Whats in the future graphically.
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@PeachMcD I'm not sure the OP is necessarily interested in glowing icons, flashy notifications and the like. A lot of people here seem to be keying into the idea that graphics require more resources. And they wouldn't be wrong, but are missing the point. My personal gripe with some areas looking flat and bland have nothing to do with improvements in graphics. But variety and contrast in terrain and objects. Just a re-evaluation in some of these biomes would only require tweaking. Ultimately, I'd hope that they would continue to look at this over the course of development. Perhaps they already have plans to, but just haven't gotten around to it because they are working on the pillars of development, to steal a phrase from Chris Roberts (Star Citizen). It seems like this game is pretty easy to run as is. When it's released, the 4000 series could be out. I think it's reasonable to consider upgrades to the game at some point. I'm curious in this thread mostly because I haven't seen much information on this topic from developers. Granted, I'm pretty new here.
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@Stacy555 said in Whats in the future graphically.:
(...)As always people are starting to cherry pick from posts(...)
I think you misunderstood me @Stacy555, I am sorry if I didn't express myself properly.
@Stacy555 said in Whats in the future graphically.:
(...)Someone is clearly working on graphics ... so there is the resource
Yes, the key difference is, it's 'someone' here and '100-300 people' in each of the other games you mentioned. That 'someone' (and it's more than one person at Fractured as well) has to get all the graphics done to finish the technology stuff for humans, then get things done for Beastman and for Demon planet. And all of that by the time the programmers have finished their part of the work, because you don't want graphics to delay testing.
They simply won't have the time and manpower to get every detail right on graphics this early on in game development with the few people they have available. Especially if you compare them to products with art teams several times their size. That's all I was trying to say and hint at, since people (including myself) often tend to forget that.
I'm not trying to diminish your point, but explain why it likely won't happen for a long while (or maybe at all) unless we get really lucky
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@Stacy555 said in Whats in the future graphically.:
@Jetah Pathfinder is far prettier than Fractured in it's present state, the terrain is very different as you move through the areas.
I'm not saying people who understand the full concept of the game will be put off by the way it looks, but it may have an impact after release, that may stop people from taking a closer look, after seeing Youtube videos and the like, and it "Looking" boring.so a finished game is in a better state than a pre-release game? i mean, we don't have anything outside of the woods, maybe some marsh. but it plans on having all biome types and it'll change as you travel too.
test literally has one area (unless it's changed and i wasn't aware). we don't even have beast or demons yet (again unless that's changed).
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@Stacy555 Thanks for starting a thread where opinions on an aspect of the game development could be thrown around. It seems the community opinion is that a little more consideration given to the color palate would be awesome if possible. The really cool thing is that we know the devs look at the community for feedback. If we see a the graphics become a little more aesthetically pleasing it might be at least in part due to this thread.
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Nice to see this turn in to a proper debate.
Bells and whistles no.
a little more variety and colour .. yes please.
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Graphics just costs a lot in terms of development time and monetary resources, and doesn't do much for gameplay. There's a reason why more recent games with high tech graphics just don't have the content in them compared to a really old game with lower grade graphics. Besides, if we expect to have large scale PvP battles eventually, keeping high FPS on most computers will ensure that more people can play the game. In more multiplayer oriented games like League of Legends or Valorant for instance, you can see how the developers deliberately chose a graphical style that allowed a large amount of people to play the game even on bad computers, while still looking good to the human eye.
EDIT: And if you want more colour in the game, just turn up Nvidia's Digital Vibrance.
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@Basileus said in Whats in the future graphically.:
Graphics just costs a lot in terms of development time and monetary resources, and doesn't do much for gameplay. There's a reason why more recent games with high tech graphics just don't have the content in them compared to a really old game with lower grade graphics. Besides, if we expect to have large scale PvP battles eventually, keeping high FPS on most computers will ensure that more people can play the game. In more multiplayer oriented games like League of Legends or Valorant for instance, you can see how the developers deliberately chose a graphical style that allowed a large amount of people to play the game even on bad computers, while still looking good to the human eye.
EDIT: And if you want more colour in the game, just turn up Nvidia's Digital Vibrance.
I feel like you didn't read the thread before commenting. I think we've pretty much determined that no one is asking for drastically improved graphics. We all understand the downfalls of overly focusing on eye candy.
I have a serious disagreement with your last statement. You're essentially using the Bathesda excuse. If they want the game to be better, they can fix it themselves. I think no matter what the issue is that we are discussing, the rationalization you used is quite poor.
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@d3Sync I don't understand why anyone who wants more color wouldn't use digital vibrance. It's basically a free way to change the color however you want. Some people do actually like less intense colors, so that's a purely subjective thing that can't be "improved" per se.
And as for people not wanting 'drastically improved' graphics, I'm saying that even small improvements can make a massive difference in both cost and FPS. For example, in Valorant, there's an "Improve Clarity" setting that basically doesn't change too much aside from making colors a little more intense, but in exchange you lose 15% of your total FPS. Meanwhile, changing Digital Vibrance to 100% costs you 0 fps, and is easily doable by just changing a single slider value.
Ultimately, there's a reason why games like Counterstrike have more players and larger impact on the market than any CoD game, despite the giant graphical discrepancy in favour of CoD. If the opportunity cost of time and money is spent on making graphics better instead of better gameplay, the game will fail (remember this is an indie company with super limited resources, a lot of their textures and art are basically pulled from templates that you can buy so that they can save time). No matter how much you improve the graphics, you aren't going to draw in the Crysis style crowd, but if you focus on gameplay and good netcode, you can easily draw in the more competitive minded players who will be staying around for a long time.
