Goblin Squad Member
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I hate Amiri's artwork. Brings the entire PF collection down a notch IMO. It's so blatantly anime in every way, the gloves and boots are ridiculous also. You can get away with the Giant's sword, but not on a lipstick barbarian out of dragon ball z.
It doesn't mesh with the style of the characters.
Wow, that is actually my favorite piece of Pathfinder artwork and is the iconic that I most associate with. I guess it is true what they say about art being in the eye of the beholder.
-Lisa
Yeah, sorry Lisa. I think Pf has done such an amazing job of getting under the skin of all the classic archetypes from monsters to races to classes. It's what defines you guys the most, you really "get it" what makes them all what they are.
Amiri, IMHO, is a very rare big miss. As much as I love the re-imagining PF does sometimes (goblins, gnomes), the anime emo-barbarian missed very wide left for me.
I guess I'll have to get the art team to create Amiri for me to play in the game and then I can go all berserk with her "anime" sword and whoop a little butt. :)
Lisa
Lisa, my only complaint about Amiri is the stomach "window" in her armor. She's a barbarian from the far north, and I'd think she's be quite cold, especially in winter. I love the sword, and the lore behind it, and any one, male or female, that can kick Frost Giant arse well enough to walk away with one of their swords uber rocks in my book. I just wish her armor covered her better and maybe added even more fur for warmth, given how damned cold it is in the Land of the Mammoth Lords.
I, for one would love to see you play her in PfO :)
For those not familiar with Amiri's background/lore look here
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Goblin Squad Member
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I hate Amiri's artwork. Brings the entire PF collection down a notch IMO. It's so blatantly anime in every way, the gloves and boots are ridiculous also. You can get away with the Giant's sword, but not on a lipstick barbarian out of dragon ball z.
It doesn't mesh with the style of the characters.
Wow, that is actually my favorite piece of Pathfinder artwork and is the iconic that I most associate with. I guess it is true what they say about art being in the eye of the beholder.
-Lisa
Yeah, sorry Lisa. I think Pf has done such an amazing job of getting under the skin of all the classic archetypes from monsters to races to classes. It's what defines you guys the most, you really "get it" what makes them all what they are.
Amiri, IMHO, is a very rare big miss. As much as I love the re-imagining PF does sometimes (goblins, gnomes), the anime emo-barbarian missed very wide left for me.
I guess I'll have to get the art team to create Amiri for me to play in the game and then I can go all berserk with her "anime" sword and whoop a little butt. :)
Lisa
Lisa, my only complaint about Amiri is the stomach "window" in her armor. She's a barbarian from the far north, and I'd think she's be quite cold, especially in winter. I love the sword, and the lore behind it, and any one, male or female, that can kick Frost Giant arse well enough to walk away with one of their swords uber rocks in my book. I just wish her armor covered her better and maybe added even more fur for warmth, given how damned cold it is in the Land of the Mammoth Lords.
I, for one would love to see you play her in PfO :)
For those not familiar with Amiri's background/lore look here
Link was a good read.
Well for me, that is less concern. Either this is a portrait of her in a her combat posture with fur coat thrown off so to speak, or again who knows perhaps these people of the frozen lands like to tough it out/have higher cold resistance, sneer at the weakness of bare conditions etc. Plus being a barbarian (eg conan-style?) aka wild child, they generally show the vitality within their bodies and a distain/lack of sheltering in an armour shell? Idk. More the size of the weapon is a one-off with an explanation and the mits/snow shoes should have a functional reason and not be only an manga-reference ie clash of art styles.
As said, think the character is very cool. Still wonder about that blade, and how many kilos it weighs to drag around: Total weight on knees * distance travelled = Adds up into tons!
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Goblin Squad Member
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Basically if we see Amiri in game, well know its Lisa at the helm :P
I like Amiri's art but the stomach showing is a bit off. My eyes kind of glaze over when I see stuff like that in fantasy art these days. I think it has to do with growing up on AD&D era art that was far more debatable than this.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Basically if we see Amiri in game, well know its Lisa at the helm :P
I like Amiri's art but the stomach showing is a bit off. My eyes kind of glaze over when I see stuff like that in fantasy art these days. I think it has to do with growing up on AD&D era art that was far more debatable than this.
Maybe it will be Lisa, though it could be Sean K Reynolds' amazing girlfriend Jodi
Sean, you are one lucky dude! ;)
Hey Lisa, get them to add Amiri as a avatar in The Pits, monster sword and all :P
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Goblin Squad Member
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BTW, I have nothing against Amiri-type toons being available. I hope everybody gets to play their "style". I just want there to be a gritty, dirty, thick, dreadlocked, hairy armpit option for the female barbarian so I can be happy too.
I think that's my problem with Amiri, it doesn't take the female barbarian concept as seriously as Paladin Seelah (easily one of my faves).
