Graphic Improvements
Alkalurops
Member Posts: 269
From the first day BG:EE was announced, I always felt that the new areas & UI of Baldur's Gate (EE) were a bit "off". They looked ok, but didn't have the same "ambience" as the old areas. At first I waved it away thinking I was just being nostalgic by preferring the older areas, but by looking at the new BG2 areas, I think I now know what's "wrong".
The new areas are blurry. They lack "texture" and "grit". I don't want to come across as a grumpy old nitpicker or anything, but this is just how I feel about the new areas.
Compare for example
http://baldursgate.com/images/neera/screenshot01.jpg and http://image.gamespotcdn.net/gamespot/images/2012/344/reviews/663933_20121210_screen005.jpg
One could say that the new neera area definitely has better trees, but at the same time the grass is plain flat. In the old areas, you can see literally individual blades of grass, yet in the new areas grass is a smudgy green blob. It lacks texture.
So I opened photoshop and applied some filters to the screenshot of one of the new BG2 areas.
http://baldursgateii.com/images/screens/screen11.jpg
https://forums.beamdog.com/uploads/FileUpload/8e/4c3bb38eeb04c737c1ac164e0b83ba.jpg
(Open in new tabs to easily switch between images)
First, to be clear, it's *just* a photoshop filter, nothing advanced (I'm a photoshop novice). My goal is *not* to make it look better, but to make it look more like the old areas. I also understand the devs can't simply apply a filter to all their art assets to "fix" the problem.
One of the things to notice in the photoshoped picture is the textured version of the UI. Despite being higher-resolution than the unenhanced UI, I always felt the new UI didn't have as much texture to it as the old one.
So... thoughts? Is my analysis correct?
The new areas are blurry. They lack "texture" and "grit". I don't want to come across as a grumpy old nitpicker or anything, but this is just how I feel about the new areas.
Compare for example
http://baldursgate.com/images/neera/screenshot01.jpg and http://image.gamespotcdn.net/gamespot/images/2012/344/reviews/663933_20121210_screen005.jpg
One could say that the new neera area definitely has better trees, but at the same time the grass is plain flat. In the old areas, you can see literally individual blades of grass, yet in the new areas grass is a smudgy green blob. It lacks texture.
So I opened photoshop and applied some filters to the screenshot of one of the new BG2 areas.
http://baldursgateii.com/images/screens/screen11.jpg
https://forums.beamdog.com/uploads/FileUpload/8e/4c3bb38eeb04c737c1ac164e0b83ba.jpg
(Open in new tabs to easily switch between images)
First, to be clear, it's *just* a photoshop filter, nothing advanced (I'm a photoshop novice). My goal is *not* to make it look better, but to make it look more like the old areas. I also understand the devs can't simply apply a filter to all their art assets to "fix" the problem.
One of the things to notice in the photoshoped picture is the textured version of the UI. Despite being higher-resolution than the unenhanced UI, I always felt the new UI didn't have as much texture to it as the old one.
So... thoughts? Is my analysis correct?
2
Comments
The trees are much better in the new renders tho, they just need some tweakery I guess.
This is especially obvious in the new snow areas, and the caves associated with Neera's quest. I can't find the cave screenshots on the baldursgate.com site right now, but they do have some of the snow.
Doesn't that look like low resolution textures stretched over some geometry? Since they're rendering all these to 2d maps anyway, why not bake in textures of the appropriate resolution. Not like the gpu has to pump more triangles or use more vRAM.
@Cuv and @CamDawg just cuz.
That said, I think there's also a second (less urgent) problem: they need to add more geometry to the scene. To go back to my grass example: you can see blades of high grass near rocks. I don't know if that's because they hand-painted it afterwards or because the source art had grass geometry in the scenes, but in either case: the new areas are lacking this kind of detail.
http://timenerdworld.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/icewind-dale-wyrms-tooth.jpg
There's much more geometry and texturing going on in that scene. The snow isn't just snow, there's snow, ice fragments, frozen dirt, stone, all blending together on the same ground. Admittedly, Wyrm's Tooth is an outstanding piece of art that's hard to match, but still...
One thing that made IE games look so good was that they could pre-render scenes that were so detailed even current-gen hardware would explode trying to run it in real-time. Yes, we would lose the "3D" aspect, but in return we would get great graphics running on minimal hardware.
These issues can't simply be solved in photoshop, they need to be addressed *before* rendering the final image. Since they still have all the source material (I hope...) I sincerely hope they will consider refining their art.
I support the EE games, because we need a market for this kind of game and I fundamentally support what Beamdog is doing. I can't help but wish that I didn't have to apply so many caveats when I discussed the graphical fidelity of their new content though (the 1PP stuff is great, was using it prior to EE...).
Again, @CamDawg because he's shown an intellectual honesty that is rare amongst developers.
In all seriousness, I actually know very little about area development in general. I'm afraid I really can't offer any insight, but I'll see if I can rouse someone who could.
One image to comparision, little more on:
http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/17646/projekt-x/p1
Not to mention how silly it would be to not fix something like this because of download size in the first place...