BIG time.

[Izuldan]

The overall environment looks nice, and I think meshes well with the nostalgiac feel of old PoF.

The dragon.....looks fake. The head and horns are OK, but the wings and claws (especially the wings) have so many straight lines and right angles coming from it that it looks like it is origami.

[Kreugen]

Thats the drake model thats been in the game from the beginning. Which is no surprise, because every model you see in practically every bleeding edge zone is also the same stuff you'll find in antonica.

And yeah, I hope thats supposed to be stone.

[fuffalo]

isn't he supposed to be bone?

[Pasteton]

from the temple graphics to every mob to every texture, it's all been cut and pasted from the same design elements from eq2 release. these things should be being released free by some community of modders, not being hawked off as professional content from a paid game developer. it's incredible the laziness with which they approach content creation.

I still remember running through one of the zones in kingdom of sky, i can't remember the name now but it had the entrance to deathtoll on one of the islands, and there were several blatantly obvious places they cropped huge chunks of lavastorm and retextured it purple, then turn around and charge us for it as an expansion. On one of the islands which had a portal to another zone, was a spot that was such a hack job crop from lavastorm i half expected Asphyxia to spawn in the corner with all the other visual cues.

halls of seeing? lyceum of abhorrence? sanctum of scale? this greenish tinged rockpath with regular stone columns is the eq2 duploblock of new content. Toss in a few bias/gamma tweaks and you have years of expansion raiding ready and waiting. my guess is by now whoever actually designed deathtoll was long ago fired for obviously putting effort into a task.

who cares, they think, people want the loot and the new content, snazzy details like high production values get ignored after the first time in. perhaps so, but it also shows you don't care for or take pride in your product, and that shines through in everything that you do.

[xregg]

I think Scott needs to consult me on how to take screenshots to show off the game.

[Draegan]

xregg yours look the same.

[kudos]

I think it looks better than 90% of the EQ2 zones I saw when playing. Then again that isnt exactly hard to do.

[Dynalisia]

Landscape looks pretty good, but the small building looks crap, artistically bad. The temple itself should be much much bigger and elaborate if they want to pawn this zone off as 'Plane of Fear, only now in EQ2, so bigger, better and more awesome!'. They should really learn to start avoiding the obvious overabundance of almost unaltered primals in their models.

If I see a tower from EQ it's always some basic cylinder with some decorations sticking to it, like a veiny bulge of stone, or some teeth-like pillars, /yawn. Not to mention all the planes in the dragon's wings like someone else pointed out aswell. The model of that thing is barely any better than the stuff we had in the Western Wastes. Looking at the thing as a whole, their entire texture palette still seems to be based mostly on concrete-ish tiles for a lot of stuff.

Instead of making a set of textures especially for a certain pillar, they seem to be modelling a pillar and then texture the individual components of it with a global base texture that is supposed to give it some basic surface properies relating to the material that that part of the pillar is supposed to be made of, completely leaving other properties out, or to the inadequate graphics engine. YEs, not only is there no game on the market today that has such a good lighting engine you can go without baking some shading into your textures, using such basic textures as both Eq1 and Eq2 do at the moment also makes everything look bland, sterile and, like I said, as if the entire world is made from concrete.

Seriously, if I could give one blessing to the EQ2 team, it would definately be some solid texture artists.

[GrobbeeTrull2.0]

It's not the Plane, it's the Shard. What's left of the Plane. So I don't expect it to have the grandeur that PoF once had.

[Genjiro]

Textures in EQ2 have always sucked ass, plasticy and just very forced looking. I've always wondered if anyone who does EQ2 art has any sense of perspective. The temples/castles etc in this game look like mini models of what something like that should resemble in terms of grandeur and scale. They need to take some of the EQ2 art guys around places like Hellfire Citadel, have them look up once inside, and learn what a giant castle/citadel/fortress should look like as far as perspective goes. The colors look right as far as the atompshere goes but, yea that dragon looks like shit. I hope thats just a statue and not supposed to be Draco.

[Laerazi]

Originally Posted by Soygen

Err...that sounds like Cazic Thule.

Caiz Thule does not have human proportions...

EQ1 Avatar of Fear vs EQ2 Avatar of Fear

[niteflyx]

old-world drakota model + patchwork ogre texture = new dragons I guess.