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Goblin Squad Member
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I guess I'll have to get the art team to create Amiri for me to play in the game and then I can go all berserk with her "anime" sword and whoop a little butt. :)Lisa
Ok , but buy her a decent armor first, with no belly hole. Because if not, I will aim all my hits at her belly, and be sure I will fight her from a good distance using my bow, out of the reach of that gargantuan sword of her!
LOL
Uh-oh, Daeron, look out, she's Chaotic Neutral! That's one of the few alignments nobody here complains is utterly crippled and disadvantaged!
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Goblin Squad Member
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It's not a "belly hole", Amiri has no shirt, only a strap of cloth covering her assets.
If you take the time to notice, she's not wearing pants either, only a loincloth.
She's got arm and leg armor which is probably where all your confusion is coming in. Take that off and she would look more like this.
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Goblin Squad Member
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... Take that off and she would look more like this.Amiri has Hooves?
Someone clearly didn't read the section on Humans in the core book.
;)
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Goblin Squad Member
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... Take that off and she would look more like this.Amiri has Hooves?Someone clearly didn't read the section on Humans in the core book.
;)
...someone clearly didn't look at the linked image to see either cloven hooves or flip-flops at the ends of her legs in the barbarian female's image.
It's best to ignore any posts by Being before 12:00 EST. He gets grumpy in the morning. :)
/chuckle
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Goblin Squad Member
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Thanks for all of the comments and feedback!
I'll just reiterate what Ryan said with regard to the female clothing and equipment options. We want to hear your feedback and do our best to walk the line between 'desirable' and 'exploitative' as he puts it.
...We're still working through a lot of the designs, so hearing your thoughts certainly helps shape our direction.
Well to be honest what the sorceress is wearing isn't very immodest at all.
I grew up in Bavaria and here and in Austria the traditional dress is called a Dirndl. Other examples are here and here.Of course there are still racier ones, but please don't forget that there are people from other cultures that will play this game and have different views on what is considered "modest".
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Goblin Squad Member
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With the whole Amiri artwork, I think some people are trying to take it too seriously. It's a game, she's supposed to look cool and intimidating. I love Wayne Reynold's artwork and I hope GW sticks to their guns on this one.
As the iconic barbarian? Really? I'm not crying foul I'm crying bad taste. Now that I saw the hot GF it kinda makes sense cuz that's exactly what Amiri reminds me of: somebody drew their hot GF as a D&D character.
Well, now that I think of it maybe that is the essence of the fantasy barbarian after all? Philosophical geek stuff right there.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Art is very subjective - Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and all that.
I have no problem with other players being able to create characters that I personally find unappealing, as long as I have the option to create my own characters in a way that does appeal to me.
Really like the character models. I especially like the variety of different capes and how they flow.
The "flow" is something the riggers and animators will have to decide, but the meshes do look luscious. Oh please oh please oh please give us a fantasy MMO with actual fabric instead of just blocky polies clunking around!
Holding a community prayer meeting at the church of Desna next week! =P
If they keep with the Pathfinder art style(I read someplace that they are)
how can they go wrong?, The art rocks and has a very good feel, Never seen a bad pic yet from pathfinder.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Oh please oh please oh please give us a fantasy MMO with actual fabric...
This is exceptionally difficult. I know there are companies working on it, but the technology just isn't there yet.
Remember also that PFO is a "budget" MMO. They're not going to be risking large amounts of development resources on things that don't significantly improve "meaningful human interaction".
Art is very subjective - Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and all that.
I have no problem with other players being able to create characters that I personally find unappealing, as long as I have the option to create my own characters in a way that does appeal to me.
+5! Although I'm not a fan of overt anime, I agree with Nihimon. So long as I can have my "dark" gritty scarred Thief type character, it doesn't matter what other people's characters look like.
Really like the character models. I especially like the variety of different capes and how they flow.The "flow" is something the riggers and animators will have to decide, but the meshes do look luscious. Oh please oh please oh please give us a fantasy MMO with actual fabric instead of just blocky polies clunking around!
I agree. Having a selection of possible designs that players could put on their cloaks or on shields would be cool. Pretty much what DAOC did would be nice.
Oh please oh please oh please give us a fantasy MMO with actual fabric...This is exceptionally difficult. I know there are companies working on it, but the technology just isn't there yet.
Remember also that PFO is a "budget" MMO. They're not going to be risking large amounts of development resources on things that don't significantly improve "meaningful human interaction".
Ummmm... I hate to pop that bubble, but even if they would just use simple cloth dynamics simulations, it can easily be done these days. Very easily. It's not really a matter of GW's development resources at all, it's almost entirely a question of what their target audience's machines are generally capable of rendering. It's very likely they'll just use a dynamics solution and then bake out the results so that the client machines never have to perform the physics calculations.