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@Basileus
I will take your suggestion on board and up my digital vibrance setting, but I'm not expecting too much to be changed with pale green and light brown being the main palette choice.The whole argument of graphics vs gameplay should be a non starter in 2020, why one should have an impact on the other is just a poor excuse, there are many Indie games out there that are awesome to look at and to play, War of mine is a good example, yes it's dark and dingy but it's a great look for the content of a great game.
Graphical look vs Fps ....... see above, I'm not talking about the amount of pixels, just about how the are used and then optimised for good fps.
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I am still of the firm faith that DS will improve graphics along their way. Every game I have ever played has done so (even New World updated their graphics again on this last alpha test), however, I do expect DS to only improve the graphics once they have time to do so. With that said, I do think it was a great idea to "remind" them to do just that
Also, graphics do not ALL have to be done at the same time, they may (and may already be doing so) updating portions at a time. And I also agree that they need to adjust the environmental pieces to be more distinguished and easier to differentiate from.
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It is of absolutely no benefit to anyone to discuss or critique the graphics of a game that is still in alpha, especially 3D. The assets in this stage of development are on a strictly functional basis.
Updating the graphics to a 1.0 standard will be one of the last priorities and will most likely go hand-in-hand with optimization.
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@FibS said in Whats in the future graphically.:
It is of absolutely no benefit to anyone to discuss or critique the graphics of a game that is still in alpha, especially 3D. The assets in this stage of development are on a strictly functional basis.
Updating the graphics to a 1.0 standard will be one of the last priorities and will most likely go hand-in-hand with optimization.
It is of absolutely no benefit to anyone to tell people not to express their opinion.
Thank you for yours.
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I'd have to 100% disagree with FibS. Alpha or pre-alpha are the two best phases to give an opinion. In development, it is already too late when the game gets the beta. Games rarely ever change significantly from that point on.
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@Stacy555 said in Whats in the future graphically.:
It is of absolutely no benefit to anyone to tell people not to express their opinion.
Which I didn't, don't be a baby, please and thank you.
What I told you is a fact: whatever your or my opinion is on the alpha assets is irrelevant, as alpha assets have no bearing on the art direction or quality of future assets, ergo neither does feedback on them.
Alpha assets are not rough sketches that are refined into beta or 1.0 assets. They are rushed stand-ins that are wholly discarded and replaced with completely new assets. Only these new assets will be worth critiquing, and it is likely we will be shown concept art and early models to critique more relevantly at that time.
Until then, none of this discussion means beans.
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@FibS You are clearly not understanding your own words, and wow you love the word "Assets".
Quote "Until then none of this discussion means beans".
Would be nice if you had even bothered to read the Thread heading, before being completely dismissive about people showing interest in what they, would like to see change for the better in a product they are paying to have created.
This is an open forum, please don't tell us whats worth discussing and what is not, now if it's of no interest to you ... move on.
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Didn't the devs say a lot of graphical stuff are placeholders and that right now they don't focus on that? You're basically arguing about stuff that might be drastically different on release.
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@Razvan I'm not arguing, I've simply asked for other players take on where the games graphics will be on release, and how much better if at all they will look, as I feel they are quite poor at this point.
Just an open discussion.
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Graphics in this game is already amazing.
I dont know what are you all on about?
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Hi @Stacy555, we believe the most problematic point with Fractured's graphics as of today are the biomes, which, as many players like @d3Sync pointed out, all look pretty similar.
This is due to an overall lack of unique "decorative" art assets for each biome (and the average quality of the existing ones), but also to the lack of unique lighting and post-processing. The latter is going to be improved before the next test, but the former will have to wait until we hire a dedicated environment artist.
Adding to the above, animations are also very poor, and we know that. We don't have a dedicated animator in the team - our art director has been taking care of that so far. You can consider all the current player character animations as placeholders - even the walking animations eheh.
All the above being said, you can't really compare Fractured graphics-wise to AA/AAA games like Ashes of Creation or New World from Amazon, whose owner earns in 3 minutes (literally) the total cost of the development of Fractured so far
We are an 8-people indie studio, and while the team's hopefully going to grow and graphics are surely going to improve before full release, they will never compete with AAA titles - nor it's our interest for them to
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@Prometheus said in Whats in the future graphically.:
Hi @Stacy555, we believe the most problematic point with Fractured's graphics as of today are the biomes, which, as many players like @d3Sync pointed out, all look pretty similar.
This is due to an overall lack of unique "decorative" art assets for each biome (and the average quality of the existing ones), but also to the lack of unique lighting and post-processing. The latter is going to be improved before the next test, but the former will have to wait until we hire a dedicated environment artist.
Adding to the above, animations are also very poor, and we know that. We don't have a dedicated animator in the team - our art director has been taking care of that so far. You can consider all the current player character animations as placeholders - even the walking animations eheh.
All the above being said, you can't really compare Fractured graphics-wise to AA/AAA games like Ashes of Creation or New World from Amazon, whose owner earns in 3 minutes (literally) the total cost of the development of Fractured so far
We are an 8-people indie studio, and while the team's hopefully going to grow and graphics are surely going to improve before full release, they will never compete with AAA titles - nor it's our interest for them to Thank you for the full and clear answer @Prometheus, as I have said before some of my examples were just references really and not meant as realistic markers, good to hear that graphical improvements are on the list for future development, I'll wait and see what you guys come up with.
Keep up the great work.
