There's this idea going around that 2d games are more expensive to make. I'm not saying that's wrong, but I want to take some time to analyse it.
3d requires models to be created, textured, rigged, have shaders written for it, and (in the case of characters) animated. Then the lighting comes into play. That's a lot of work, but the tradeoff is that once it's done you can place the camera anywhere and the scene will work. It allows for dynamic changes in camera angles, and gives the option to change things easily.
2d requires hand(photoshop)-painted backgrounds. This takes care of modeling, texturing and lighting all in one. It requires more careful design work, as each angle must be planned, and used in an efficient manner. Characters need to be drawn/animated at around 12-24 frames per second (depends on budget). This means idle cycles, walk cycles, talking cycles, picking up items (either a generic 'pickup' gesture for lower budgets, or properly animate every item). All "special" actions need to be animated by hand. Of course this applies to 3d as well, however 2d has to have every frame drawn. Walk boxes/click targets must be created manually, and your ability to use the Z axis is very restricted. The advantages here are that you don't need to light, model, shade and texture every scene.
It would be interesting to perform an in-depth analysis of which costs more.
lol ... i hope you are the only one who thinks this, a monkey island with crysis graphics ... just lol ... monkey island is a PIRATES GAME! in a "phantasy world" ... i think catoonish graphics are the best for such a game ...
What's so bad about that? You can have realistic graphics and still have comedy. Realism would just add a whole lot of atmosphere that I would simply find enchanting. But I doubt it'll ever happen. I'm not talking ultra realistic. An exaggerated realism, if you will. Larger than life, but with epic detail. You can't say that's not appealing.
But anyway, I don't really mind cartoons either. I just can't wait to play TMI.
There's this idea going around that 2d games are more expensive to make. I'm not saying that's wrong, but I want to take some time to analyse it.
3d requires models to be created, textured, rigged, have shaders written for it, and (in the case of characters) animated. Then the lighting comes into play. That's a lot of work, but the tradeoff is that once it's done you can place the camera anywhere and the scene will work. It allows for dynamic changes in camera angles, and gives the option to change things easily.
2d requires hand(photoshop)-painted backgrounds. This takes care of modeling, texturing and lighting all in one. It requires more careful design work, as each angle must be planned, and used in an efficient manner. Characters need to be drawn/animated at around 12-24 frames per second (depends on budget). This means idle cycles, walk cycles, talking cycles, picking up items (either a generic 'pickup' gesture for lower budgets, or properly animate every item). All "special" actions need to be animated by hand. Of course this applies to 3d as well, however 2d has to have every frame drawn. Walk boxes/click targets must be created manually, and your ability to use the Z axis is very restricted. The advantages here are that you don't need to light, model, shade and texture every scene.
It would be interesting to perform an in-depth analysis of which costs more.
Don't forget that 3-D has other advantages. Once Telltale creates an engine to create 3-D games, it can use that engine for all of its games, replacing characters, objects, and scenery for each game. Not that they could not create a 2-D engine and do the same thing, but they already have one for 3-D. For 3-D games, it is much easier for the game to seem much bigger, as the player can explore entire rooms as opposed to a room with one angled shot. 3-D games can much more easily reuse objects in the environment, such as trees or barrels, which saves time and can fill up space. Now, in my opinion, 2-D is much more visually pleasing, especially the 3-D used in Curse of Monkey Island, but I understand that Telltale has certain budgetary restrictions that CMI did not.
completely agree with this statement. The textures are too plain and lack sufficient detail for you to become absorbed in the MI world. They look worse than EMI. I'm a big fan but even so, the visuals are a major disappointment for me.
I also agree that a 2-D scrolling style should be adopted like CMI, as attention to detail can simply be drawn into the watercolour backgrounds. We want Monkey Island 3 visuals!!
It's a little more than two weeks until the game comes out. Stop expecting drastic changes in the graphics just because you guys wish it. However, in case you missed the many people exclaiming this, Telltale has stated that the released screenshots are NOT representative of the final game, and are still being tweaked and polished.
3d models can be reused, over.. and over.. and over again to do anything you want. A well rigged 3d model is basically a puppet.
On the flip side, while you can reuse walk cycles, if you want your 2d animation to suddenly stand on his head or do something not previously drawn, you gotta get that pen out once more and here we go again with individual frames.
It's time consuming and exhausting. I know, my final year project at uni was a 2d animation.
