I'm still not getting how you quantify the amount of "soul" a game or part of a game has.
Just wanted to add something a little different to what championshewolf and sistersilicon have already said. There's a line (albeit a fuzzy one) between "art" and "deliverables," and I think many MMOs lean towards the latter. I'll get to that second part in a bit, after I try to describe what I mean by the former.
"Art," in the context of video games, is when a graphic designer (or sound producer, or writer, etc.) takes what's available, and produces design that shows inspiration, attention to detail (and the other side of the coin, lack of detail), and a personal sense of pride or even "fun." The art conveys that the artist was motivated by something other than pure functionality. It's hard to quantify (at least for now), but if you've ever seen a character's face that seems to evoke a personality, or a landscape that makes you just stand and look for a while, or a bit of music that you stick around to listen, then you've encountered art.
By "deliverables," I mean assets that are produced to order to satisfy a timeline and/or a function, but show little motivation otherwise. A character model that is sufficient to attach costumes to, a musical score that simply announces you've entered a different area or circumstance, or a landscape that simply connects other pieces of landscape - if there isn't art there, then it's just an asset delivered to spec.
Granted, in the context of MMOs or other video games, any asset that's art is also a deliverable, and there's always pressure to produce more rather than fuss over less; and granted that visual and audio assets are often well separated from more tangible stuff like gameplay mechanics. Nevertheless, presentation can make a significant difference
For a concrete example (in so far as we can have concreteness in such a discussion), I always considered vanilla WoW character faces to be artistically done (usually). Sure, there's a low polygon count there - but the artists generally did pretty well at conveying personalities with different faces. In contrast, the character models in CO and DCUO are just... there. There's variation, to be sure, but I'm personally hard-pressed to show "personality" in those games without relying on costume bits. It seems clear that the priority was to produce deliverables rather than create art. STO is slightly better in this regard (IMO), but the faces still feel kind of flat.
Ironically, WoW screwed the pooch with their first pass at remodeling the character faces... Below is a pic of two of my favorite characters, before and after the revision. Let me know which version of each conveys more personality, and what that personality might be...
I don't see how either of those conveys any personality.
Top left looks sick, like she has the plague or something top right looks kinda cheerful but that's it really bottom left looks like she was hit with a magic spell to make her sleep walk. bottom right looks kinda like a cunning sorcerer.
In both cases the model on the right is more detailed. I can almost count the polygons used to make the hair on the left... One thing I can think of that seems to be a real change is the shape of the faces. But I don't know if that's something fixable.
Eh, that's just you being you. Nice to see you completely missed my point about artists working with what they have available to them...
In any case, both characters were "accidents," in that the character creator threw up random models - but something about those models evoked a type of personality for me. Didn't take much tweaking to bring it out. You might not see what I saw, and that's fine - but my point is I saw something worthwhile in the old models that were completely lost with the new ones.
This is especially notable with the eyes, where the combination of shape and shading really made a difference. In the newer versions, the eyes are largely the same across the board - or at least the differences aren't nearly as pronounced.
In short, the pre-revision faces have the look of the designers taking some care to make the faces unique; the post-revision faces look like someone had a deadline to meet.
Eh, that's just you being you. Nice to see you completely missed my point about artists working with what they have available to them...
In any case, both characters were "accidents," in that the character creator threw up random models - but something about those models evoked a type of personality for me. Didn't take much tweaking to bring it out. You might not see what I saw, and that's fine - but my point is I saw something worthwhile in the old models that were completely lost with the new ones.
This is especially notable with the eyes, where the combination of shape and shading really made a difference. In the newer versions, the eyes are largely the same across the board - or at least the differences aren't nearly as pronounced.
In short, the pre-revision faces have the look of the designers taking some care to make the faces unique; the post-revision faces look like someone had a deadline to meet.
The old faces were entirely the work of modellers and texture artists. The new faces handed a bunch of responsibility to animators without anybody at Blizzard realizing that they now needed a Mood menu to really support them.
Choose your enemies carefully, because they will define you / Make them interesting, because in some ways they will mind you
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
Yeah, the new ones look better. No idea what you liked about the old ones. Probably sentimental attachment.
