Mod_West

I was hoping to have them done before moving on to Varlamore but that hasn’t gone as planned… it’s quite a difficult thing to rationalise as the reworks are pretty much as expensive as making it from scratch.

As you noticed, Arceuus did have a slight colour shift. I did this during DT2 as it was a very cheap change! I know some of the main criticisms of that area is that it’s too purple. Funnily enough purple terrain is really bad at blending with other colours and it doesn’t match the crystals in that area. Green is far more natural and makes more sense in context so figured that would be a quick win

My unofficial plans that have a small amount of white boxing done are Gentletractors rework of Lovakengj (moving most of it underground) and there are a few designs of Arceuus and Piscarilius floating around. I also have some I’ve done myself but they’re quite old now and due a revisit for sure :D

Kourend is certainly something that still needs that final touc...

Hmm, I think it’s a reasonable size, but I might be bias :P

When we were working on the map plan with Gentletractor, I initially felt the buildings were a bit small but I decided that it’s probably better to start with them feeling too small as things generally grow when translating to 3D. I think Gentletractor has nailed the sizes of the city and towns.

While comparing to the oldest cities is a good litmus test I don’t think it’s the best way to judge scale. We have a larger render distance now and you can really see how small it makes the old world feel. The idea behind Varlamore being a vast Savannah was to really make the most use of the change in technology the game has seen over recent years.

Hopefully you can trust the team to not make the same mistakes that were made during the initial release of Zeah when it came to scale. I’ve spent much of my time here correcting those mistake! For a start, having a concept map like the one we’ve shown is a big ...

Maybe you should give it a chance as that table was removed well over 2 years ago! The north is still a bit messy but the south has lots of places to explore :D

Awesome work! Excited to see the others :D

This is correct! The way old school models used to be rigged required us to add little polygons for pivot points. A lot of really old models just use an average of the points being manipulated which can lead to poor control over movement so it was helpful to add anchor points like this.

These would probably never be visible on the boss itself but due to scaling them down they sometimes poke through the mesh!

The task for this was made well over 3 years ago 😅 I was under the assumption we were just showing it for feedback not officially polling it

Haha, that was my predecessors work! I wouldn’t dare

I think about this everyday too! Still a long way from venturing south from Kebos but I’ve been chipping away at laying a ground work for Varlamore for a long time now. I use this map as a rough guide but there are plenty of changes that take into account other projects that this map wouldn’t know about - plus a few references to other player made maps :D I think when it comes to Civitas Illa Fortis I’d try and get the city layout very close to what’s here, the idea of a Carthage inspired city and dock would be perfect with the theme we want to achieve for Varlamore!

Unfortunately large land mass expansions take a long time to create and I wouldn’t want another repeat of the original Zeah release… I still feel that continent has a lot of unfinished reworks that need doing.

Ah yeah, forgot about that one! Personally I don't agree with needing 75% vote on visuals - I know, outrageous! That poll was a test run to see if that way worked. Asking if we should make some new content seems reasonable to get a super majority, but when it comes to visuals it gets a bit more limiting as for the vast majority of visual decisions, we come to as a team which works well from an art direction perspective as it keeps it consistent. I've experimented with many avenues of player polling and feedbacking when it comes to visuals and have found trying to run art direction this way leads to a few issues.

Ultimately, the area was incredibly old and had very little engagement, keeping it with the old style was potentially causing less engagement as it felt incomplete and poorly made. Perhaps I'm bias, but you could see into the barrows dungeon from within the shades dungeon and the clashing styles was incredibly jarring. Solving that breakdown of style was integral an...

:D

I've teased this one a few times as it's used for NPC's. The current issue with this is there are a lot of helmets which don't remove the jaw, so any protruding beards would poke through

We've changed many old areas! This isn't new or something we shouldn't be doing
- Duel arena
- Many houses in many towns ( for construction contracts)
- Clan wars -> Giant Hill
- Ferox Enclave (as well as other parts of the wilderness)
- Ruins of Unkah (Pretty sure this was just desert, could be wrong)
- Kourend has had extensive changes, but perhaps that's different as it's new

The game is a live-service and on occasion we need to dip into the existing maps and make changes. This house wasn't used for anything and now it adds something to the world rather than just being scenery. These changes are approached cautiously as some areas are much more iconic than others, but if a building isn't being used it's quite literally free real-estate :D

I personally find it strange that all this time the nameless hairdresser has had a monopoly on the heads of Gelinor and it's time we broke it up! First we hit his rather extreme prices and now he ha...

Thanks!

We've actually not thought too much about it! Last time we lead with a cape design which in hindsight was perhaps a bit too forward... I think it will ultimately come down to whichever is chosen and we'd probably want a colour combo that hasn't been see before. Blue and brown works really well for Sailing, Shamanism and Taming are perhaps a little more abstract. A yellow base would be nice as that would be quite unique, although quite loud. Quite fond of a dark grey myself, but not sure which that would be most suited for.

If I remember right, it was mod Jed who was running that project and he only asked art for rewards. I thought it was a little strange lore wise but was probably very busy in another project to worry too much. The rightful backlash basically gave me and Ghost a free pass to make some cooler looking bosses, regretful we couldn’t have just done it that way to begin with… projects were managed quite differently back in those days

This isn’t the plan 🤔

That area is quite dull currently 🤔 the mountains act as a nice way to transition from the forest - great ideas!

Pretty sure we interviewed someone for CM once and then turned them down after seeing their chat logs… If it’s from a long time ago it’s probably fine but if it was that week you might have an issue

Ghost has been contracting for us for years :D he mostly handles animations and fx nowadays. He did all the animations for the TOA demi-bosses, so Akkha, Zebak, Kephri and Ba-ba were all Ghost :)

Sorry if I came off a bit blunt, I see too many comments claiming that "nobody asked for this" when that's never the case and it tends to rub me the wrong way. Even if there weren't complaints, having a consistent asset for humans is more important, especially when the edge cases are so few. I believe it's only the knights of the round table and the guards in Keep Le Fay that utilise those animations and models and they were the initial prototypes for the human model rework that came with HD in 2008.

Perhaps it is a small and petty complaint to address but it feels worth it to me. I don't take feedback personally, you've got to get used to it when you've been working on the product for as long as I have :P