I always found 3d a LOT faster to animate, it's just slow to weight, rig and model. Comparatively, probably a similar amount of time is spent for a basic walk animation but for anything more complex? It's definintely going to be cheaper to do a series using 3d models that you can reuse and reuse again than having to draw everything from scratch right? People complain if you reuse animation lol, look at Hannah Barbara.
Anyway, as I said before, I quite like the cartoony style. With a little polish I have faith it'll look just spiffy. (ahem.. I went a little british there didn't I?)
completely agree with this statement. The textures are too plain and lack sufficient detail for you to become absorbed in the MI world. They look worse than EMI. I'm a big fan but even so, the visuals are a major disappointment for me.
I also agree that a 2-D scrolling style should be adopted like CMI, as attention to detail can simply be drawn into the watercolour backgrounds. We want Monkey Island 3 visuals!!
Once again I'll bring this up. Clearly (sarcasm) TMI looks much worse.
Did someone say text adventures? I'd happily play a new Monkey Island text adventure The obsession with graphics isn't healthy. While it can make for beautiful, immersive environments (Prince of Persia) it can also lead to a poor plot (Prince of Persia) and frustrating gameplay (Prince of Persia). I see character in Telltale's Monkey, and I'm more than happy with that for a while.
It looks like Telltale is finally starting to listen to fans about the graphics in Tales of Monkey Island. They have gone back to the drawing board, and redesigned the 3D environments...
[/sarcasm]
This is from The Infernal Machine (image taken from the Monkey Island in "Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine" thread). Honestly, it looks worse than Escape from Monkey Island, even.
The only game I'm playing at the moment is pretty much a glorified spreadsheet without any kind of graphics at all - and it's one of the best-selling PC games of our time. In a lot of ways it's also more immersive than all of its 3d, 2d or whoopa-D peers because of it.
Hmmmm, sounds like Championship Manager - 01/02 maybe.
The only game I'm playing at the moment is pretty much a glorified spreadsheet without any kind of graphics at all - and it's one of the best-selling PC games of our time. In a lot of ways it's also more immersive than all of its 3d, 2d or whoopa-D peers because of it. It's not a matter of being as technically as advanced as it gets. It's about nailing the experience you're aiming for, whatever it may be.
I find this "debate" has turned into the bizarre some page or so ago. Back in the 80s, when someone like Paul Norman dragged beer, his wife, cigarettes and Beatles records into the garage and kept the door slammed shut for days this was different. This was a one man show. And a man had got to know his limits. Modern game development is team business. There's a team dedicated for art, for sound, for writing, etc. and Telltale surely aren't any different, as "small" a developer they may be. So whenever somebody talks about sacrificing this for that, .. that's just absurd.
It's being brought up with AAA titles as well, claiming that all ressources available would bei alocated to visual wizbang and marketing campaigns and whatnot rather than gameplay, writing and monkey pants. I mean, how else can it be that games this big, expensive and visually advanced sometimes still suck? Surely this cannot possibly be some designers' or writers' fault - it's that all money was spent on bump maps galore!
Telltale are relatively small business compared to the big ones, they've got short development cycles, and whilst I personally think that some of the pre-release screenies look a little flat, I'm confident. Wallace&Gromit looks splendid. And sounds as much.
I mean the time it would take to make one character model that detailed, a whole cast of characters & other stuff could be created and when you have a business model like Telltale (and any other episodic game company) then you can't afford to spend that much time on something which isn't really vital to the game.
Sure, I admit it's not realistic for a relatively small company like TTG now, it would be ridiculous for a game which must be released monthly.
I was just showing why graphics aren't always shallow or useless as lots of people said.
Sometimes they just increase awesomeness and inspiration, if the game has already great qualities like MI.
(I'm going to have my say on this topic, I'll be quick, and it'll go like this...)
*twitch.*
To paraphrase the venerable Homer Simpson; "Must educate anonymous Internet schmoe, wheeeeeee!"
*ahem.*
So, no, Tales of Monkey Island probably doesn't have anistropic filtering, motion blur, environment mapping, high dynamic range, lens flares, depth of field, an advanced particle system, an advanced physics system which allows for realistic movement in environment objects and cloth, mimap--uwaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAaaaaAAAaaaaaAAAAAAAAAA!
Sorry, I got sucked into a vortex of the concerns of graphics in modern games, and many of them do concern themselves with all those things and more. In fact, I too am a graphics wh--wait, I'm not allowed to say that, am I? Ah, I too am a graphics activist, but I realise there's more to graphics than just the technological aspect of things.