Better resolution does not guarantee better artwork. Had the designers tried to "capture" what made the original faces unique, I probably wouldn't have an issue. As it is, the new ones look like they were stamped out of a mold.
Each of them is visually distinct to me. And less ugly than the old ones. Yeah, low poly faces tend to look ugly in general because proper faces need smooth contours and low poly is not that.
Thing is, I think the designers DID just what you said they should do. The old faces had few differences, and the new faces look to me to be about the same in terms of being visually distinct from each other.
Look yet again - you're missing a lot. Specifically, compare the old human faces in columns 4 and 5, row 3 to each other, then compare the revised versions immediately below. The old faces have distinctly different eyes and mouths, giving different character to each face; the new versions just look like the same face with slightly different expression (ok, so one has freckles while the other doesn't - but even the freckles are de-emphasized in the new face). You can try the same exercise for any/all pairs of faces. I won't ask you, markhawkman, to report back, because even if you see what I'm saying, I suspect you'll shrug and say otherwise.
The eyes in the new faces are identical - and also cartoonishly large. In both old and new, the eyes do a lot to define the face, and the old eyes (including shading) absolutely show more variety. The new eyes not only show less variety, but due to their relative size, dominate the rest of the face.
Regardless, we're starting to veer off-track from the question of what "soul" is, and how to capture it, and the sub-question of what "art" is... but anything I have to say at this point will just be repeating myself.
New WoW faces are all terribly generic. They're all nearly the same face with changed eye colors and very subtle tweaks like lipstick color and sometimes very subtle wrinkles which get lost in darker skin shades anyway.
Distinct shapes painted on old faces allowed for things like age and ethnicity. Character models were low-tech, but memorable. They had more than "few" differences. They were made as different as it was possible with only diffuses and no normalmaps.
Some looked Asian, some looked Middle-Eastern, some could pass for African.
New ones? They barely have any differences. They look like the same face was drawn with different moods.
Yes, people were asking about updating character models since they saw updated NPC models in WoTLK, but without changing them. Like put more polygons there, but keep it the same.
CO can get around with same base texture because it got moods, facial sliders and normalmaps to work on top of it. WoW can't.
Human face on the left comes as rounded with wide and slightly flat nose because nose tip is the only thing indicated there. With a slightly dark skintone she looks like maybe Latina, maybe Middle-Eastern, it's hard to tell with WoW cartoony graphics but it does invoke some sense of ethnicity. It's not a cookie-cutter face.
Updated face on the right looks just generic. Like any other updated face in the game. The only thing it got is being tanned.
You'd literally have better results by halfassing it with loading models with old textures, subdividing it to a better polygon count and then smudge-smudge textures in 3dpainting so they now stretch better over higher poly model and maybe painting over some better resolution details in same places.
Yeah, no you wouldn't. You'd have to specially design the new wireframe to fit the old skin. But it'd still look like crud with the old fuzzy features.
Anyways, the question was about what gave the old ones more "soul"... and I'm not seeing anything about the old textures that was better. For that woman, BOTH the old and new look latino to me... sure the older face was a bit rounder, but... that doesn't seem like a major improvement to me.
CO-2 would need to have vanilla powers like Strike, Blast, Wave, etc, and would allow us to select power characteristics and FX up to a certain limit. Also, tessellation of costume features.
Yeah, no you wouldn't. You'd have to specially design the new wireframe to fit the old skin. But it'd still look like crud with the old fuzzy features.
Anyways, the question was about what gave the old ones more "soul"... and I'm not seeing anything about the old textures that was better.
For that woman, BOTH the old and new look latino to me... sure the older face was a bit rounder, but... that doesn't seem like a major improvement to me.
Yeah, no... You could.
Fuzzy features can be painted over. You'll paint over or blur in a higher resolution, you'll get rid of fuzz. You're not stuck on a 256x256 post stamp size or whatever was an old texture size that I can't recall right now. Texture size is something you can change without even touching unwraps.
You are aware that you can rescale textures to higher resolution and use them as templates for new ones? Or that subdivisions can be set to keep UV unwraps intact? It's done pretty often when you're updating models for anything. People use shortcuts like painting over occlusion maps or images all the time. For once, it saves time...
... actually, it looks like this is part of the problem with new faces because they look awfully like someone made base color from baked occlusion maps and then only painted some details over it. Old textures were made in a stone age where things like AO or normalmaps weren't anything given even for a game and looked like painted entirely by hand.
