Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General I'm concerned about the direction of D:OS 2

But I can look out of my window for that. D:

I rather like my realism as realised by Fuji Velvia, as depicted in D:OS and Oblivion etc.

That'll probably fix the "Hulk"-Body of the male characters but it's no excuse for desaturated greyish-colors. Nature is extremely colorful.

Realistic always seems to come close to a grey or cold blue tint. Let's have a look at some beautiful (real) locations in europe:







Strong colors, strong greens and blues. Even the gras dryed in the sun and the dirt roads in the valley aren't muddy brown but have a slight golden shimmer.

I understand you, but just to make something clear here.
There are a lot of colors in the world, yes, but nothing is saturated like DoS1.
The art direction of DoS2 is not my call and will never be. Still, I want to comment on this.

I don't know if you ever done photography but the important thing to know there, with your pictures is that the 1st and the 2nd are strongly reworked pictures. I would really like to see both originals because, they look beautiful, but these are not real life color pictures at all. I can even see Lightroom filter in the 1st one.
The 2nd one is even desaturated a bit with a lot of sharpen.

The 3rd one though, on the other hand doesn't seem to be reworked. You see the sky is grey-ish and all the green is not shiny like the 1st one. You can also see on the 3rd one that it was probably really warm when the picture was taken because of the color of the sky and the trees.

Thanks for the information, I've never done photography and don't know much about digital image editing. I just took the first three pictures from the web because I didn't want to cherry pick. But it's good to see an expert commenting on the topic.

I'm far from being an expert photographer but yeah. It's something you learn when doing some. It's pretty rare to find unedited pictures these days. It's really easy to edit and it's always better looking.

PS: I also REALLY like flashy color, heh. But like I said, this is not my call.

I think I often get bogged down in the "but what is real?" philosophical discussion when it comes to photography. RAW images look absolutely horrible and need some degree of work to get them into a presentable state, which always leaves me wondering how much is too much, and how much is not enough? Even if I go back to the days of colour films, there were so many different saturations and colour balances it was hard to know what was most "realistic", and it varied according to circumstance... and most of all, taste. Which is why I mentioned Velvia: I like saturated colours, and it's the sort of thing that triggers my memories a lot more than the perhaps understated equivalents. That said, Velvia sucked for portraits, but portrait film often looked a bit uninspiring for many landscapes.

But really I don't mind as long as it's not the washed out deadness of Skyrim (yeah I know, excepting the slightly more colourful south-eastern corner with its nice autumnal silver birches, although I've long since forgotten what that originally looked like without all manner of tweaks, retextures and other fiddling that made me think "argh, too many decisions").

The game looked beautiful to me at PAX East.

I say this as someone who has previously voiced concern about Larian deviating significantly from their roots when trying to go for a more 'mature' approach.

Just don't compare them, it makes things harder.
Check only the new graphics, try to forget the old and if anything disturbs you, it can be addressed, right?

Honestly I didn't check the new in-game graphics very deep like someone spoke about colors, but I see that it is much more realistic and I like it very much. Didn't compare with DOS graphics.

However the character art feels a bit out of my scope, it is too detailed, but somehow too cleaned up, I like more dirt and (small) flaws to give a more realistic touch. But the lady I've seen in an update just nails it!! Amazing, even if not very much my taste and somehow I imagined other direction for DOS2. But after a certain point of being a fan nothing really matters anymore (for me at least).

I actually like the more realistic touch. Never was a fan of cel-shading style, like the Wind Waker, or overly cartoonish, for RPGs (Tales of Symphonia was a stretch). Final Fantasy is a relatively good example (up to FFX).

Then again, I am a Planescape Torment freak. And after a bit, I relatively forget about graphics, if the game is good.

Hmm, but at least you can still play Wind Waker, without carving your eye out with a spoon.

Colouring: interesting, I never saw the difference so clearly before.
As for the change of tone: why not wait and see or watch some previewvideos? As far as I can see, the humor is still there (for example if you talk with a dog, he tells you that he hates his mistress for dressing him up like a doll. Or you ask a ghost who killed her and she answers dryly with "you") and since the story seems to be more darker in tone, the look seems to fit. But I can understand if this bothers you. I replay the game at the moment with a friend and we love how alive the world feels just with the beautiful lightning.

But I had something else on my mind: I asked myself if the game will become more linear, since we play escaped prisoners on the run? The first game was a treasure hunt so it solved (for me at least) the pacing problem those kind of games have. But with Source Hunters behind us, the only way for us should be forward, so we shouldn't go back to older areas.
This reminds me a bit of Beyond Divinity, which had chapters instead of the more open approach, Divinity 1. Granted, in Divinity 2, you couldn't back to some areas too, so it wouldn't really be something new, but I still ask myself, how Larian plans to give us THE FEELING of being hunted and on the run.

I believe something from the dark side of the Source will emerge and keep us on the run.

I'm not sure if you're trying to imply that Wind Waker looks less dated. Wind Waker came out 5 years after FF7, and 3 years after FF8, and the "realistic" character models from these games look less dated than Wind Waker to me.

But I think that's actually besides the point.

The major problem for me is that the design in D:OS wasn't attractive. Compare D:OS characters to the characters in Kingdom Hearts. Squall looks great. Mulan looks great.

I'm not too fussed about which direction they decide to go. Everything I've seen from D:OS2 looks better so far, but I haven't had a good look at the 3D character design.

@cyseal

That's actually not a bad idea. A constant reminder of something that will eat us over the course of time if we don't get help, could be a good device, even if their is no timelimit in-game.

@Ayvah

FF7? Really? Okay, tastes are different, but this one is new. And yes Wind Waker still looks good, but that's because it always was so stylized, that it don't even bother to compete with the more impressive games at the time (like Unreal 2 or maybe Dead or Halo 2). The "realistic" models of FF8 still look good "for their time", but they are outdated compared to a character from the Witcher 3 for example. But okay, if you think so, I will leave at that.

By looking at the game images, I think I like D:OS2 better then D:OS1. But for me, story and atmoshpere are more important than graphic. So If I must choose, I prefer Crono Trigger over Skyrim.

Regarding the landscape images, the first 2 look really strongly edited (I am not an expert for photography or image editing). In fact, when I looked at the second image, first I thought it is a painting and not a photo.
I hope I see something like this on my vacation. I made some good photos that looked nice even without editing.

Regarding the "darker" setting: Right now I play DA:O (very good game despite the archetypical story: You are the only one who can save the world fom an ancient evil).
Does "dark" mean that your chars are covered in blood all over?
While DA:O looks good in general, it feels strange when you talk to villagers while all of your cloth and skin is full of blood and nobody cares, though all other villagers (including knights or other fighters) are clean.

They are certainly products of their time, and you can see their age. I mean this in the sense that if you go back to the games now, how much do the limited graphics get in the way of enjoying the game?

To me, this isn't great, but I'm pretty comfortable with this.

By the time Wind Waker came out, it was competing against Final Fantasy XI, and the older FFX, so when we talk about FFVII & VIII we're really going back to the infancy of 3D graphics on consoles. Some parts hold up better than others. To me, Wind Waker looks no less dated than these examples.

Hi guys,

Hey, I don't care too much about colours! But please keep the humour...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4HE4Ucsg1I

This makes me laugh every time

That's pretty good.

Chrono trigger over skyrim is a no-brainer
CT... so many fond memories.

Couldn't agree more on CT.
For me CT > all, ^__^
http://imgur.com/a/GoxaU

that's quite a collection.