This is why I support Telltales approach of doing the game in 3D in the first place, but I find that many fans of graphics are very two dimensional, and their conversations go like this (read with Monty Python inflections): "It's got no mipmappin'!", "Whaarrt?! No mipmappin'?!" And so on.
But there's so much more to games that I feel is generally ignored, a game can be technically perfect but it can have a totally crap animation system. Recent games have been learning from this, for example, I was particularly pleased at how many well animated ways I could wreak havoc in Prototype (whipfisting *gigglesnerk*), along with all the technologically advanced bits. But some games have crap animation, and that's ignored.
Oblivion is a fine example of crap animation, whenever I see that game in motion I cringe; whether it's monsters, the hyperactive physics system that has things leaping off tables and a mile into the air whenever one gently nudges something, the Horses (oh Gods, the Horses), the combat, the swimming, the...ANYTHING, someone hire those guys proper animators, for the love of all that's cinematic and decent! DO IT NAO!
...but I digress.
The point is though that animation is the centrepoint of a cinematic experience, and what is Tales of Monkey Island? After a fashion, it's a cinematic experience, a comedic one, but still. Actually, one of the things I really hated about Curse of Monkey Island was how generally un-emotive it all was, except for the cutscenes, it didn't feel well animated at all, so 2D can suffer this problem as much as 3D.
And 3D does portray the best cinematic experience through such animations, so there's no excuse for not doing it properly in 3D, yet you'd be surprised how many games screw this up, and how many graphics...activists fail to notice!
Look up some CGI animated shorts, some of those that have been Oscar nominated and winning, a lot of them don't look that much better than Tales, they don't have a really very technologically advanced look at all, but what they do excel at is animation, and that's what matters.
Now the adventure gaming medium has always been home to cinematic experiences, from Monkey Island to Broken Sword, and that's what we should expect from an adventure game. Providing it has that, it doesn't matter that it's not technologically advanced. The only way Telltale could fail me is if they suffered a critical animation fail, like Oblivion or CMI. But to be honest, from the looks of the videos and the screenshots I've seen, they haven't.
Considering the type of game this is, what Telltale are doing is frankly the best we could hope for. Would anistropic filtering, motion blur, environment mapping, high dynamic range, lens flares, depth of fi--eeeaAAAaaaAAAAAAaaAAAA! Sorry. Anyway... would an incredibly advanced graphics system really add to the game, at all?
In my opinion: Not in the least, not even marginally.
So I say we let Telltale do what they do best.
(Also, Crysis had fairly 'orrible animation, too! /flee)
Considering the type of game this is, what Telltale are doing is frankly the best we could hope for. Would anistropic filtering, motion blur, environment mapping, high dynamic range, lens flares, depth of fi--eeeaAAAaaaAAAAAAaaAAAA! Sorry. Anyway... would an incredibly advanced graphics system really add to the game, at all?
In my opinion: Not in the least, not even marginally.
I don't agree.. it does add to the games to have a bit more advanced gfx for the atmosphere. It's like getting a nokia phone from 10 years ago.. It might work and all, but wouldn't you much rather have an iphone or something like that? With time we advance at so should telltale and their games.. it's not that the games are bad, it's just that the gfx are downright ugly.. at least sam and max is without the use of some of the effects that you mentioned..
It depends on what you're after. If you want the newest latest thing to show off to everybody and use all the extra features you can get an iPhone. If you just want a portable phone to make calls you can get an old Nokia. Turn that statement in reference to a Monkey Island adventure and the same applies. I just want my MI for now. Maybe later when adventures really start to catch on again I'd love to spring for the iPhone equivalent for and MI game, but for now I'm happy with what I've got. It does its job and it does it well.
I'm wondering.. A lot of people compare the graphics they like to games such as Call of Duty, Crysis, or Oblivion, games obviously suited for creating life-like environments in which you should be able to blow someone to Heaven, Hell, and back again in a multitude of ways, each of which should look spiffier and cooler than the one before. Creating the right explosion effects, the nicest impact dents from trying to shoot someone with a shotgun at close range while the other party is wearing body armour, that sort of thing, they require nice graphics, definitely.
