RPS Exclusive Hands-On With A Valley Without Wind

[zebramatt]

Although perhaps it is useful criticism, insofar as it highlights an unnecessary potential reason not to buy the game: people who care about such things think it's ugly based on what they've seen so far. A few high res images or videos should go a long way, if so.

[Magos Mechanicus]

@Teal_Blue:
I wouldn't go that far. I've played a fair bit of DF myself and love it for its incredible depth, but having tried it both with graphical tilesets and the ASCII art I prefer the former and can't see how it hurts the game for anyone. For one thing, they're far easier to get an overview over.

In the end, graphics are a significant part of a game, and while Chris is quite good about unifying them, AVwW's art direction is built around existing commodity art assets that don't always gel with each other (and indeed, aren't all supposed to, for lore reasons). Combine that with compression losses and some people evidently do get turned off at first sight. Hopefully the demo will make a more effective convincer. If alpha testers find it addictive, it sounds like it will.

[Nalgas]

I guess now that not only is the changelog public but also the bug tracker, it's not exactly a secret anymore who's been doing what, and I can at least comment on some general stuff now (you should've seen me trying to act all casual replying to the last big blog post, heh).

Is it the most amazing-looking game ever?  No, but I don't think anyone ever expected it to be, and if that's what you want, you can go spend $60+ on something with a budget of tens of millions of dollars with dozens or hundreds of artists behind it.  Not everything in AVWW quite fits together perfectly, and there are plenty of nits to pick while looking at screenshots or videos, even uncompressed ones to a lesser extent, but what else are you going to do with a screenshot other than stare at it and pore over the details?  It's not like it's interactive and you can play with it.

While actually playing the game, on the other hand, there's no time for any of that, and what matters more is whether things serve their purposes of being recognizable and distinguishable.  For the most part that's been true while also generally being in the range of looking "good enough" to "actually good" in the context of "what you're able to see while running around as things are trying to kill you and eat you", and there really hasn't been much that stood out enough to distract me from either playing the game normally or attempting to find creative new ways to make the game stop working.

Amusingly enough, the stuff people have been griping about with the artwork and way the game looks in every single preview article is probably the only thing about the game I haven't submitted a bug report of any kind for.

[x4000]

Yep, now that beta is imminent and the mantis is public, there's no need to keep quiet on who is an alpha tester. Everybody who wants to is going to have access in less than a week, and if you weren't an alpha tester I'd say you're getting the better end of this bargain given the transformation of the game during alpha testing.

[Nice Save]

The screenshots and compressed videos don't do the game justice. Once everyone see it in motion I think any doubts will evaporate. Even with an HD video, it's actually a lot easier to see what's going on in the game when you're in control. (Hint: you're the one spewing fireballs all over the place)

Yep, now that beta is imminent and the mantis is public, there's no need to keep quiet on who is an alpha tester. Everybody who wants to is going to have access in less than a week, and if you weren't an alpha tester I'd say you're getting the better end of this bargain given the transformation of the game during alpha testing.

Yeah, while I was astonished at how (relatively, for my idea of an alpha) polished the alpha was when I got my hands on it, a lot of minor annoyances and roadblocks to learning the game have been ironed out since then. I reckon the new game experience has become much better over the time I've been playing (and bombarding Chris with enough feedback to bury a small house).

If anyone has a question for alpha testers I'm happy to answer if that's okay with Chris and the team.

[x4000]

Perfectly fine with me!

[OobleckTheGreen]

I've played quite a lot of DF. Like most fans of the game, it's the depth that brings me back, not the graphics. DF is a great game for its content. That said, I've wished a hundred times that someone would build a functional 3D isometric version of DF to make the world more visually accessible. After all, a content-rich game is made even better if it's nice to look at.

I personally think that AVWW is making great strides in the graphics department, and I suspect that the graphics will keep getting better and better as time goes on. After all, once Arcen finally allows us to open up our wallets on this one, they'll have a (hopefully) much larger budget to work with.

For now, I think the real issue for some is not that the graphics are "bad" but that they're quite different from the norm. This is a pretty innovative game, as I see it. A side scroller with more depth than most contemporary games calling themselves RPG's is pretty innovative by itself. But if you look at the art, it's pretty innovative as well. It's not big budget beautiful, but most innovations in this world aren't. It's what's under the hood that makes a performance car truly interesting, not the paint job.

