Game News Wasteland 2 to have pretty portraits

[Johannes]

Here's some art too
http://diglett.blogspot.se/2012/03/wasteland-2.html
It's not perfect, mostly I dislike the head size on the isometric pic, but more flair than the official pic.

Also a thread on the official forum on the subject which I found while looking for that:
http://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=513


As far as just keeping everything in a realistic style - I just can't imagine Vax, Octotron, cyborgs, Night Screamer, Harry, etc. in the same setting as the super serious military man here.

 

[Morkar Left]

I remember there was some discussion going on in the kickstarter time and shortly after which approach is prefered. Somehow nearly everybody wished for realistic artstyle like shown from inXile. Now out of a sudden people want popart and ega graphics back? Where were you when your bitching and complaining could have some influence?

Here's some art too
http://diglett.blogspot.se/2012/03/wasteland-2.html
It's not perfect, mostly I dislike the head size on the isometric pic, but more flair than the official pic.

Also a thread on the official forum on the subject which I found while looking for that:
http://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=513


As far as just keeping everything in a realistic style - I just can't imagine Vax, Octotron, cyborgs, Night Screamer, Harry, etc. in the same setting as the super serious military man here.

So much kawai makes me puke to be honest.

 

[Ion Prothon II]

Comicstyle is pretty broad. When I say I wouldn't mind a "graphic novel" look for Wasteland 2, I'm thinking more along the lines of Gabriel Knight 1 than Team Fortress 2.

Pixel art in games like: Gabriel Knight, Hand of Fate, Beneath a Steel Sky is too unique to label it as 'comicstyle'. IMO they aimed for the look as much realistic as the resolution allowed, not for comic. Cartoon/comic- stylised were Sam & Max, Larry, Monkey Island, and so on.
Fuck, that's what you wrote, redding is teh hard.

I'm not impressed. I prefer the realistic approach over comicstyle.

Ah, that totally makes you right then. And if some guys say they find EGA graphics more "interesting" (like PorkaMorka) then it means they whine and they are wrong.

Hey, if the thing was done in VGA, I'd go totally 2D Scoia'Tael : x and defended it with PorkaMorka to the last drop of blood.

 

[Kahlis]

Pixel art in games like: Gabriel Knight, Hand of Fate, Beneath a Steel Sky is too unique to label it as 'comicstyle'. IMO they aimed for the look as much realistic as the resolution allowed, not for comic. Cartoon/comic- stylised were Sam & Max, Larry, Monkey Island, and so on.

Realistic, yeah, but there was a certain vivid quality to them too - probably from the medium the art was done in. Most of the Sierra VGA games had painted backgrounds with the early ones using hideous claymation for some of the animations and portraits (like the horrid QFG1 remake), but I think Gabriel Knight used colored pencil. There used to be a site somewhere with lots of the original GK1 artwork pre-scanning, and even then it was more interesting to me. The colors more than anything else.

 

[mbpopolano24]

Pretty, so pretty.... now I just need some 'salt' and 'dragon's blood' and I am ready to go....

 

[FeelTheRads]

Hey, if the thing was done in VGA, I'd go totally 2D Scoia'Tael : x and defended it with PorkaMorka to the last drop of blood.

But you see, his point was that he finds it interesting how artists deal with the limitations. Now, that might just be hipster faggotry, but he didn't say EGA was inherently better, just more interesting.

 

[Stelcio]

You might prefer realism, but that kind of style is what makes Wasteland, well, Wasteland and not just another Fallout.

It's not the graphics style that made Wasteland distinctive, it's the content, heavily rooted in '80s lulzy fashion and image and some weird sf stuff. Like this shit:

Or this to be more close to the source:

 

[Ion Prothon II]

Thank god they weren't into 70s stuff.

 

[Ion Prothon II]

Hey, if the thing was done in VGA, I'd go totally 2D Scoia'Tael : x and defended it with PorkaMorka to the last drop of blood.

But you see, his point was that he finds it interesting how artists deal with the limitations. Now, that might just be hipster faggotry, but he didn't say EGA was inherently better, just more interesting.

Yeah, I know. In general, I'd say the same thing about the graphics with 8- bit color. Would even say it's better, to be more kool and edgy.
BUT, if the pixel graphics in limited color palette is an insipring story about brave men dealing with tech limitations, then CGA/EGA graphics should be a depressing story that everybody tries to forget, about godforsaken starving castaways eating each other.

 

[PorkaMorka]

As far as just keeping everything in a realistic style - I just can't imagine Vax, Octotron, cyborgs, Night Screamer, Harry, etc. in the same setting as the super serious military man here.

