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Borg Unicomplex
klyptok
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Why does the Borg Unicomplex not look like a unicomplex?
What on earth happened to borg structures & art direction?
What on earth happened to borg structures & art direction?
Post edited by klyptok on
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Typically Borg structures look like this:
Even old Activision games
STO got these right:
Just what on earth. What is that? It looks like a pile of lego blocks. It's almost like they took some random bulkhead and copy-pasted the texture on a pile of cubes to quickly make... "something"
Oh wait, they did.
The station stands out like a sore thumb. I don't mean to offend anyone personally, but my opinion is that the borg stations in STO are very ugly and poorly done. Even if they kept the same models, they could at least slap on a few common borg textures for an instant improvement:
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I agree, the neo-Borg are more like super-zombies rather than the classic horror of TNG.
As to the original issue, I do agree that some of the assets need something to make them look more Borg. Perhaps some piping and antennas and some other things. Don't need to make surfaces for those added textrues and protrusions, but it would at least look better.
My character Tsin'xing
I found it downight embarassing.
My character Tsin'xing
A few things, yes. It still looks far more like a very boring alien industrial factory complex than a menacing Borg unicomplex.
The geometry is passable at best.
Some of the models are fairly good. If they wanted to improve on the geometry they should drop some of the random piles of cubes / rectangles or better yet, add slopes to some of them to better connect them to their substructure. Right now there are parts that just don't flesh out very well and feel weirdly lumpy in a cube-like, piled up way. It's hard to describe so I'll draw it on and post it later.
Another point is that almost all of the structure surfaces are incredibly flat. They lack the borg appeal and design.
The borg ship textures typically are indistinguishable from borg structures in cannon, other games, and pretty much everywhere else. Sure they might have some random plates of armor here and there like a tactical cube, or other objects like rings or large pipes... but the general look is supposed to be your typical borg "mess" of efficient but unesthetic organization of black or various shades of gray pipes, tubes, plates and small protrusions.
Instead we have these strange, shiny flat, massive brown metal bulkheads (brown?????) with only tiny bits of tech in the cracks. There are neon yellow lights (yellow??) shining on some things, but they aren't shining through the piping like it's an illuminated section buried in the mass of the structure. In STO it's just a massive light on the surface (i.e. not borg).
To me none of this makes any sense and stands out far more offensive then painting Deep Space 9 bright pink and making it square, ESD vibrant green and the cardassians galor ships scarlet red. It just doesn't work out at all.
If they wanted to do a quick fix, they could dump some borg textures on with a bump map. It would look better but that's a sloppy way to do it.
To get it proper, look at how they make a borg sphere, v'ger thing or the cube. That's exactly what direction should be looking for in art when dressing up the borg superstructures.