This game is shaping up nicely and it's doing so on a minimalist budget, from what I can see. I say embrace a little change and innovation.

[superking]

Although, yes, it is rather ugly, and am still not entirely convinced by the shift from a top-down world to a 2D world, it is beginning to charm me.

+1

[KDR_11k]

Clearly, no one on RPS has played Dwarf Fortress.    I have not, but I've been watching a LP for it and to say the least, it is the ugliest graphics I have ever seen in a game. 

Granted, its in Alpha/BETA or something, but cmon.  Picky lot around there lol.

King

There's a massive and important difference between low-tech and bad. ASCII is very low tech but it's not the ugliest a game can be. Think horribly drawn MS Paint art. It's important how aesthetically pleasing the result is (and plain ASCII is still far above some of the atrocities of 1990s web design). One factor of that is how close the result seems to be to what the developer intended which allows judging the dev's competence.

For the guy who laughed, I've played games that looked horribly and played well but I've played far more that looked horribly and played just as horribly (and the rate of good games is much, MUCH higher among pretty games, if the only ugly games you played were good ones then you're sheltered). Often graphics that seem low effort (stock models, photoshop filters) just point at games developed with little effort put into making them good. I know that AVWW will be worth playing but for the sales it's important that people go "I want to play that" when they first see it. Of course there are quite a few idiots who are impossible to please but there are also a lot of people who see so many damn games that they can't offer each more than a cursory glance before deciding which ones to learn more about.

I was planning to watch a 1080p video until I remembered that I only run 1280x960 on my PC.

[Nalgas]

For the guy who laughed, I've played games that looked horribly and played well but I've played far more that looked horribly and played just as horribly (and the rate of good games is much, MUCH higher among pretty games, if the only ugly games you played were good ones then you're sheltered).

I'm the guy who laughed.  The reason I laughed is actually the opposite; there are so very many games out there that look great but play horribly.  They dump tons of money into the art budget and put minimal effort into making an interesting game or even making a finished game and just rush out something bland and buggy...but at least it's pretty, so who cares if it's not fun to play even when it's not busy crashing-to-desktop every six minutes?  I wasn't laughing because I don't agree that half-assing the presentation, graphical and otherwise, can be a sign of doing a half-assed job on the rest of the game, because it very much so can be, but because you implied a rather strong correlation between good graphics and good games, which I've learned to distrust over the years through personal experience.  It's usually true of the absolute best games, where every single element of them comes together perfectly, but those are few and far between (and even with those that become classics, I should make the distinction that it's less about "good graphics" and more about being aesthetically and functionally suited to the game itself).

I was planning to watch a 1080p video until I remembered that I only run 1280x960 on my PC.

I salute you for your choice of resolution.  You have no idea how happy I am to finally meet the one other person in the world who uses 1280x960 instead of 1280x1024 and actually has a proper aspect ratio.  Heh.

[zebramatt]

1280 by 800 here! 

[Nalgas]

1280 by 800 here! 

That's what my laptop is, too.  I haven't actually used 1280x960 in a long, long time (my desktop's 1920x1200 these days, after a strange progression that included 1920x1440, 1344x1008 (I swear I am not making that up), and 1600x1200), but I always chose it over 1280x1024 on CRTs.  I'd rather have square pixels than a few extra pixels that are the wrong size/shape.

[superking]

1280 by 800 here! 

aww yearh

[Cyborg]

On the subject of graphics…

Parents often say to their children, "It's what's inside that counts." It is often followed by cutesy cartoons and all kinds of stories about the topic. But that should be amended, "it's what's inside that counts... To your mom and dad." The real world cares what you look like; everything from a job interview, dating, court dates, movies and celebrity, how you look matters. Is it fair? Should it be like this? No, but human beings are flawed, and this is part of the program.

Likewise, if you present yourself to the masses with the graphics shown at RPS, the reaction you get is the masses. AI war attracts a certain kind of gamer that looks within for decent gameplay and a deep strategy game. It's the same for dwarf Fortress. And it will have to be the same for this game as well.

It's actually doing a disservice to continue on with the lie of that little saying.

[KDR_11k]

Also let's not forget that the Tyrian sprites in AI War looked pretty good by themselves and screenshots are often handpicked to include as many explosions as possible.