Given the extreme limitations imposed by the type of game they're making, how would you go about retaining the whimsical style of W1, without using the hated "cartoony 3d" style, ala Team Fortress, World of Warcraft, UFO: Afterlight and that new Firaxis X-Com? It's basically the default art style for modern games that aren't going for full photorealism and most of us are pretty sick of it by now.

Personally, I'm happy to see that they went with a realistic style for the portraits. Hopefully that will mean that they aim for a more realistic (although still low budget and low detail) 3d environment. Silent storm + 2D portraits would be pretty nice.

If you try to do whimsical in a low budget, low detail 3d environment, there is too much danger of ending up with something truly monstrous, like this:

Look at those faces... just look at them.

 

[FeelTheRads]

then CGA/EGA graphics is a depressing story that everybody tries to forget,

Not necessarily. For example, take the Space Quest creators. In their talks during the recent Kickstarter they mentioned they still have a soft spot for EGA graphics. And their complaints where about the tools available for digital drawing at that time (as in no Photoshop), not about the palette limitations.

However, if I'm not mistaken, your problem is that EGA is treated as an art style when it really was just a look derived from the graphical adapter's limitations becoming a style only later when it was "retro". Plus, it's absurd to claim that everything EGA is special (although I don't think anybody did that), because some artists did excellent work with it, others were just shit. Just like in today's graphics.

But I'm not sure where you pull this "everybody hated it" thing from.

Also, this doesn't make any sense:

about godforsaken starving castaways eating each other.

Unless you're trying to be "kool and edgy".

 

[Azrael the cat]

You might prefer realism, but that kind of style is what makes Wasteland, well, Wasteland and not just another Fallout.

It's not the graphics style that made Wasteland distinctive, it's the content, heavily rooted in '80s lulzy fashion and image and some weird sf stuff. Like this shit:

Or this to be more close to the source:

Yeah, I get your point, but one thing people tend to forget about material from the 80s is that it wasn't actually seen as comical back then - quite the opposite in fact, the photo above is pretty much pure 'dark and gritty' 80s-style.

Mad Max gets some well-deserved shit for its crappy 3rd entry, but you have to remember that audiences were fucking blown away by the grittyness of the first two films. In the 70s they would have seen that and laughed, and in the 90s everyone was overdosing on 'dark and gritty' to try and block out their memories of the 80s. 80s counterculture was so awesome BECAUSE the mainstream was so shit. The graphical feel of Wasteland was a product of its time - not just in terms of the lame old 'technological limitations' stuff, but because the culture was completely different. The grim concept art is a lot closer to the feel of Wasteland, in terms of how it was perceived at the time, than any reproduction of the above would be.

It reminds me of the first time I saw Dr No and was shocked to see a Bond film (the first Bond film) that was an actual movie - not a 'good Bond film' but a 'good spy film'. He was writtern with genuine charisma, women didn't just fall into his arms at the sight of him - he was written with a charm that made it plausible, side-characters were developed and actually useful, he wasn't winning 20 v 1 gunfights and relying on Q's gadgets as an excuse for special effects set-pieces. It was a genuine attempt at a film, not a franchise. Over the years, each successive Bond film became less about exploring his character, less about making a good film, and more about inserting the pieces that fans had decided were the 'definitive Bond traits'. The result was the franchise went to shit, as they were just trying to tie scripts around a pre-determined set of 'Bond film requirements', and shit that was plausible in the 60s was just getting fucking ridiculous by the 1990s.

Regardless of its merits as a film, I'll say two things for Casino Royale - it was the first time in decades that they tried to 'make a good film' rather than just settling for a 'Bond film', allowing little drips of characterisation (best-shot scene in the film, to my mind, is Bond's reaction upon finding out that his now dead lover was, despite appearances, not trying to betray him - he goes straight into the suave Bond-reaction, and you just get this ever-so-slight reaction shot where you see that all the swagger and suaveness is his poker face, that there's a genuine character ticking away beneath it, always doing the suave spy act so nobody knows what he's really thinking) that you could never have done in the long list of films where it was a franchise rather than a series of good films. Secondly, by writing it for the 2000s, they got the essence of Fleming's character right for the first time since the 'big 3' (Dr No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger) - all that schlock with Pierce Brosnan was terrible, not because of Brosnan (the man has done some damn good spy flicks), but because Fleming's character was never written as a cartoonish superhero, but a noirish character who feels it when he gets hit, regularly gets outrun because he smokes too much, is good at poker because he has a razor-sharp memory for counting cards and a talent for reading people - and you simply can't portray that character in the 2000s by mimicking how he was portrayed in the 60s.

