Morgoth

Goddamn it's 2 AM, I chopped the whole day wood and I'm not even a tiny tired. What's wrong with me?

I'd call that plain bad design. But maybe that is some specific German thing. Heh.

Don't you ever get tired of being a troll? Or can you tell me what's the difference between german fantasy game and fantasy game?

Brothers Grimm? Risen is Brother Grimm? And since when do we count fairy tales as fantasy?

But maybe these games go away if we hate them much enough.

There is no such a thing as German fantasy. There's only fantasy.

Wow, I've never seen such a boring, generic looking hero. Let alone packshot.

Yeah, sounds cool. Except, I don't gonna buy some dip**** game from a 5 man team.

A 5 man team doesn't need a publisher. They go DD only. A 50 man team however needs to get fed, so they need a publisher. Publisher not gonna release PC only game (see Risen).

Lab rats for source engine. Explain what's that supposed to mean. Because Troika chose this engine. Troika didn't fail because of their buggy games, but because they didn't plan their games and funding very well.

All I'm saying is that hardcore RPGs for PC don't sell well. Why do you think Troika went out of business? Because their games sold crap. Now I don't know what Iron Tower has for future plans, but if they wanna go serious about making games (i.e. start making commercial games), they better start a) using a different engine and b) make sure they're making a game that has a predictable large fan base, so that they don't go all Troika. And if they're gonna earn their money with games, you can be sure they have to make at least a 360 version as well, otherwise they won't get a publisher signed up. And spare me with that 120 hour VO crap.

Niche? Not even that. How many people outside the Codex and you five from Obsidian are really gonna buy that? The point is, if I invest so much time, money and energy into a project, I wanna make sure I get some money back. I have my doubts AoD will even make a little bit of money.

Your argumentation is wrong. Chess is not a video game. As a gamer, I expect quality gameplay, quality story, quality sound, and yes, quality graphics. You don't even know what a graphics whore is. Go to some Crytek forums, then you know what I mean. But I've seen other amateur projects with either licensed or self-made technology that precedes the art direction and quality of graphics for lightyears of those of AoD. The AoD team obviously doesn't have too skilled artists, so I remain skeptic. AoD just doesn't look passable anymore. They should have thought about that when they chose the engine. Because expectations are changing quickly, and what might look acceptable today, may not look acceptable in 2 years anymore. So good luck Brian and Annie. I mean it. HURRDURR.

Therefore, my point stands. Art direction predates polycount and thus polycount by itself has ZERO influence on whether a game's art direction is good or bad, stupid. You're a moron. Have you even read by post?

As a general statement, this is simply false. Art direction predates polycount. AoD's engine looks plain ugly, though. You need a certain amount of poly resolution to hold that lighting detail, stupid. Unless you go 2D painting all the way back a 'la Infinity Engine, you need some geometry detail to get the lighting look right. And proper lighting makes 50% of the art direction. Other thing is the form, the shape of an object. I won't get any excited if the head of a character looks like some wood block. Shape and lighting are key for good art direction, something that AoD neither has.

You can't have a good art direction if your engine doesn't support certain features, let alone a decent poly-count.

Loading times from patch 1.2 onwards was very fast. 10 secs maybe, or less. Using an AMD CPU and a single-core is a crime to video games btw.

Well, good thing the mechanics and systems and what not are in place, so that they can start create content and test it out. I still hope though they get a programmer that does some magic to the graphics renderer. I don't want bloom and tons of shaders and that ****, but at least I expect an engine that can utilize a high(er) polycount, better lighting and normal mapping.

What do you mean "thanks god not using the Source engine?". Although the source engine is mainly a shooter engine, it's lightyears ahead of this crap AoD is using.

Even a small publisher won't bite the bait. I can only imagine this game will be self-publsihed, and goes DD only.

Played the Batman demo today, and it was surprisingly good. Definitely a pickup for the bargain bin.

Using that old ugly engine won't get them a publisher.

Like Vista wasn't stable, silly.

Played the ArmA 2 demo today. That's the sort of game where the developer chew off too much that they couldn't handle. Some awesome graphics, but wierd AI behavior and...well, the fact it's a simulation doesn't help me to like the game much either. Man, I played that stupid mission where I ran 20 min around in some valley, then I finally approch the village, and BAM! I'm suddenly dead. Hurrdurr.