But, is it truly necessary for a game such as Monkey Island to compete with them on that level? Is the target market for those games the same as for Monkey Island? Maybe the developers are better suited for explaining this, but I think the markets differ. The average person trying to get a simple shooter will be sorely disappointed when he picks up Monkey Island; if, by the first island, he does not get to shoot at least 50 monkeys with an arsenal ranging from thrown swords to a small hand-held cannon, the player will wonder why he even bought it, if he expected a game like Crysis or Call of Duty. The markets for these products are different, and while it is definitely good if people from the shooter market buy and enjoy Monkey Island, they are not the main market catered to, I assume.
And, to be honest, I think that there is something to be said for making the game available with slightly-less-than-perfect graphics; adventure games often are the domain of casual gamers, people who come home from work and play for an hour or so, and then go their own way again. These people often do not have the best computers available, and having the game run laggy, or not run at all, on their computers is not a good thing if they're your primary market. You must adjust your game to the specifics of the hardware that your primary market is using, not markets that will maybe buy your game, but from which the main bulk of your income will not come.
So, to make a long story slightly shorter, I think that with expensive graphics you cater to a market which is not your primary market, and might even alienate your primary market. God knows I'm happy that Monkey Island isn't that hardware-intensive, otherwise my poor laptop would not be able to run it.
Tales of Monkey Island probably doesn't have anistropic filtering, motion blur, environment mapping, high dynamic range, lens flares, depth of field, an advanced particle system, an advanced physics system which allows for realistic movement in environment objects and cloth, mimap
I would like it if it did have antistropic filtering, hdr and possibly environment mapping. They would add to it a little. Couldn't hurt, at least. I'd say there's a pretty good chance we'll get some antistropic filtering at least.
Note the following:
"One of the blessings and curses of the Telltale “Insanely Rapid Production Process” (that’s IRPP™) is the fact that we’re constantly tweaking the visuals until the very last moment. For example, the little bits of the season prologue that we leaked at E3, as cool as they were, now look approximately 9500x cooler a mere three weeks later. I mean, they’re freaking gorgeous."
I think that's enough evidence that we should hold our horses.
I wanted to weigh into this discussion about the graphic capabilities of the engine because frankly, I'm not happy with the visual quality of the game (and I'm not looking for bump-mapped, super high detailed meshes, HDRI etc etc) and after carefully considering WHY the visuals in this game rub me the wrong way I boiled it down to the way the lighting works within the engine.
I realised that nothing casts a shadow. While the meshes that make up the character all have their own shadows, they don't cause shadows on anything around them.
Let's have a look at this screenshot for example:
if image isn't showing click here.
Now have a look at the line where the hair meets the scalp, there's not even an hint of a shadow to suggest that there is less light hitting that area of the scalp. I realise this is supposed to look cartoony, but even in cartoons a character will have shadows cast over them or they won't have any shadow at all. At the moment the engine is in a weird half/half state where objects self shadow, but don't cast shadows. There either needs to be full shadows, or no shadows otherwise everything looks like it doesn't belong together.
So I quickly just stuck the image in photoshop and did a very rough shadow pass where I thought shadows should be and after stopping and looking at the result I found it a much more appealing image to look at.
Just by adding a bit of shadow from the hair to the head, getting rid of the ugly rim underneath the eyes, getting rid of the harsh light on the bit of clothing near his chest, putting a bit of shadow onto his forearm as it disappears into his sleeve, and adding a little bit of shadow to his hand where the light isn't getting to directly and the chain is casting a shadow I thought it looked like a much more cohesive and felt as though the objects were actually part of the scene.
Feel free to comment on this because as much as i want the game to succeed the lighting issues i have with the engine are really turning me off buying the game.
Once again you are criticizing the lighting in screenshots where the lighting is NOT FINISHED.
Yes well if a company is going to post screenshot that don't reflect the finished look of the game then people will point out the parts that feel unfinished. I wasn't trying to point out the flaws in the visuals just for the fact that I didn't like it. I tried to understand why I didn't like the screenshots and tried to point out how they could possibly make the game look better by making an example of what felt unfinished.
And if a game looks like that before it's released, it doesn't matter if it's in progress shots. I didn't know that the lighting was incomplete, and if these things don't get pointed out, often the developers don't worry about fixing it because they think people won't mind.
If the lighting in the game is incomplete then they need to post screen shots with a sign that says Work In Progress somewhere on the image rather than releasing them with the impression that that is the final look of the engine.
Yes well if a company is going to post screenshot that don't reflect the finished look of the game then people will point out the parts that feel unfinished. I wasn't trying to point out the flaws in the visuals just for the fact that I didn't like it. I tried to understand why I didn't like the screenshots and tried to point out how they could possibly make the game look better by making an example of what felt unfinished.
