Ugliest Game of 2001?

[MarkG]

Originally posted by ContradictioN
Those CTP graphics may look good, but they don't feel good, and thats what will make a world of difference.

care to explain how they didnt "feel good"?


for me the ctp1/2 graphics worked(and the same goes for the civ2 ones) cause i instantly knew what i was looking at. unlike the smac graphics were i kept looking on the left corner to see(read) what unit i had selected....

They don't FEEL good, but they LOOK good. I'm not talking about visiblity, I'm talking about depth of feelings. Which are more important than the look.

A blind man can feel beauty.

and MarkG, can you change my nickname back to Icedan? pleaseee or I will :banned: you

[DarkCloud]

Originally posted by Kevin Ar18

What farms?

And, BTW, what is with those anchors on the cities. I wouldn't exactly say they look good.
I suspect they are probably there to indicate a naval base is there. But can't we find a better way? Say a harbor actually sticking out across the ocean water?

Oh, and one thing about all these screenshots is that they seem like they are still in development because there are still things missing. IE, no railroads, fortresses, airports, farms, ice type terrain, or rain forest type.
So, there's still hope. And about the roads, they are probably there as preliminary art as they begin to get the game working which they'll refine later.

About the Farms- I meant irrigation, the canals that crisscross the screen. They look horrible. Kevin couldn't even tell what they were.

I also agree that the city art needs more work, it looks too muddy.

[Chronus]

Okay, even though graphics are not that important to me, I'll admit that the roads criss-crossing the mountains do look a bit silly. What concerns me, however, are the important items that the roads may hide (such as the mine someone pointed out above). The beauty of the earlier Civs were their simplicity and easy interface. Please don't make me wonder what important item is hidden behind all those roads. I shouldn't have to click the tile in order to read what's in it.

The CTPII colors are nice, obvious, rich colors. However, the blending in the CivIII screen is better. I don't mind a single tile of plains in the middle of grasslands but they appear too square-like in the CTPII screen.

The oceans look pretty good to me with their shades of turquoise. What's wrong with that?

[Kevin Ar18]

Originally posted by DarkCloud
About the Farms- I meant irrigation, the canals that crisscross the screen. They look horrible. Kevin couldn't even tell what they were.

Actually I was able to tell that there was irrigation, but I just couldn't find any farms. I realize from the wording of my message that it sounds like I'm jumping on you, but I'm not. I didn't mean to get on you on the least, sorry about that. Actually I was kind of speaking to Firaxis like what farms Firaxis, I can't even see any farms, all I see is irrigation. But, alas, there really isn't any farms.

Originally posted by Chronus
The oceans look pretty good to me with their shades of turquoise. What's wrong with that?

Yeah, I actually think the ocean looks ok or even pretty good. My main complaint is with ALL terrain having a puke green color to it.

And you know, we may just find out after playing this game we like how it looks.... Who knows. We're only seeing screenshots, not playing a real game. Interesting how things can grow on you.

[me_irate]

Heres the reason i thought it looked dated.

http://www.firaxis.com/civ3/screenshots.cfm
the middle one.


if you notice on this screen the roads go under the different types of stuff (road under horse) also on the mountains in the northeast the road sorta goes over the hills correctly. But it doesn't show any roads over the the mountains which could mean they haven't figured a way to do it yet. Actually, i dont have a clue how they could make good roads over mountains as they are now, maybe tunnels, but not roads. The graphics in this pick are 100% better than the other one. Notice, cities much better as are the units, irrigation and trees are less blury. The only things i dont really care for is the river,(not obvious enough)
and that the trees still aren't very pretty.

[Urban Ranger]

I think the irrigation and the roads need more work.

Otherwise the graphics are okay. Of course, they could do better, say, with rivers and seas "recessed" below land.

The pink doesn't look so bad on my monitor. I must have a really good one

[TechWins]

Graphics aren't too important to me but I do need some clearity with them. I will admitt that great graphics do enhance a game but don't make or break a game. How Firaxis is calling great graphics on Civ3 is very inaccurate. It would be like saying, when looking at the sun during the middle of the day it is very easy to find certain spots on it. If you can't determine the easiest of things right away the game will become more work than fun. Graphics for Civ3 have to improve. IMO the graphics may look cooler than Civ2 but I feel that they're a lot less clear. Clearity is the most important part of graphics so the graphics for Civ3 are terrible. If Firaxis could just fix the clearity part of it the graphics would be fairly good.