To be honest, what I want to see them take from Wasteland is an appreciation for lost gaming mechanics. As far as the feel of the universe goes, I'd much rather that they took the general concept and just decided to make the best game they could, rather than approaching it from the perspective of trying to pick the 'right' aspects that define Wasteland. And they've made a very good point in favour of changing at least some of the environments - the post-chernobyl regrowth has completely changed our understanding of what happens in a nuclear wasteland. Humans die, animals get fucked up but some will adapt and survive, but mostly nature takes over again. You're more likely to see lush forests (of course, you wouldn't want to drink the water - though low-level radiation isn't as big a problem for animals that only live around 6 years anyway...) than deserts.

 

[Stelcio]

To be honest, what I want to see them take from Wasteland is an appreciation for lost gaming mechanics. As far as the feel of the universe goes, I'd much rather that they took the general concept and just decided to make the best game they could, rather than approaching it from the perspective of trying to pick the 'right' aspects that define Wasteland.

That's cool and I agree. For now there's no precise info on how Wasteland 2 gameplay will be shaped though, so we discuss what we get from Fargo - art. Once we get some gameplay pieces, we'll be all over them, believe me.

And they've made a very good point in favour of changing at least some of the environments - the post-chernobyl regrowth has completely changed our understanding of what happens in a nuclear wasteland. Humans die, animals get fucked up but some will adapt and survive, but mostly nature takes over again. You're more likely to see lush forests (of course, you wouldn't want to drink the water - though low-level radiation isn't as big a problem for animals that only live around 6 years anyway...) than deserts.

Still, desert terrains of Wasteland and Fallout were not entirely out of place, because that's what they are in reality.

 

[Ion Prothon II]

then CGA/EGA graphics is a depressing story that everybody tries to forget,

Not necessarily. For example, take the Space Quest creators. In their talks during the recent Kickstarter they mentioned they still have a soft spot for EGA graphics. And their complaints where about the tools available for digital drawing at that time (as in no Photoshop), not about the palette limitations.

Nothing new. I'm sure now the most of the developers don't see anything wrong with overuse of repulsive shader effects, just as they were all OK with fucking ugly early full 3D graphics at the end of 90s... and so on.

However, if I'm not mistaken, your problem is that EGA is treated as an art style when it really was just a look derived from the graphical adapter's limitations becoming a style only later when it was "retro". Plus, it's absurd to claim that everything EGA is special (although I don't think anybody did that), because some artists did excellent work with it, others were just shit. Just like in today's graphics.

What
My point in a nutshell: EGA was crap and it forced artists to do pixel graphics, using shitty colors from ass palette. Aesthetic value was sacrificed in order to draw stuff on the screen. Few exceptions where very special conditions were met. Nothing to be proud of.

Those graphics cards were one of the reasons why PC was useless office machine, when compared to Amiga.

Also, this doesn't make any sense:

about godforsaken starving castaways eating each other.

Unless you're trying to be "kool and edgy".

You're hurting my feelings. It was a clever metaphore, you know? Like, Amiga- *there* was something to show, what scene or commercial artist can do with limited color palette... whereas PC had just a painful transgression to a more tolerable video standard, developers doing business with games for handicapped hardware.
When exactly VGA became widely used? 1992? :irony:

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Yeah, I get your point, but one thing people tend to forget about material from the 80s is that it wasn't actually seen as comical back then - quite the opposite in fact, the photo above is pretty much pure 'dark and gritty' 80s-style.

Mad Max gets some well-deserved shit for its crappy 3rd entry, but you have to remember that audiences were fucking blown away by the grittyness of the first two films. In the 70s they would have seen that and laughed, and in the 90s everyone was overdosing on 'dark and gritty' to try and block out their memories of the 80s. 80s counterculture was so awesome BECAUSE the mainstream was so shit. The graphical feel of Wasteland was a product of its time - not just in terms of the lame old 'technological limitations' stuff, but because the culture was completely different. The grim concept art is a lot closer to the feel of Wasteland, in terms of how it was perceived at the time, than any reproduction of the above would be.

That's why I mentioned Watchmen - converting the style to a serious 80s comic book would be pretty good technological advance. Still, a lot of stuff in Wasteland is outright jokes and shout outs to pop-culture. Just like with Fallout 2.

