Am I the only one feeling a bit disappointed?

So, let me fully add my voice into this, and no I don't think this post will be what you expect it to be ;p

We need threads like this. After all, TC felt like he was alone, and I like to avoid having people feel the way Ciel does about the place being an echo chamber. We need criticism to be effective as a community behind the game, me and Mike talk about this on the inverted bloodcast:

(there's a good bit before that timestamp too, it was several minutes talking about feedback etc)

Thing is for me, I am a certain degree of disappointed by how the game looks.



It's been done, and in Unreal 3...:


edit: LOL right after I post this, a trailer goes up of them doing it again with a new game:



I've been playing Guilty Gear for about 14 years with a good degree of seriousness, and I easily forget that I'm playing a 3D game when I'm doing a match in Xrd. The camera will pan or zoom in for a super and I will still have a moment of "...what woah" as I'm playing it. The way key frames of animation were used really solidified this feeling as well as the ridiculously strong shader work, but yeah...this game proved to me that it's possible for me to move on from feeling "2D only" is best for my favorite games.

The Bloodstained Kickstarter name drops Xrd in its FAQ about the graphics and about the 2.5D choice. That got me perhaps unreasonably hyped about the possibilities, lol. I knew even then that it couldn't look like THAT, there's just no way, it was an above and beyond amount of work for the Xrd team to get the game to look that way with just a couple of characters on screen with 20-ish set backgrounds - applying anything similar to a giant Castlevania game would be an insurmountable task. Even so, I had hope that a certain manner of stylistic cel shading would persist in the characters and backgrounds, and the concept art did lend toward that idea.

Feeding further into this hype for me was the character shader choice we were given for Miriam's model, and it still looks pretty much ideal to me. The thick lines, colors, the deception of "flatness" at multiple angles - it's there. The backgrounds though have went in a whole different direction than I thought was ideal though, i.e. they are indeed essentially realistic 2.5. For me, a 2D painting-ish looking shader for the environment SOUNDS like it would have been better. I don't know though the technical specifics of if that would have even been possible, or beneficial to the gameplay design. It seems in my mind to be something that works absolutely or fails absolutely - either you capture the 2D feeling wonderfully in an overarching sense, or it just ends up looking like worse 3D with flat, bland textures.

IGA early on was excited about the possibilities 2.5 were going to give (such as with the scrolling in that lava area, the Vepar fight, many others yet to be seen), as that's new ground for him and it sounds neat to me too. What we have now doesn't even per se look bad to me - it's not 2D or Xrd 2.5, but it is expressing unique design ideas and I think it's capable of fitting a darker gothic aesthetic that would be harder to capture in a drawn medium. To picture what I mean, those of you that are familiar with Bloodborne, I don't think that game would have been as able to accurately portray the feelings it wanted its environments to give you if it was all cel shading...at all. The 3D plays well into the visceral details and the abstract, unsettling thought it provokes. An IGAvania game could invoke similar perceptions by using its surroundings in a similar way, but certainly more of that like...energetic, explorative positive feeling mixed with the dark, gothic and macabre. It's a potentially strong avenue to take.

And now, it's on him to prove to me it can be done. I think he can do it. Lord knows the pressure is on him to. Would I have rather it be/look more 2D overall? Of course, obviously, but he has what it takes to make something great out of limitations, even known to thrive in it. The limitation in this case may even be expectations of questionable possibility, yet regardless I can't shake them, yet further regardless still I think that Bloodstained can loose them.

I think almost all kinds of criticism / comments / feedback on the game are valid as long as it's not some bullsh*t like "this visuals sucks, I want muh 2d side-scroller" or "this MN9 all over again gg wp no re". The team is not gonna abandon the 2.5D graphical style this far on development and the comparisons with MN9 are pure fearmongering and THAT can definitely be contagious and spread paranoia, escpecially since I see more and more people saying that every time a new Kickstarter update comes out.

