| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Hello everyone.
I'm running Age of Ashes on Foundry. Pathfinder 2e is awesome, Foundry is awesome. Great. But something that stood out to me from the moment I started looking at the PDFs for the AP is how bad the quality of the illustrations and maps (especially the maps) is. I'm not talking about how good the art is, I'm talking about resolution and compression.
So I did a bit of digging, and staff from Paizo have stated that the quality of the maps on the APs is what they have, that they don't have higher quality maps available.
I already have the physical books for the adventure, but in the name of science, I decided to spend a few bucks on the PDFs from Devir, the infamous company that translates (or uses Google Translator on the books, but that's an issue for another day) Pathfinder to Spanish.
And to my surprise, the quality on their books is noticeably better. Here are a few examples:
English Hellknight Hill cover vs Spanish Hellknight Hill cover
Detail from battlemap in English vs detail from battlemap in Spanish (example 1)
Detail from battlemap in English vs detail from battlemap in Spanish (example 2)
Detail from battlemap in English vs detail from battlemap in Spanish (example 3)
As you can see, the compression in the English version of the books is much worse. This is, obviously, taken from official and legally purchased and downloaded PDFs, from Paizo.com and DriveThroughRPG.com, respectively.
So... yeah.
What gives, Paizo? People have asked for higher quality maps for years, you have them. Why give us a lower quality product? Why don't you have these higher quality maps available for download separately, or put them in the PDF with the interactive maps?
For what's worth, I don't know if this applies to other APs, as I don't have the money nor the inclination to purchase more PDFs from Devir to test it on more products.
Thank you.
|
While this doesn't defend Paizo's decision to not provide the high resolution maps, there may be other factors in play when using Devir service. It's possible they used an image sharpening utility to clean up the existing image as part of the service. I have seen a few available, though never used any myself.
However, the idea that even in today's technology that Paizo isn't provided with high resolution maps from their designers is mind boggling. Understandable 20 years ago, but not today.
I know Hellknight Hill had issues with interactive maps, so maybe there is a simple versioning issue here.
Regardless, I've found the interactive maps are sometimes lower quality than what you can extract from the PDF.
Honestly, between the resolution and flattened images with secret doors and such baked in, I've just gotten proficient with Dungeondraft and using Reddit communities to get high-res maps for my APs and even many Society scenarios.
It is what it is, I get they have limited resources and at least there are communities out there sharing their creations for free.