And if a game looks like that before it's released, it doesn't matter if it's in progress shots. I didn't know that the lighting was incomplete, and if these things don't get pointed out, often the developers don't worry about fixing it because they think people won't mind.
If the lighting in the game is incomplete then they need to post screen shots with a sign that says Work In Progress somewhere on the image rather than releasing them with the impression that that is the final look of the engine.
I was trying to be constructive in my criticism.
You may have a point in that perhaps they should not hve released as many shots as they did, and sometimes I feel like I'm the only one pointing out that TT polishes right up to release and these are very much work in progress...
However, you seem to be someone who at least knows a little about graphics and lighting, and if you compare different screenshots it's fairly evident that some of those scenes are in a much better state of completeness than others, don't you think? It seems highly unlikely that they would release a game that was so visually inconsistent.
So, between:
1) The inconsistency in the quality of the shots, and
2) The way that Telltale works
it's not difficult to figure out that those aren't representative of the final look, and this has since been verified by several people. That's why I might seem frustrated that people aren't taking this into account.
I'm wondering.. A lot of people compare the graphics they like to games such as Call of Duty, Crysis, or Oblivion, games obviously suited for creating life-like environments in which you should be able to blow someone to Heaven, Hell, and back again in a multitude of ways, each of which should look spiffier and cooler than the one before. Creating the right explosion effects, the nicest impact dents from trying to shoot someone with a shotgun at close range while the other party is wearing body armour, that sort of thing, they require nice graphics, definitely.
But, is it truly necessary for a game such as Monkey Island to compete with them on that level? Is the target market for those games the same as for Monkey Island? .....
Agreed. Oh gosh how much I do agree with your post.
I read the title, twitched, and started hard thinking of how to reply my view on this topic. Seems like I don't need to, you just gave the perfect answer.
Indeed. This game is not like those hyper-realistic xbox-ps3 games out there. It's supposed to be CARTOON-styled adventure, and for that I think the current graphics are more than brilliant. Sure, a few tweaks here and there, (lightning, texture details? ) but heck, it's still unfinished.
And yes, I don't have a top-notch computer to play new games on, either. It's already 6 years old, and can hardly run ANY new game nowadays.
..That's why I was screaming for joy when Sam & Max was actually RUNNING on it, and smoothly! I have to thank Telltale for that.
Surely, I also think graphics still are in a pretty important role when it comes to graphic adventures. But being uber-semi-ultra-hyper shiny and polished? no need to. Cartoony style mostly hides it away with it's bright colour-filled worlds. Plus the animation is nice, and the characters have different expressions while speaking. That creates the emotion for me, and that's all that matters when it comes to graphics.
I'm sure it will look great in game. I liked what Telltale did with Sam and Max in Season 2 and the latter half of Season One. If they had given it a Monkey Island spin I'd have been cool with that. But I think it'll look even better than that and be 3d's version of the 2d CMI - jarring at first but accepted near universally later on.
I'm sure it will look great in game. I liked what Telltale did with Sam and Max in Season 2 and the latter half of Season One. If they had given it a Monkey Island spin I'd have been cool with that. But I think it'll look even better than that and be 3d's version of the 2d CMI - jarring at first but accepted near universally later on.
This.
People often forget how strange CMI looked when it was first seen.
I just wanted to post something I found here. For those of you who are falling back on the "the Special Edition of Secret looks so much better because it's 2D" idea, Lucasarts didn't make SOMI: SE quite as 2D as we thought.
You'll recognize this. And oh my, guess what, it's 3D.
And after looking at a close-up of this sprite of Elaine, I'm convinced that the sprites are pre-rendered cel-shaded 3D. It looks like the style of Runaway, tbh.
Comments
3d requires models to be created, textured, rigged, have shaders written for it, and (in the case of characters) animated. Then the lighting comes into play. That's a lot of work, but the tradeoff is that once it's done you can place the camera anywhere and the scene will work. It allows for dynamic changes in camera angles, and gives the option to change things easily.
2d requires hand(photoshop)-painted backgrounds. This takes care of modeling, texturing and lighting all in one. It requires more careful design work, as each angle must be planned, and used in an efficient manner. Characters need to be drawn/animated at around 12-24 frames per second (depends on budget). This means idle cycles, walk cycles, talking cycles, picking up items (either a generic 'pickup' gesture for lower budgets, or properly animate every item). All "special" actions need to be animated by hand. Of course this applies to 3d as well, however 2d has to have every frame drawn. Walk boxes/click targets must be created manually, and your ability to use the Z axis is very restricted. The advantages here are that you don't need to light, model, shade and texture every scene.