It reminds me of the first time I saw Dr No and was shocked to see a Bond film (the first Bond film) that was an actual movie - not a 'good Bond film' but a 'good spy film'. He was writtern with genuine charisma, women didn't just fall into his arms at the sight of him - he was written with a charm that made it plausible, side-characters were developed and actually useful, he wasn't winning 20 v 1 gunfights and relying on Q's gadgets as an excuse for special effects set-pieces. It was a genuine attempt at a film, not a franchise. Over the years, each successive Bond film became less about exploring his character, less about making a good film, and more about inserting the pieces that fans had decided were the 'definitive Bond traits'. The result was the franchise went to shit, as they were just trying to tie scripts around a pre-determined set of 'Bond film requirements', and shit that was plausible in the 60s was just getting fucking ridiculous by the 1990s.

Regardless of its merits as a film, I'll say two things for Casino Royale - it was the first time in decades that they tried to 'make a good film' rather than just settling for a 'Bond film', allowing little drips of characterisation (best-shot scene in the film, to my mind, is Bond's reaction upon finding out that his now dead lover was, despite appearances, not trying to betray him - he goes straight into the suave Bond-reaction, and you just get this ever-so-slight reaction shot where you see that all the swagger and suaveness is his poker face, that there's a genuine character ticking away beneath it, always doing the suave spy act so nobody knows what he's really thinking) that you could never have done in the long list of films where it was a franchise rather than a series of good films. Secondly, by writing it for the 2000s, they got the essence of Fleming's character right for the first time since the 'big 3' (Dr No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger) - all that schlock with Pierce Brosnan was terrible, not because of Brosnan (the man has done some damn good spy flicks), but because Fleming's character was never written as a cartoonish superhero, but a noirish character who feels it when he gets hit, regularly gets outrun because he smokes too much, is good at poker because he has a razor-sharp memory for counting cards and a talent for reading people - and you simply can't portray that character in the 2000s by mimicking how he was portrayed in the 60s.

Casino Royale still had the gadget crap and was ridiculous when compared to the novel. Even Doctor No was less sensible than the source.
The novels were realistic and gritty with the main enemy being the Soviets not some retarded S.P.E.C.T.R.E. or generic muahahahaha terrorists. The main problem with them that most of them were following the same goddamned formula and after I've read Moonraker I started feeling that I'm reading the same novel again and again/
Fuck, I have to read them again.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I think that's the thing. Wasteland 1 has a very over-the-top 70's/80's science fiction pulp feel to it. I find the official art (of WL2) impressive but in some ways it feels a little too somber. Even the new Scorpitron feels a little too realistic.

More or less. W2's scorpitron is a robotic scorpion, with claws, legs and all, something you'd see on a cartoon. W1's scorpitron is just a funny-looking tank...W2's would look like a kid's toy with W1's scorpitron's paintjob.

(fake edit: both look okay to me, just pointing out that neither looks terribly realistic nor comicbooky)


free picture hosting


free picture hosting

 

[Johannes]

You might prefer realism, but that kind of style is what makes Wasteland, well, Wasteland and not just another Fallout.

It's not the graphics style that made Wasteland distinctive, it's the content, heavily rooted in '80s lulzy fashion and image and some weird sf stuff. Like this shit:

Or this to be more close to the source:

Yeah, I get your point, but one thing people tend to forget about material from the 80s is that it wasn't actually seen as comical back then - quite the opposite in fact, the photo above is pretty much pure 'dark and gritty' 80s-style.

It wasn't and isn't comical, but it's still FUN and always was.

But it's true that the same feel is hard to emulate today, because you can't just get yourself into that mindset. Or most people can't, and just copying some superficial elements won't work. Well, like in your Bond example. Not impossible though - like you still end up hearing the occasional new song or album that sounds almost exactly like it could've been made in the 80s, or just stylistically feels like 80s even if the exact technology and sound used are different.

I wouldn't really count on this crew to succeed with making a proper 80s vibe product, though - I don't see Fargo or anyone there being "stuck in the 80s" enough to succeed properly in doing that. Too bad since I'd much prefer that.

And they've made a very good point in favour of changing at least some of the environments - the post-chernobyl regrowth has completely changed our understanding of what happens in a nuclear wasteland. Humans die, animals get fucked up but some will adapt and survive, but mostly nature takes over again. You're more likely to see lush forests (of course, you wouldn't want to drink the water - though low-level radiation isn't as big a problem for animals that only live around 6 years anyway...) than deserts.

Still, desert terrains of Wasteland and Fallout were not entirely out of place, because that's what they are in reality.[/quote]
Well, Wasteland did have lbig farmland with giant veggies among other things, in any case.



Btw, the ingame shot was passable. Better than the portrait, which tries too hard to look cool and tough. But well, it's ok to include a guy like that too if most portraits won't be stiff and boring like that, even if the technique used is similar.


And lastly, decline of Codex newsposts - what is this shit, it reads like a commercial starting right with the title?