In any case, I wasn't really referring to any specific animation solution, I just want the clothing to move appropriately rather than being hard-bound to the joints so that it causes that hideous texture stretching and "conjoined pants" look while wearing robes and such.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ummmm... I hate to pop that bubble, but even if they would just use simple cloth dynamics simulations, it can easily be done these days. Very easily.
Citation needed :)
Seriously, though, do you have some links to videos of games that do this?
I mean, I understand the CryEngine has some pretty cool stuff like this, but I was understand the impression that it's not feasible in an MMO.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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The rendering is entirely client-side; there's no reason why an off-the-shelf package couldn't be incorporated, except that the target customer doesn't have the hardware to handle a few characters with full physics and few people anywhere have the hardware to render dozens of characters.
If almost everybody can't run a graphics option, it's wasted money.
That said, a feature that allowed different quality settings for one's avatar and for other characters would be nice; put the cycles toward the character that the player attends to the most.
Citation needed :)
Play a modern game. =P Might I point you to a fairly ancient one, though, EQ2 which offers quite extremely detailed graphics controls to its players. You can enable cloth simulations for your characters if you prefer the "live" look of physics instead of the hard-bound pre-animated behavior. Champions Online also provides quite a lot of cloaks and capes with "cloth" behavior.
I'll let you type in a search on youtube/google.
I mean, I understand the CryEngine has some pretty cool stuff like this, but I was understand the impression that it's not feasible in an MMO.
See Decius' post below.
I think he's perhaps a little off in his estimations, but it's certain that the typical PFO player's gaming machine will only get, on average, more powerful before PFO opens up in three or four years. People who play PC games tend to be a good solid step ahead of the consoles at any given stage of the hardware release cycle, and "serious" gamers are notorious for spending more on their "gaming rigs" than on their cars.
The distribution curve of GW's target audience will still be almost the sole determining factor in PFO's graphical requirements.
The rendering is entirely client-side; there's no reason why an off-the-shelf package couldn't be incorporated, except that the target customer doesn't have the hardware to handle a few characters with full physics and few people anywhere have the hardware to render dozens of characters.
If almost everybody can't run a graphics option, it's wasted money.
And that's the beauty of baking out your animations: the developer only has to calculate the dynamics simulation once for each animation (not all that difficult, relative to how much computing power is available to that scale of operation) and thereafter no one ever has to do anything but render the pixels.
The downside is that you'd have to do this for each mesh -- which means you'd likely only get one cape/cloak mesh at launch. Skirts and robes and things would have an incentive to be as simple as possible and/or in a limited variety of meshes.
But MMOs tend toward using texture maps to differentiate equipment anyway.
And you'd be surprised how different the same mesh can look with just a different bump map. You'd probably also be surprised by how little you actually need dynamics for if you're clever about your costume design (by which I mean that only a certain subset of the playerbase will even be using robes or cloaks that you'd need to run simulations on).
That said, a feature that allowed different quality settings for one's avatar and for other characters would be nice; put the cycles toward the character that the player attends to the most.
We see this in games like Champions Online and a whole host of single-player games which might be rendering many characters at any given time. This technique (for anyone else reading that isn't as familiar with tech stuff) is called "level of detail", and it's been employed in video games since forever. You can see it put into practice in games like Elder Scrolls (Oblivion or Skyrim) and (famously) in UT3-run games like Gears of War or Unreal itself. It's also been around since the early days of MMOs, and you can see it in EQ2 or Age of Conan very commonly. World of Warcraft uses Level Of Detail on a great many things from environment to characters, but their tech and art style generally make the transitions not as eye-catching. You can still sometimes see the ground texture popping up a step as you change between environmental "zones", though. Or at least, you used to back when I played WoW.
TL;DR: "level of detail" technology is far from new and is standard practice in just about every video game of any kind or genre you're likely to have heard about.
I don't know the stats of PFO's target audience's machines, but it is entirely possible they're designing their game to be run by toaster ovens (usually associated with older gamers who tend to be much less concerned about eye candy). And if that's the case, readers should check out D&D Online for a rather good balance between graphical quality and performance in a fantasy MMO environment. DDO is quite aged at this point, however, and judging by the WIP shots we're looking at in this blog, PFO is aiming for far more contemporary machines.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Yeah, I don't play single-player games or console games.
I remembered reading this article about CCP developing this kind of technology, and I guess I thought it was more recent.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I mean, I understand the CryEngine has some pretty cool stuff like this, but I was understand the impression that it's not feasible in an MMO.See Decius' post below.
I think he's perhaps a little off in his estimations, but it's certain that the typical PFO player's gaming machine will only get, on average, more powerful before PFO opens up in three or four years. People who play PC games tend to be a good solid step ahead of the consoles at any given stage of the hardware release cycle, and "serious" gamers are notorious for spending more on their "gaming rigs" than on their cars.