It would be interesting to perform an in-depth analysis of which costs more.
What's so bad about that? You can have realistic graphics and still have comedy. Realism would just add a whole lot of atmosphere that I would simply find enchanting. But I doubt it'll ever happen. I'm not talking ultra realistic. An exaggerated realism, if you will. Larger than life, but with epic detail. You can't say that's not appealing.
But anyway, I don't really mind cartoons either. I just can't wait to play TMI.
Don't forget that 3-D has other advantages. Once Telltale creates an engine to create 3-D games, it can use that engine for all of its games, replacing characters, objects, and scenery for each game. Not that they could not create a 2-D engine and do the same thing, but they already have one for 3-D. For 3-D games, it is much easier for the game to seem much bigger, as the player can explore entire rooms as opposed to a room with one angled shot. 3-D games can much more easily reuse objects in the environment, such as trees or barrels, which saves time and can fill up space. Now, in my opinion, 2-D is much more visually pleasing, especially the 3-D used in Curse of Monkey Island, but I understand that Telltale has certain budgetary restrictions that CMI did not.
On the flip side, while you can reuse walk cycles, if you want your 2d animation to suddenly stand on his head or do something not previously drawn, you gotta get that pen out once more and here we go again with individual frames.
It's time consuming and exhausting. I know, my final year project at uni was a 2d animation.
I always found 3d a LOT faster to animate, it's just slow to weight, rig and model. Comparatively, probably a similar amount of time is spent for a basic walk animation but for anything more complex? It's definintely going to be cheaper to do a series using 3d models that you can reuse and reuse again than having to draw everything from scratch right? People complain if you reuse animation lol, look at Hannah Barbara.
Anyway, as I said before, I quite like the cartoony style. With a little polish I have faith it'll look just spiffy. (ahem.. I went a little british there didn't I?)
Anyway, I don't think I would have loved MI this much if MI1 was a text adventure.
Probably it wouldn't have attracted me. Honest.
[/sarcasm]
This is from The Infernal Machine (image taken from the Monkey Island in "Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine" thread). Honestly, it looks worse than Escape from Monkey Island, even.
Hmmmm, sounds like Championship Manager - 01/02 maybe.
I find this "debate" has turned into the bizarre some page or so ago. Back in the 80s, when someone like Paul Norman dragged beer, his wife, cigarettes and Beatles records into the garage and kept the door slammed shut for days this was different. This was a one man show. And a man had got to know his limits. Modern game development is team business. There's a team dedicated for art, for sound, for writing, etc. and Telltale surely aren't any different, as "small" a developer they may be. So whenever somebody talks about sacrificing this for that, .. that's just absurd.
It's being brought up with AAA titles as well, claiming that all ressources available would bei alocated to visual wizbang and marketing campaigns and whatnot rather than gameplay, writing and monkey pants. I mean, how else can it be that games this big, expensive and visually advanced sometimes still suck? Surely this cannot possibly be some designers' or writers' fault - it's that all money was spent on bump maps galore!
Telltale are relatively small business compared to the big ones, they've got short development cycles, and whilst I personally think that some of the pre-release screenies look a little flat, I'm confident. Wallace&Gromit looks splendid. And sounds as much.
Oops:
That was very close: FM08.
Do you still think great graphics would be pointless? This looks painly awesome... (thanks viz)
I was just showing why graphics aren't always shallow or useless as lots of people said.
Sometimes they just increase awesomeness and inspiration, if the game has already great qualities like MI.
*twitch.*
To paraphrase the venerable Homer Simpson; "Must educate anonymous Internet schmoe, wheeeeeee!"
*ahem.*
So, no, Tales of Monkey Island probably doesn't have anistropic filtering, motion blur, environment mapping, high dynamic range, lens flares, depth of field, an advanced particle system, an advanced physics system which allows for realistic movement in environment objects and cloth, mimap--uwaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAaaaaAAAaaaaaAAAAAAAAAA!
Sorry, I got sucked into a vortex of the concerns of graphics in modern games, and many of them do concern themselves with all those things and more. In fact, I too am a graphics wh--wait, I'm not allowed to say that, am I? Ah, I too am a graphics activist, but I realise there's more to graphics than just the technological aspect of things.