That said, so far I have no complaints about how the game is turning out but I completely understand the points some people have made here and I think they're valid.

purifyweirdshard That pretty much captures my sentiment on the issue of art direction. I think what we have seen so far works from a design standpoint, but - to me - the realistic shading just makes it look nothing more than functional. It gets the job done, but that's it. And I've seen similar comments elsewhere: that the visuals as they stand lack identity. There's nothing that makes it pop out and let you clearly see an artist's fingerprints.

It's somewhat unfair to make the comparison, but there are a number of 2D metroidvanias that have come out recently, and there's one thing that they all have in common: you can immediately tell the game from the art direction. But while it's easier to achieve that with hand drawn visuals, a good combination of textures and stylistic textures and shaders can accomplish this as well, and I think that Miriam's character shaders are proof that IGA and co. are more than capable.

If what we have is what we're getting, then fine. I'll enjoy the game just the same. But in my opinion, what we have seen in the environment so far won't be looked at as having the same timeless beauty that Symphony of the Night does, and I would push for the team to do better if I could.


Astaroth I can't agree that waiting is better. A change in shaders would possibly require a change in textures as well, which means that the longer that any hypothetical change is made, the more work has to be redone. At 20% of project completion, such a change is still viable. At 80%? not so much.

not necessarily 80% like i said, test areas for all the stages, that could be now since they obviously have quite a few rooms set up for testing and to show off, it could be soon, but i think having a complete picture of what said changes might affect is better than having one or two rooms ready like they showed off a few months ago with the entrance hall bits

Note: The beauty of gaming today is patches. Post-launch fixes of both textures, functions, animations and more. Just a thought.

Edit: Glitches, bugfix, new skins, more weapons, balance-issues, hacks, spelling, lore, addons..

Me too, but if its acceptable and the patch have been adding more of the fun for free, its cool.

And all those speedrunner glitches must be fixed too.

I agree. Having an unfinished game is a tinder that dies out fast. That trap isn't something that will occur for Bloodstained however. I am pretty sure they will push it further if needed instead. Which is okey. I have been waiting longer time for Chasm than this. hehe.

I remember making comments back then when we got to vote on the shaders that Miriam looked like she was ripped straight out of GTA (or something to that effect) because the style of shading is very similar, I also made comment that it was jarring against the background. Seems very similar in line with thoughts of OP.

However, there's no way I would say that the creative minds behind this project have created a "Frankenstein's Monster" because those shaders were picked by Iga himself according to the Kickstarter update and it was put to a vote and those of us who felt this way were in the minority so... yeah, creatively I think they have pushed forward with what people wanted at the time.

What's interesting for me at least is to see this sort of commentary creeping back in, not that's it's a good thing or anything like that but, well, yeah, it's still jarring (the characters against the backgrounds), like two different styles being put together in the same game.

I think I also mentioned back then( (and I see it reflected in the comments here) that when you look at other games or hell even any other Iga game, the characters look like they are right at home in the environments that they are put in. This does not 100%.

However, in saying that, truth be told the style chosen for the character art (the enemies included based on what I've seen recently) looks really awesome, maybe I've mellowed because I've had all this time to digest it since the shader feedback was taken. If I look back on the below** now I would rather out of the four to have what was picked, but it still doesn't fit quite right... is it too late to chuck a filter on the environments?

** bloodstainedfanforums.com/thread/857/update-igas-brand-background-shaders

Also, looking at the art of Miriam in the inventory screen, there's no way I could now pick the other one, it's too 'bland'.

Either way, I personally don't feel it's as big of a niggle as I once thought it was and in reality I think that will be reflected in reviews once the game comes out (considering there is plenty of time for tweaking and polish to be applied).

Yeah, I used to think this was a bigger deal like OP, but there more I watch the latest gemaplay vids I'm just no longer convinced it is...

Silver

Might be an "area issue". That area will be warm, while second area will be cold. All about lightening. And being 30% finished, blur is something they add almost last to any area. But hopefully we could get updates on same areas later on, so we can compare.