Dragon's Dogma 2 and the curse of crapcom strikes again
(media.scored.co)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (28)
sorted by:
God Damnit. I'm in the same boat, this game could have really ticked that RPG itch I've got right now. The parts I've seen so far are trash. I don't think the intro had a single white male, this can kinda be excused due to lore but we all know why this is a thing
Funny you bought up the environment, everything is woodland or some cave. Cool. I'm not going to spend 70 bucks on this.
This intro? It doesn't look as ethnically homogenous as a medieval European setting should, especially in regards to the knight class. That said, if they don't look majority Mediterranean by candle light, you might want to adjust your gamma settings. The originals art direction was also washed out/generic. I resorted to installing an ENB within the opening hour. Fun game, though.
The upshot is fairly extensive modding tools are already out. Given that they're CC based, redoing NPCs should just be a matter of config editing. I'll wait for the performance patches to come out, and Denuvo to be removed.
I've just retreated to my decades old backlog of vidya I need to play through. Running through original Ff7 on an emulator right now. Graphics are outdated but I've already gotten used to it as I fall into the plot
That does remind me of how I'd once calculated out how much time it might take for me to redo all the NPC visuals in Skyrim (like custom design every named NPC's face). The number of hours it would take unless I really optimized a speedy approach was pretty insane. (Something like weeks if I didn't want to go at an extremely grueling pace)
Not that this is a solid defense for these studios that have hundreds of employees available, it's just something I thought was kind of startling and eye opening.
As for terrain, I don't mind if they use generation tools for that at all. I've played around with some and the results can be pretty fucking cool if you know what you're doing. But you have to put a fair bit of planning and deliberation into the process, otherwise it absolutely will look pretty bland and generic.
In my previous comment I wasn't referring to asset flips so much as what I'd describe as a fairly lazy execution of height-map and terrain generator tools like World Creator. Assuming Capcom used something close to that kind of method
The tools can provide some incredible results but only if the developer knows how to plan ahead, utilize the results, scale it properly, and flesh out the details once it's shipped over to the actual engine/game.
The last step though is where I often see what I think you're describing, a half-assed use of mediocre assets that look rather out of place and repetitive. Another issue I've sometimes found is where they generate these large scaping landscapes but they don't put a lot of thought into planning ahead for unique and detailed locales (and factoring that into the geological design of the terrain). And this is of course not factoring in voxel terrain generation... which is a whole other ballgame.
One other thing with the asset flipping though is how the most frequently flipped assets are some of the cheapest you can find on a marketplace. Which is funny/sad in a way because there are artists/asset makers who put out some really stellar quality work, yet you'd be hard pressed to actually find it in many games because those artists aren't spitting out easily rehashed work that can be tossed into every which game.
tbf dd was more 'grounded' than most jp fantasy games. But dd2 also ran ike shit, which is stupid since the pc port for the first was decent.