This is why I support Telltales approach of doing the game in 3D in the first place, but I find that many fans of graphics are very two dimensional, and their conversations go like this (read with Monty Python inflections): "It's got no mipmappin'!", "Whaarrt?! No mipmappin'?!" And so on.
But there's so much more to games that I feel is generally ignored, a game can be technically perfect but it can have a totally crap animation system. Recent games have been learning from this, for example, I was particularly pleased at how many well animated ways I could wreak havoc in Prototype (whipfisting *gigglesnerk*), along with all the technologically advanced bits. But some games have crap animation, and that's ignored.
Oblivion is a fine example of crap animation, whenever I see that game in motion I cringe; whether it's monsters, the hyperactive physics system that has things leaping off tables and a mile into the air whenever one gently nudges something, the Horses (oh Gods, the Horses), the combat, the swimming, the...ANYTHING, someone hire those guys proper animators, for the love of all that's cinematic and decent! DO IT NAO!
...but I digress.
The point is though that animation is the centrepoint of a cinematic experience, and what is Tales of Monkey Island? After a fashion, it's a cinematic experience, a comedic one, but still. Actually, one of the things I really hated about Curse of Monkey Island was how generally un-emotive it all was, except for the cutscenes, it didn't feel well animated at all, so 2D can suffer this problem as much as 3D.
And 3D does portray the best cinematic experience through such animations, so there's no excuse for not doing it properly in 3D, yet you'd be surprised how many games screw this up, and how many graphics...activists fail to notice!
Look up some CGI animated shorts, some of those that have been Oscar nominated and winning, a lot of them don't look that much better than Tales, they don't have a really very technologically advanced look at all, but what they do excel at is animation, and that's what matters.
Now the adventure gaming medium has always been home to cinematic experiences, from Monkey Island to Broken Sword, and that's what we should expect from an adventure game. Providing it has that, it doesn't matter that it's not technologically advanced. The only way Telltale could fail me is if they suffered a critical animation fail, like Oblivion or CMI. But to be honest, from the looks of the videos and the screenshots I've seen, they haven't.
Considering the type of game this is, what Telltale are doing is frankly the best we could hope for. Would anistropic filtering, motion blur, environment mapping, high dynamic range, lens flares, depth of fi--eeeaAAAaaaAAAAAAaaAAAA! Sorry. Anyway... would an incredibly advanced graphics system really add to the game, at all?
In my opinion: Not in the least, not even marginally.
So I say we let Telltale do what they do best.
(Also, Crysis had fairly 'orrible animation, too! /flee)
I don't agree.. it does add to the games to have a bit more advanced gfx for the atmosphere. It's like getting a nokia phone from 10 years ago.. It might work and all, but wouldn't you much rather have an iphone or something like that? With time we advance at so should telltale and their games.. it's not that the games are bad, it's just that the gfx are downright ugly.. at least sam and max is without the use of some of the effects that you mentioned..
I say:
I don't give a monkey.
But, is it truly necessary for a game such as Monkey Island to compete with them on that level? Is the target market for those games the same as for Monkey Island? Maybe the developers are better suited for explaining this, but I think the markets differ. The average person trying to get a simple shooter will be sorely disappointed when he picks up Monkey Island; if, by the first island, he does not get to shoot at least 50 monkeys with an arsenal ranging from thrown swords to a small hand-held cannon, the player will wonder why he even bought it, if he expected a game like Crysis or Call of Duty. The markets for these products are different, and while it is definitely good if people from the shooter market buy and enjoy Monkey Island, they are not the main market catered to, I assume.
And, to be honest, I think that there is something to be said for making the game available with slightly-less-than-perfect graphics; adventure games often are the domain of casual gamers, people who come home from work and play for an hour or so, and then go their own way again. These people often do not have the best computers available, and having the game run laggy, or not run at all, on their computers is not a good thing if they're your primary market. You must adjust your game to the specifics of the hardware that your primary market is using, not markets that will maybe buy your game, but from which the main bulk of your income will not come.
So, to make a long story slightly shorter, I think that with expensive graphics you cater to a market which is not your primary market, and might even alienate your primary market. God knows I'm happy that Monkey Island isn't that hardware-intensive, otherwise my poor laptop would not be able to run it.