 

[thesheeep]

Whoa, this thread became tl;dr pretty fast.

I can see why some who prefereed the more comic-y stile are a bit upset by the obviously different new one. I, however, favor teh new one by far. I really didn't play Wasteland for the funny looking scorpitron...
Also, the difference between their first "screenshot" and this is also slightly strange. I just hope the portrait will be defining the style more than that screenshot. In the end, though, I#d be fine with both, as long as everything fits together.

Also, speaking about soulless...

 

[villain of the story]

D2 graphics were horribly outdated for its time

It looked good, though and it got special shinies for those with 3Dfx cards IIRC.

 

[zeitgeist]

At this point in time, I'd prefer at least some kind of a character generator for the portraits instead, even if it's just a mix&match system and not something like this. Did they actually say anything about how many portraits there will be, will the NPCs (and party members that join you) have their own, etc? What about weapons/armor/equipment shown on the models in the gameworld? How detailed will that be?

 

[Cynic]

 

[4too]

Every Picture Tells A Story, Don't It






{CLICK-First Slide}

After Azrael the cat's excellent editorial on how cut and paste-ing, the 'elements of (a) style',
can script a AAA motion picture franchise into --> a shopping list, a power point slide show, a tedious continuum of mediocrity,
my whimsy wilts as I wind up to pitch my desperate tangential movie analogy.



{CLICK-Second Slide}


Thanks Johannes for pointing to

Maturity, humor, pulp and the original Wasteland @ http://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=513

Thanks for the lead to

Cue lamentation: " Oh, Harry The Bunny Master, we hardly knew thee."


{CLICK-Third Slide}

Under the Nex Gen bruised eye,
Wasteland 1's Agricultural Center can no longer stand as a low level character shooting gallery / experience point grind festival.

More to this sausage than congealed blood and putrid pig parts …

I know the business majors here at the Codex see the bunnies frolicking in Harry's wake, as he struts past rows of mutant broccoli,
and salivate at the lucrative potential of Wasteland Two-Point-O : The FARM Sim MMO!

Calm down, that's for 2014.


{CLICK-Fourth Slide}

Save your spittle for how GRIM-DARK(™) transforms this garden culling quest into a noir FACTION conflict!

I evoke the powers of darkness featured in Yojimbo / A Fistfull of Dollars.

Video games are Serious-Business(™) for Serious-Consummation(™).

Do I hear a HALO-luya!

The denominator of choice, in denominations worthy of consideration,
celebrates avatars of ego entitlement lusted over by the Mall-Ninja focus groups.

I conjure the pop icons:

… in back stabbing, take no prisoners, hysterical political shrieking ^faction^ strum und drang!

{CLICK-Fifth Slide}

Be 'Harry The Bunny Master' and *ax* out your green passions in the dawning new age of the Post Apocalypse!

Ol' skool farmers flee, as 'Harry Of The Dirt' balances justice and the new ecology on the bones AND blood of a Zombie Agribusiness.

:bird tweets: Resource manage and grow your commune. :/bird tweets:

;aggressive drumming: Mobilize your rodent rascals when the pentangle branded 'regulators',
those self star-ed 'rangers',
arrive as the hired gunsels of the - decayed - old - way …. :/aggressive drumming:


{CLICK-Slide Home}






4too

 

[Azrael the cat]

It reminds me a bit of why it's so nuts to call yourself 'a Marxist'. Marx was never a Marxist - he was a philosophy and political theorist. The idea of freezing a philosophy in a particular moment of time, never deviating and calling it'Marxism' is an insult to the guy's genuine intelligence. On the same note, when they made Wasteland 1, they weren't trying to 'make Wasteland', they were trying to make the best damn game they could. That's what I'd like to see (together with oldschool mechanics, of course) - I'd be much more comfortable to see them make and justify their art decisions on 'this is the best game we can make', rather than 'this is the essence of Wasteland'.

 

[Infinitron]

It reminds me a bit of why it's so nuts to call yourself 'a Marxist'. Marx was never a Marxist - he was a philosophy and political theorist. The idea of freezing a philosophy in a particular moment of time, never deviating and calling it'Marxism' is an insult to the guy's genuine intelligence. On the same note, when they made Wasteland 1, they weren't trying to 'make Wasteland', they were trying to make the best damn game they could. That's what I'd like to see (together with oldschool mechanics, of course) - I'd be much more comfortable to see them make and justify their art decisions on 'this is the best game we can make', rather than 'this is the essence of Wasteland'.

The difference, as obvious as it may sound, is that Wasteland wasn't a sequel, while Wasteland 2 is.

 

[asper]

Awesome