Xbox |OT|

[shikamaru317]

gtotheunit91 said:

shikamaru317 said:

Yeah, I'm honestly more bothered by the Avowed art style change than Fable. I don't really mind a game like Fable looking less cartoony, it's not like they are going for full photo-realism or something, it's just that the character models are less exaggerated in terms of their proportions, which is perfectly fine with me. And they definitely nailed the tone of the original games in terms of humor, I'm really not sure why I'm seeing so many people saying that the tone is off.

The Avowed art change hurts a bit more as I was expecting them to try and make the actual game looked like that short clip of pre-rendered simulated gameplay at the end of the reveal trailer, especially after I heard that they had moved to Unreal 5. It doesn't really look bad, it just doesn't look great either. 

I'm not bothered by the Avowed art style change, although it's hard to even claim that since all we had prior to Sunday was a CGI trailer, which means practically nothing as to how the game will look. 

But it does very much look like Pillars of Eternity in first-person. PoE had very vibrant colors and Avowed seems to be owning that. In an interview on Sunday, Feargus said that Avowed did start out as Obsidian's take on Skyrim, but realized that's not where Obsidian's strengths lie. So that may have been part of the rumored reboot and why the game doesn't look like what it did from that initial CGI trailer.

But also, the game isn't releasing at least within the next 6 months. So it could be another year of development or nearly a year and a half. I think Avowed will still look very good at release as graphical polish is usually one of the final steps of development.

Yeah, I don't really mind it being colorful, that isn't an issue for me at all. It's more down to things like some of the enemy designs looking more cartoony than realistic, like the spider, the lizard people, the ogres, the zombies and skeletons, things like that all have a more cartoony look than a realistic look to my eyes. It kind of feels more like Borderlands/Wonderlands in terms of enemy design than the more Skyrim like aesthetic I was hoping for, if that makes sense. I get that they were precisely aiming for that though, they didn't want to be seen as just copying Skyrim, so they went a totally different direction in terms of art design in order to differentiate Avowed from Elder Scrolls. The only thing is, that CG reveal teaser seemed to indicate that they did want it to pretty much look like Skyrim with modern graphics, which is why a good many people found it odd that the game itself looked so different from the teaser reveal.

On top of that, the actual technical graphical prowess on display feels somewhat low, I mean Fable running on ForzaTech vs Avowed running on Unreal Engine 5 almost looks like there is a whole console generation between them, and even Starfield looks a good deal better in terms of graphics, which is saying something because Bethesda Game Studios also isn't known for high-end graphics relative to other AAA games that released the same year on their past games. I get that Obsidian has never really aimed for high end AAA visuals, but I think many people were hoping they would do so starting with Avowed since they were calling it AAA and had a big Microsoft budget to work with, and 2 Unreal Engine master studios in The Coalition and Ninja Theory who could help them to achieve loftier graphical goals in Unreal Engine than they had in the past.

Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 14 June 2023