I would like it if it did have antistropic filtering, hdr and possibly environment mapping. They would add to it a little. Couldn't hurt, at least. I'd say there's a pretty good chance we'll get some antistropic filtering at least.
http://www.destructoid.com/tales-of-monkey-island-q-a-with-telltale-designer-mike-stemmle-137500.phtml
Note the following:
"One of the blessings and curses of the Telltale “Insanely Rapid Production Process” (that’s IRPP™) is the fact that we’re constantly tweaking the visuals until the very last moment. For example, the little bits of the season prologue that we leaked at E3, as cool as they were, now look approximately 9500x cooler a mere three weeks later. I mean, they’re freaking gorgeous."
I think that's enough evidence that we should hold our horses.
I realised that nothing casts a shadow. While the meshes that make up the character all have their own shadows, they don't cause shadows on anything around them.
Let's have a look at this screenshot for example:
if image isn't showing click here.
Now have a look at the line where the hair meets the scalp, there's not even an hint of a shadow to suggest that there is less light hitting that area of the scalp. I realise this is supposed to look cartoony, but even in cartoons a character will have shadows cast over them or they won't have any shadow at all. At the moment the engine is in a weird half/half state where objects self shadow, but don't cast shadows. There either needs to be full shadows, or no shadows otherwise everything looks like it doesn't belong together.
So I quickly just stuck the image in photoshop and did a very rough shadow pass where I thought shadows should be and after stopping and looking at the result I found it a much more appealing image to look at.
if image isn't showing click here.
Just by adding a bit of shadow from the hair to the head, getting rid of the ugly rim underneath the eyes, getting rid of the harsh light on the bit of clothing near his chest, putting a bit of shadow onto his forearm as it disappears into his sleeve, and adding a little bit of shadow to his hand where the light isn't getting to directly and the chain is casting a shadow I thought it looked like a much more cohesive and felt as though the objects were actually part of the scene.
Feel free to comment on this because as much as i want the game to succeed the lighting issues i have with the engine are really turning me off buying the game.
fixed.i should do this more often.
yeah I noticed that, after refreshing it a couple of times they came back....weird
Actually now they're not showing at all so I've just linked to them.
Yes well if a company is going to post screenshot that don't reflect the finished look of the game then people will point out the parts that feel unfinished. I wasn't trying to point out the flaws in the visuals just for the fact that I didn't like it. I tried to understand why I didn't like the screenshots and tried to point out how they could possibly make the game look better by making an example of what felt unfinished.
And if a game looks like that before it's released, it doesn't matter if it's in progress shots. I didn't know that the lighting was incomplete, and if these things don't get pointed out, often the developers don't worry about fixing it because they think people won't mind.
If the lighting in the game is incomplete then they need to post screen shots with a sign that says Work In Progress somewhere on the image rather than releasing them with the impression that that is the final look of the engine.
I was trying to be constructive in my criticism.
You may have a point in that perhaps they should not hve released as many shots as they did, and sometimes I feel like I'm the only one pointing out that TT polishes right up to release and these are very much work in progress...
However, you seem to be someone who at least knows a little about graphics and lighting, and if you compare different screenshots it's fairly evident that some of those scenes are in a much better state of completeness than others, don't you think? It seems highly unlikely that they would release a game that was so visually inconsistent.
So, between:
1) The inconsistency in the quality of the shots, and
2) The way that Telltale works
it's not difficult to figure out that those aren't representative of the final look, and this has since been verified by several people. That's why I might seem frustrated that people aren't taking this into account.
Agreed. Oh gosh how much I do agree with your post.
I read the title, twitched, and started hard thinking of how to reply my view on this topic. Seems like I don't need to, you just gave the perfect answer.
Indeed. This game is not like those hyper-realistic xbox-ps3 games out there. It's supposed to be CARTOON-styled adventure, and for that I think the current graphics are more than brilliant. Sure, a few tweaks here and there, (lightning, texture details? ) but heck, it's still unfinished.
And yes, I don't have a top-notch computer to play new games on, either. It's already 6 years old, and can hardly run ANY new game nowadays.
..That's why I was screaming for joy when Sam & Max was actually RUNNING on it, and smoothly! I have to thank Telltale for that.
Surely, I also think graphics still are in a pretty important role when it comes to graphic adventures. But being uber-semi-ultra-hyper shiny and polished? no need to.
This.
People often forget how strange CMI looked when it was first seen.
You'll recognize this. And oh my, guess what, it's 3D.
And after looking at a close-up of this sprite of Elaine, I'm convinced that the sprites are pre-rendered cel-shaded 3D. It looks like the style of Runaway, tbh.