You might disagree, but nothing looks really distinct in the new face. It's exactly the same face on every other variant. On some they painted some more wrinkles, but still doesn't look aged enough. On others they just changed eye or lipstick color. Or raised eyebrows. They made a dozen of new faces that all look the same with minor alterations. Old ones were outdated, but you could recognise them looking at unpacked textures even without seeing it in model viewer.
Aside of the Burning Crusade races, but two third of them looked the same even before the update so there wasn't anything to break.
WoW engine uses one head shape per race and gender for all faces. It's only swapping textures. It's a cartoony looking graphics that doesn't leave room for subtlety. Either go for caricature and be explicit... Or don't bother. Seems like they didn't bother, to be honest. But then, WoW started to be more simplified and generic with every big update literally losing features, so not a big surprise.
New player faces might be inspired by updated NPC designs, and maybe even made by the same people, but they're hardly on pair with updated Proudmoore or Alexstrasza. Except NPC in cutscenes got moods and facial animations, and what's used ingame is much simpler. Characters can open/close mouth, close eyes, frown and that's about it...
By the way, this entire idea with updating models was Blizzard taking clues from the community illegally updating character models on their own. Which was made by subdividing old models...
Comments
"Art," in the context of video games, is when a graphic designer (or sound producer, or writer, etc.) takes what's available, and produces design that shows inspiration, attention to detail (and the other side of the coin, lack of detail), and a personal sense of pride or even "fun." The art conveys that the artist was motivated by something other than pure functionality. It's hard to quantify (at least for now), but if you've ever seen a character's face that seems to evoke a personality, or a landscape that makes you just stand and look for a while, or a bit of music that you stick around to listen, then you've encountered art.
By "deliverables," I mean assets that are produced to order to satisfy a timeline and/or a function, but show little motivation otherwise. A character model that is sufficient to attach costumes to, a musical score that simply announces you've entered a different area or circumstance, or a landscape that simply connects other pieces of landscape - if there isn't art there, then it's just an asset delivered to spec.
Granted, in the context of MMOs or other video games, any asset that's art is also a deliverable, and there's always pressure to produce more rather than fuss over less; and granted that visual and audio assets are often well separated from more tangible stuff like gameplay mechanics. Nevertheless, presentation can make a significant difference
For a concrete example (in so far as we can have concreteness in such a discussion), I always considered vanilla WoW character faces to be artistically done (usually). Sure, there's a low polygon count there - but the artists generally did pretty well at conveying personalities with different faces. In contrast, the character models in CO and DCUO are just... there. There's variation, to be sure, but I'm personally hard-pressed to show "personality" in those games without relying on costume bits. It seems clear that the priority was to produce deliverables rather than create art. STO is slightly better in this regard (IMO), but the faces still feel kind of flat.
Ironically, WoW screwed the pooch with their first pass at remodeling the character faces... Below is a pic of two of my favorite characters, before and after the revision. Let me know which version of each conveys more personality, and what that personality might be...
Top left looks sick, like she has the plague or something
top right looks kinda cheerful but that's it really
bottom left looks like she was hit with a magic spell to make her sleep walk.
bottom right looks kinda like a cunning sorcerer.
In both cases the model on the right is more detailed. I can almost count the polygons used to make the hair on the left... One thing I can think of that seems to be a real change is the shape of the faces. But I don't know if that's something fixable.
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My characters
In any case, both characters were "accidents," in that the character creator threw up random models - but something about those models evoked a type of personality for me. Didn't take much tweaking to bring it out. You might not see what I saw, and that's fine - but my point is I saw something worthwhile in the old models that were completely lost with the new ones.
Of course, that's all subjective... But what might be less subjective is that the pre-revision faces had more visual variety than post revision, as seen in these pics:
http://cdn.gamer-network.net/2014/usgamer/HumanFemaleFaces.jpg
http://cdn.gamer-network.net/2014/usgamer/NightElfFemaleFaces.jpg
This is especially notable with the eyes, where the combination of shape and shading really made a difference. In the newer versions, the eyes are largely the same across the board - or at least the differences aren't nearly as pronounced.
