Originally posted by
We0921
I just want to preface this by saying that most of what I'm about to say is my opinion:
The 06 style used textures sporadically, which have a sort of dated charm to them (Like some of the paintings). The new style (and current style) avoids textures almost completely and uses models instead.
It's a bit strange when some places skew towards the old style and some the new style. It's very odd seeing the solid-colored play-doh trees in Prif and Soul Wars when the rest of the game has the standard leaf texture trees.
It's tough as well because I think some of the OSRS artists want to somewhat modernize the game's art direction, and it definitely seems like it's been a work in progress.
The model artistry seems to trend towards texturing with polygons (See Piscarilius planks vs Port Sarim's), which can look pretty great at times (Shayzien's hedges) and others not so much (Crash site cavern walls/floors)
However, I do have to say that their environment artistry has been much improved. Stranglewood and new Shayzien are some awesome environments that I think would look absolutely worse if they were made in the old style. I just hope that they don't shy away from giving some places extra love in the same way they did Hosidius and Shayzien.
I'm curious to know what people think of this stuff
That’s a great breakdown and hits the nail on the head 😅 Id say the first few years of OSRS lacked a lot of cohesion down to a mix of poor planning and no feedback process to make sure there was alignment. Over recent years the art team is sitting at 11 people and I think you can tell that the new areas and reworks have greatly benefited from this expansion!
When it comes to the use of textures, it’s a tough one to crack. As mentioned the tooling is quite broken which means adding textures is time consuming and tedious so we tend to avoid it where we can. I think the aforementioned “play-doh” trees was an experiment that perhaps took the style too far from the classic textures we know and love. With Shayzien I wanted to see if we could blend the poly-colour trees in with textured trees which I think was quite successful but still disappointed players who prefer the original 2004 map design - although this could be down to the way I set dressed the Shayzien area as I really tried to push it as far as the tools would let me 😅 the pathing isn’t as open (by design) which seemed like another sticking point for players as a lot of the scenery joins together to make very few through ways when navigating about.
Ultimately the tree/texture conversation is one we’re still actively having today and has been a topic for Varlamore as the area has required quite a few new bits of foliage 😁 While the majority of interactable trees are textured, I’d argue that even before we started working on OSRS a lot of foliage was solved using poly colour over textures, so it isn’t something the current team came up with in a vacuum. Take a walk through Karamja and you’ll notice outside of the core trees (palms) that the majority are polycolour and that area has never been changed in the past 10 years.
I hope players like what we’ve done with Varlamore, it’s one of the most exciting expansions we’ve done and I really hope it’s clear that we’ve learnt a lot as a team since the original release of Kourend when it comes to art style and area design 😁
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