Merlkir

yeah, pretty much. The idea of a "portrait artist" in most people's eyes means "he paints faces with every wrinkle and mole just how real people look". Which is not at all what Sweet does. He implies rather than shows. Which obviously works for many people. An example of a very skilled "portrait artist" would be Dave Rapoza (he's been doing a lot of fanart portraits lately, TMNT and stuff) http://daverapoza.blogspot.cz/ Anyway, there are way too many arists I consider good, because I everyone tends to do different stuff and excels at something else. I can't think of any "portraitists" right now. Maybe Adrian Smith? He seems to be posting a lot of headshots on Facebook recently. http://www.adriansmith.co.uk/published-works.html

Just btw, Justin Sweet (and J.Manley too I think) paints his concept art digitally. (only his gallery work is oils and watercolor)

Justin Sweet isn't a crappy portrait artist. He's just NOT a portrait artist. 90% of stuff posted here is concept art, or illustrations, not portraits. Which doesn't mean he couldn't do absolutely kickass portraits if he tried. Royo is overrated and thankfully almost forgotten now, that girly crap above is not even worth a comment. The portraits in BGII were alright, although one can clearly see they're real people with earrings and hamsters added. (also the artist seemed to struggle with getting the eyes aligned in most of them) See? It's so easy to spout really really insensitive comments about someone's art. Good grief, I do hope none of the artists read this thread. (and believe me, artists sometimes do make the mistake of reading what fans have to say about products they worked on.)

Depends on what you mean by "totally from thin air". You can create a language with sytax rules that are unheard of in our history and with pronunciation suited for beings without teeth, who have pedipalps instead. As for the language of intellectuals, often it's some kind of elven language in fantasy worlds. Not sure about PE, the elves of old seem to have been quite alien and not that advanced as a culture.

Breaking news!

The problem I have with Latin is - this is Latin. How come they speak Latin in this world that's not Earth where the Latins lived? It's tricky, we're used to English, we see this as an immediate translation from whatever native language. But Latin? We don't speak Latin (mostly), yet we know it when we hear it. Combined with names clearly coming from the native languages, this would be a bit confusing. Tolkien used a similar approach, but less obviously. 1) He used names and other bits from old Earth languages like OE, Gothic etc. This is often misinterpreted (the Rohirrim being explained as Anglosaxons with horses), but his idea was that using these old languages actually shows the reader their respective relationships. Ie the language of the men of Dale is related to the language of the Rohirrim in a similar way as Old Norse is to Old English. So in a strange way, these were translations - translations from languages we've never heard of read into languages which haven't been spoken on Earth for hundreds of years. Is that mad or what?! :D 2) He invented his own languages. Sure, they use similar syntax to Finnish and Welsh, but they're a very distinctly different case to the ones in 1). These languages we get to hear and read in their original form. Why on earth this double standard? I honestly don't know. I just know I never wondered about it while reading Lord of the Rings, I simply accepted it. What I'm saying - Latin for magic would be a lot like the languages in 1) of my Tolkien example. But WHY are we using this double standard for languages in PE? Can we explain that in the game? In the manual? At all? (I realize not many players would care. But some might. )

Bumpa, would be really interested in the Dev's take on this. Good night!

Nice straw man It was, yes. "It's just a game" means nothing in itself, it's what you say about something you're not interested in and what you think can be cut without any impact on the quality of the game. Which is quite the thing I'd expect from a game publisher. PE is supposed to be a game made right, properly. Your strawman was equally ridiculous - simply stating languages don't matter and that they take too long to make for too much money. None of that is backed by anything. In fact, one person can do a pretty good job of building a foundation for languages in the world, in reasonable time. And it's done, it's there, you can use it anytime in the future while making sequels. It's a part of the world, just as monsters, religion or geography. Let's have a tropical beach next to a tundra, that'll be just fine. It's just a game, we JUST need some friggin' locations for players to murder mobs in.

Meh. Why bother with good writing? It's just a game? Better spend that money and development hours on graphics!

Ah you just mentioned the crux of the whole problem. It's a game ... it's not a thesis, it's not a research paper, and it's not an exercise in linguistics ... it's. Just. A game. "It's just a game" has always been a baaaaad argument. Good design comes from knowledge, practical use and research. Notice that successful games often have hundreds of hours of research behind them, they're not just made up ****.

I don't think it's a rightful argument against made up languages, if anything it's hysteria against a poorly researched/implemented game.

Huh. I like the sound of that. edit: ok, holy ****. uh..

To clarify - I'm not saying characters ingame should speak in these artificial languages (however cool that would be). I'm simply proposing they add at least a basic linguistic step to the writing/worldbuilding pipeline. No need for Tolkien-like insanity, the advantages (especially in the long run) should be enough to warrant even the little time spent. Names and onomastics have been mentioned - that's exactly what I mean. Names can tell us a lot about what/whom they describe. Even without thinking about it too much we can guess what race/nationality someone is, or if they're culturally related to someone else we know. I doubt Obsidian are writing down every single type of crops grown in every part of PE's world, there's no need to have whole dictionaries of words for all the languages either. But to know what type of languages they are, how they evolved and interacted, what grammar changes there were in that evolution/interaction etc., that just adds consistency, believability and increases immersion. It also simplifies the process of extending and developing the world further.