In short, the pre-revision faces have the look of the designers taking some care to make the faces unique; the post-revision faces look like someone had a deadline to meet.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
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My characters
Each of them is visually distinct to me. And less ugly than the old ones. Yeah, low poly faces tend to look ugly in general because proper faces need smooth contours and low poly is not that.
Thing is, I think the designers DID just what you said they should do. The old faces had few differences, and the new faces look to me to be about the same in terms of being visually distinct from each other.
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My characters
The eyes in the new faces are identical - and also cartoonishly large. In both old and new, the eyes do a lot to define the face, and the old eyes (including shading) absolutely show more variety. The new eyes not only show less variety, but due to their relative size, dominate the rest of the face.
Regardless, we're starting to veer off-track from the question of what "soul" is, and how to capture it, and the sub-question of what "art" is... but anything I have to say at this point will just be repeating myself.
Distinct shapes painted on old faces allowed for things like age and ethnicity. Character models were low-tech, but memorable. They had more than "few" differences. They were made as different as it was possible with only diffuses and no normalmaps.
Some looked Asian, some looked Middle-Eastern, some could pass for African.
New ones? They barely have any differences. They look like the same face was drawn with different moods.
Yes, people were asking about updating character models since they saw updated NPC models in WoTLK, but without changing them. Like put more polygons there, but keep it the same.
CO can get around with same base texture because it got moods, facial sliders and normalmaps to work on top of it. WoW can't.
Human face on the left comes as rounded with wide and slightly flat nose because nose tip is the only thing indicated there. With a slightly dark skintone she looks like maybe Latina, maybe Middle-Eastern, it's hard to tell with WoW cartoony graphics but it does invoke some sense of ethnicity. It's not a cookie-cutter face.
Updated face on the right looks just generic. Like any other updated face in the game. The only thing it got is being tanned.
You'd literally have better results by halfassing it with loading models with old textures, subdividing it to a better polygon count and then smudge-smudge textures in 3dpainting so they now stretch better over higher poly model and maybe painting over some better resolution details in same places.
Anyways, the question was about what gave the old ones more "soul"... and I'm not seeing anything about the old textures that was better.
For that woman, BOTH the old and new look latino to me... sure the older face was a bit rounder, but... that doesn't seem like a major improvement to me.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
My characters
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
My characters
Yeah, no... You could.
Fuzzy features can be painted over. You'll paint over or blur in a higher resolution, you'll get rid of fuzz. You're not stuck on a 256x256 post stamp size or whatever was an old texture size that I can't recall right now. Texture size is something you can change without even touching unwraps.
You are aware that you can rescale textures to higher resolution and use them as templates for new ones? Or that subdivisions can be set to keep UV unwraps intact? It's done pretty often when you're updating models for anything. People use shortcuts like painting over occlusion maps or images all the time. For once, it saves time...
... actually, it looks like this is part of the problem with new faces because they look awfully like someone made base color from baked occlusion maps and then only painted some details over it. Old textures were made in a stone age where things like AO or normalmaps weren't anything given even for a game and looked like painted entirely by hand.
You might disagree, but nothing looks really distinct in the new face. It's exactly the same face on every other variant. On some they painted some more wrinkles, but still doesn't look aged enough. On others they just changed eye or lipstick color. Or raised eyebrows. They made a dozen of new faces that all look the same with minor alterations. Old ones were outdated, but you could recognise them looking at unpacked textures even without seeing it in model viewer.
Aside of the Burning Crusade races, but two third of them looked the same even before the update so there wasn't anything to break.
WoW engine uses one head shape per race and gender for all faces. It's only swapping textures. It's a cartoony looking graphics that doesn't leave room for subtlety. Either go for caricature and be explicit... Or don't bother. Seems like they didn't bother, to be honest. But then, WoW started to be more simplified and generic with every big update literally losing features, so not a big surprise.
New player faces might be inspired by updated NPC designs, and maybe even made by the same people, but they're hardly on pair with updated Proudmoore or Alexstrasza. Except NPC in cutscenes got moods and facial animations, and what's used ingame is much simpler. Characters can open/close mouth, close eyes, frown and that's about it...
By the way, this entire idea with updating models was Blizzard taking clues from the community illegally updating character models on their own. Which was made by subdividing old models...
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