Is this Isometric gaming?
Crytek7
Member Posts: 23
I love the Infinity Isometric style but do you think it's a little dated? I mean should Beamdog go the full 3D experience like the Witcher and Skyrim, I know it's hard to control 6 characters viewing from the protagonist view in 3D but coming into 2016 I think it's time for a new outlook so the company can keep making games for the future in this fast paced gaming industry.
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Beamdog is a small company, there is no way they can keep up with the big-budget graphic of
triple-A games, so having an unusual graphic will prevent comparisation.
Also, isometric has 2 other benefits:
It ages much better than full 3D and you need less hardware resources.
..At least if it is not Pillars of Eternity..
Anyways, being able on low-hardware computers widens the possible buyers.
Isometric >> 3D
First off it's not bg3. It's and expansion to bg1. They're not going to have the last 30 hours of the game be in 3D. That would be very strange. And jarring. And awful.
Secondly they don't really have the resources. Beamdog does not have a 500 person graphics team. To make a 3D game that stands up against things like destiny or dragon age would be impossible. We as a community represent an pretty small niche market. And it WOULD have to stand up again big name games. Why would they bother if they couldn't. No one wants to buy a new game that already looks 7 years old.
And what it boils down to is no one really wants that. People don't play baldurs gate for the graphics. I'm very confident the large majority of people on this forum would rather have and isometric game over a 3D game anyway. Most of us still play 3D games, but we play baldurs gate for different reasons.
BG3 would be another argument, but frankly I'd be skeptical of a 3D continuation, and I think a lot of people will back me up on that. Baldurs gate is an isometric game. That's what it is now and i, at least would like it to stay that way.
NWN2 has probably been my favorite RPG in terms of visual style, combining 3D and isometric fairly well (other than some camera issues).
I think something like XCOM: Enemy Unknown could work well also. With recent DirectX and OpenGL hardware features available, 3D graphics can scale fairly well with hardware now, so adding that to XCOM style engine could be great.
That doesn't mean that 2D is dead though. 2D done properly (lots and lots of sprites and animations) can have much better detail than 3D, but it's more expensive to produce properly than you'd expect.
So, personally, I don't think Isometric is dated, and there's definitely a place for it.
I love the BG style and appreciate a lot what Beamdog is doing with polishing things.
But there're modern versions of the Isometric style too, PoE and future Torment: Tides of Numenera are the best examples. Just watch a video of TToN and see how many possibilities are there with the Isometric style:
https://torment.inxile-entertainment.com/#
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2r4lvv
To me, the Isometric style RPG is the best possible option.
Isometric games had a comeback since 2012:
Pillars of Eternity (funded via Kickstarter), Beamdog's games (modders make up about 50% of the developers), Wasteland 3 (Kickstarted), Shadowrunner (Kickstarted), Torment: Tides of Numenera (Kickstarted).
You can see, there is a market for these games, eh? Why would they reach their goal on Kickstarter otherwise, why would there still be enough modders for the IE after 15 years, if isometric wasn't good for something?
First person view for a team-based RPG is only good, if every character was controlled by a different person (MMO style). Even then, pause and continue or turn-based games are closer to what a classic rpg is. Real time twitch games are action games.
Isometric > 3D
Rendering styles:
2D = historically, bitmaps blitted (copied) into a back buffer (image). These days, it's the same idea, but done with polygon quads to take advantage of GPU hardware.
3D = polygon (or alternately, voxel) models, rendered into a back buffer.
Common view styles:
Isometric = BG etc. 3/4 top down view. Usually fixed camera orientation, though often has zoom in/out and sometimes rotation about the target point.
First Person = "looking out from the eyes of a character into the world"
Third Person = "above and behind the character, camera turns in direction of character facing"
There's no reason these can't be combined, though 2D First person is pretty rare..
2D Isometric > 3D anything is probably what you meant.
I know that was mean and really I'm so sorry I had to do that to you, but that malignant polyp on a pig's testicle is what happens to BG when it's made into a 3D game.
Blizzard stopped that after Diablo 2 has shown to be a mixed bag, it lost much atmosphere from
it predecessor u_u
It's only a fairly short story, like Throne of Bhaal. It's designed to show you what happens in the time between you saving Baldur's Gate from Sarevoks plots up to the time you're captured by Irenicus. It will have the same PC and many of the NPC's from the original as well as some new ones just for this. Though I do have to wonder if we'll see some of these new NPC's, kits and items in BGIIEE in the future as well. . . I certainly hope so.
Hate to break it to this community, but I liked dark alliance, and I played it AFTER bg1. Hell I didn't even bother to try and connect the two until I read all the hatred for a game that most people hated because it did follow the same formula as BG...
If I was beamdog, I'd go full 2d isometric (or similar), including what they did with Neverwinter Nights: release an excellent and easy-to-use editor, create the game following a modular easy-to-mod design, and let the fans create their own (this time) isometric adventures, upload them in some sort of steam workshop, etc.