I dare say it doesn't take that long if you're not just one guy. (being one J.R.R. Tolkien does help, sure, but division of labour and all that does a lot)

(Doublepost of doom, sorry.) That is certainly doable and would indeed save resources. BUT, in my eyes that's a bit unprofessional. There are students of linguistics who'd probably create a usable language for a reasonable fee. (good grief, am I advocating the abuse and exploitation of students and undercutting freelancing linguists?! How utterly wrong of me.) The lore of any RPG eventually becomes the subject of player disputes and fan creations. They'll start caring a lot about this world where they experienced many adventures. If they find out the writing system and magical language are not original and straight out ripped from our world (and not even very interesting/unusual choices of earthly languages at that), they'll be disappointed. I'd be. An example of a success in this matter (I'd say anyway) - the Dothraki language in Game of Thrones. The actors are not speaking Bulgarian, Romanian, or Czech (which is a common practice, you let the extras speak some babble in their native tongue and pass it as whatever alien language they're supposed to have. Try screening that movie in Romania, that'll be fun.), they're speaking a fully functional language. The writers don't need to write babble, they can write exactly what they need and it'll be consistent.

Hang on! Going on and on about cooldowns and vancian magic on forums is dandy, but the minute someone mentions that languages should make sense, it's hyper-nerdy? :D Crikey. (I don't speak Klingon, but I used to write in Quenya now and then. I also created a crude version of a Southron speech based on Old Persian and Hittite for our Middle Earth RPG. ULTRA MEGA HYPER NERD ALERT!)

No fans of linguistics around here?

Justin Sweet is pretty famous, IWD fans are only a subset of all fantasy art fans I reckon.

How are the languages of PE's world being made? We've gotten quite a bit of the lore yesterday in the 20th update and I had a mixed reaction to the names in there. Some sound vaguely Earthly (especially the elven ones remind me of Gaelic or something like that), others are quite alien. Do you guys have a linguist on the team, or are the writers "just winging it"? Certainly I can understand that most players won't be ever able to tell the difference, but there are advantages to creating the whole thing the "proper" way. (it's easier to scale it up later, or add cultures or cultural evolution) Especially since PE aims to be a long series of games (if all goes well), doing this part of the worldbuilding in depth might be a good move. (if anyone's read Neal Stephenson's ReamDe, there's quite a funny subplot about a writer taking over a fictional MMORPG's lore and rewriting ALL THE NAMES, because he's a linguist and the names don't make sense.) Someone posted this in comments under a RPS article about the screenshot, I wonder if you're familiar with this language development kit: http://www.zompist.com/kit.html

It's alright, show us where?

Probably not being a top-down-view turn based RPG, unlike the other two, they felt it wasn't a good candidate.

I'd like to point out that using funky pants and feathered hats from this period has already been done in a very popular fantasy IP - Warhammer. So, it's not as far out as some may think and it CAN be done in a very cool way.

I'm not sure I should even guess, I'm quite slow. Especially compared to Kieran who's super fast (as I've heard ). The wallpaper, knowing about Kieran's speed, 3 days? 4 days? A painting of this epic scope would take me a week at least. All those ghouly crawlers... Anyway, he's on Facebook, so we could ask. For reusability, I don't think there's much of that. You could probably start painting other expressions from one neutral face, you'd most likely use one portrait to colour pick others... Potraits such as those seen in BG and IWD would probably take about a day, perhaps two if one is slower like me. Kieran's style is indeed more colourful and slightly cartoony at times. IIRC he worked for Disney for a while (or some other cartoon company), so it's natural it shows through. I think he nailed the tone with the wallpaper for sure.

I'd like to poiint out Kieran Yanner - who did the recently released PE wallpaper. He's really good. It might mean he'll do some more art for the game, or not. Whichever, the dwarven ranger suggests they have artists more than capable of doing colour portraits. Justin Sweet would be a nice nostalgia trip, but might also clash with the rest of the game's art created by Obsidian staff artists. Here's Kieran's website btw: http://www.kieranyanner.com/ as for the cost of artwork, it's true the fantasy game market pays less than others. But big established artists like Sweet probably get a bit more than the average Joes. So for something like 20-30 portraits it could be quite a sum of money. (depends on the detail and size, but a colour page could be anything from 300 USD to 1000 USD)

i would even go further to say that the concept art of PE so far plain sucks. look at these from wasteland 2 then look back at PE pieces: http://www.sghi.info...dree.Wallin.jpg http://images2.wikia...concept_art.jpg https://inxile-waste...ers-concept.jpg The PE concept art is quite lovely. Please, understand that the point of concept art is not to please the player, it is to provide a design for modelers and texturers. Sure, it's often used for player viewing pleasure on websites and in manuals, or on loading screens, but that's not its primary purpose. Also, character art is very different to this kind of moody atmospheric art you posted. Either those are made to convey the feeling of a location, or to give an idea of the game as a whole. Or - most likely in the case of the last one - as promotional images. Which is more the role of the recently released PE wallpaper. Which is fantastic. (Kieran Yanner is very accomplished and here he proved why that is the case) I'm quite pleasantly surprised by the nature of concepts revealed so far. Fewer spikes on armour, giant pauldrons and massive hammers than I'd expect from a fantasy RPG.