The distribution curve of GW's target audience will still be almost the sole determining factor in PFO's graphical requirements.
I think that the -median- person who plays games on the PC will, in terms of total raw power, catch up to the current/next generation of consoles (PS4) in about five to ten years. I think a good rough target for the minimum specs would be a mid-range general-purpose desktop from a major brand as of the end of 2013, plus a video card from the $150 tier at the end of 2013; someone playing on that machine should be able to have enough fun to want to upgrade their computer.
I think a good rough target for the minimum specs would be a mid-range general-purpose desktop from a major brand as of the end of 2013, plus a video card from the $150 tier at the end of 2013; someone playing on that machine should be able to have enough fun to want to upgrade their computer.
Are you saying GW is aiming at the machines of today rather than the machines which people will be using when the game goes live?
Ooo ooo ooo, also, has GW gathered any data they'd like to share on this topic? ;D
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I think a good rough target for the minimum specs would be a mid-range general-purpose desktop from a major brand as of the end of 2013, plus a video card from the $150 tier at the end of 2013; someone playing on that machine should be able to have enough fun to want to upgrade their computer.Are you saying GW is aiming at the machines of today rather than the machines which people will be using when the game goes live?
Ooo ooo ooo, also, has GW gathered any data they'd like to share on this topic? ;D
I think the 'new' machines of the very near future will BE the machines that many people use when the game goes live. Even among the tech-literate, most people do not upgrade their desktop PC very often or to very high specifications.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Yeah, I don't play single-player games or console games.
I remembered reading this article about CCP developing this kind of technology, and I guess I thought it was more recent.
Wow! That's really awesome.
I think the 'new' machines of the very near future will BE the machines that many people use when the game goes live. Even among the tech-literate, most people do not upgrade their desktop PC very often or to very high specifications.I think a good rough target for the minimum specs would be a mid-range general-purpose desktop from a major brand as of the end of 2013, plus a video card from the $150 tier at the end of 2013; someone playing on that machine should be able to have enough fun to want to upgrade their computer.Are you saying GW is aiming at the machines of today rather than the machines which people will be using when the game goes live?
Ooo ooo ooo, also, has GW gathered any data they'd like to share on this topic? ;D
I'm running an Alienware Aurora that's about 4 years old. Other then adding ram and replacing the video cards I've not changed it. It'll still run anything that's out now, even games like Crysis very well.
Before PFO, and some other games in development, are released ill likely get a new system. It won't be an Alienware though. Since Dell acquired them their customer service went to hell. I might check out some other companies gaming rigs, or build my own, donno.
I'm running an Alienware Aurora that's about 4 years old. Other then adding ram and replacing the video cards I've not changed it. It'll still run anything that's out now, even games like Crysis very well.
Before PFO, and some other games in development, are released ill likely get a new system. It won't be an Alienware though. Since Dell acquired them their customer service went to hell. I might check out some other companies gaming rigs, or build my own, donno.
Allow me to strongly recommend that you build your own. It's really not that hard to do, and will save you a shocking amount of cash. ;D Frankly, Alienware and Dell are both obscene ripoffs.
Based on my personal experience, Newegg is amazing, though there's who knows how many similar places, like Pricewatch and so on. If you're worried that you don't know enough to ensure that the parts you're looking at will work together, it never hurts to ask your local techie dude or even just go down to the Best Buy and button-hole a Geek Squad guy and pick his brain. If you're charming and shrewd about it, you can get advice for free.
I mean this for anyone reading; you may be perfectly at home swimming through the ocean of electronics parts.
I'll note that a 4-year old gaming PC will be 6 or maybe 7 before PFO goes live...
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Goblin Squad Member
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I used to always build my own, but system before last I had a string of bad parts. The frustration and delay were horrible.
If you get good parts and have selected them well then yes, building your own can save a bit. But not all that much. The price of a desktop has become so low now and the odds of getting bad parts when not buying in quantity have conspired to change my mind. I now only buy good boxes.
Alienware was, frankly, impressive. Leather bound documentation. Top of the line packaging. Not overloaded with junkware. Pretty decent utility apps that are actually useful.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Falcon Northwest's built my last few systems; as far as I can tell they're direct competitors of Alienware. The support, cleanliness of build, and not needing to do my own research and construction any more is worth the cost. I've finally reached a place where I have less time than anything else, so I'll pay others for theirs.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Hey, as long as there can be male slave Leias as well, I'm fine with it.I see your male slave Leias and raise you a male Leeloo.
Sorry to necro this, but I just found a counter to your male Leeloo.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Sorry to necro this, but I just found a counter to your male Leeloo.Hey, as long as there can be male slave Leias as well, I'm fine with it.I see your male slave Leias and raise you a male Leeloo.
My eyes, they burn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!