[Chronus]

Actually, i dont have a clue how they could make good roads over mountains as they are now,

I don't mind the roads in front of the mountains as long as they are in the lower portion of the mountains. It's when they are higher up that they look goofy. Perhaps these "higher" roads can trail behind the mountains? (my apologies to anyone who may have already suggested this)

Also, what are those alphabetic characters doing on the map? I see an "i" on some hills, an "F" on grasslands and irrigated areas . . . what are they? I thought, perhaps, a settler was busy chugging away at irrigating or building a fortress but I don't see any unit.

[death_head]

It's all about the gameplay...

*tries to hypnotize self*

it's all about the gameplay...

[Provost Harrison]

Yeah, the road overlay is ugly. Surely to get them to tuck behind the mountains all you would have to do is redraw a damn mountain on top of the square behind it with the road, voila, tucked behind. And yeah, the roads should pass through valleys and around the base of the mountain, not over the peak.

A bit more clarity would be nice in the picture, but then again, Markos has already said, JPEG distortion is not helping with the clarity of the pictures either...

[hexagonian]

C'mon, the graphics for civ3 are better than CTP???? At least as they are being presented now???

Give me a break!!!!

I will give civ3 this much - they do present what the city is currently building, which is something I wish was implimented in the CTP series.

But just look at the text - CTP uses reverse boxes for city names, so the info is easily read. Because of this, the text can be smaller too, so it does not clutter up the terrain.

And as much as I like the idea of blending the terrain, this causes the unintended problem of distinguishing just what a tile is (Is a tile a plain/grassland or some type of wierd hybrid tile that Sid did not tell us about?) Sure you can click on a tile to find out, but who wants to keep doing that???

CTP tiles are distinct from one another - it makes for a somewhat less realistic map (from a blending standpoint), but at least it is a clearly defined and crisp map.

And I'm not even going to get into the roads or the irrigation ditches...

I still get headaches thinking about looking at SMAC graphics, and it looks like I will have to stock up on Advil for civ3.

[yin26]

O.K. I think the best way I could put the importance of graphics is this: I will play a game with bad graphics if the gameplay is outstanding. The weaker the graphics, the better the gameplay will have to be. This means, of course, graphics take a backseat to gameplay.

However, in the case of Civ 3, nothing suggests to me that the gameplay will be much more than what we've already been playing for 10 years. 10 years, folks. No matter how good the original Civ and Civ 2 are, that's 10 years of basically the SAME THING.

While I understand it might be pretty darn hard to improve on the Civ gameplay formula, IT SURE AS HECK AINT THAT HARD TO IMPROVE THE GRAPHICS! I kept thinking to myself all the time, "If the gameplay is even a tad bit better...or just different..., I'll buy the game just to relive the glory with new graphics."

Yes, I'd pay $50 for a re-vamped version of Civ 2. However, at least from what we've seen, this is UGLIER by far than Civ2 (released 5 years agao) and CtP. Now, did I play CtP for its graphics alone? No. The gameplay sucked IMO. So don't misunderstand the comparison there.

Simply: The tried and true Civ 10-year-old gameplay will NOT be enough to get me to buy Civ 3. At the very least I was hoping for the game to have a major facelift to justify my $50. So far, my money will be going somewhere else.

Civ 3 for Ugliest Game of 2001!

[RonHiler]

About the roads:

I'm nearly certain they are not going to remain looking like that. Here is one possible explanation for them being on top of everything else.

Clearly there is some layering going on. Flat terrain gets drawn, mountains go over terrain, cities next, irrigation, etc. Whatever the order is. Now, let us suppose that when this shot was taken, someone was working on the roads routines. They need to be sure what they are coding is working right. How best to do that? The easiest thing to do is temporarily layer it on top, so that you can see what is going on when you do test builds of the code. When the roads are working to satisfaction, you place them back into their proper layer (which would probably be underneath most everything else).

I certainly have been critical of CivIII in the past, but even I don't think the gang at Firaxis would be silly enough to leave the roads looking like they are. They may have made (IMHO) some bad design decisions, but they are not stupid by any means. I think we can safely assume the roads won't end up looking that bad in the final release.

As to the rest of the graphics, you're on your own

Ron

[Urban Ranger]

I think you are right about the roads, Ron. I saw some roads going on top of a horse (special resource), which would be just completely stupid otherwise.

However when I said the roads need more work I was also referring to their current appearance as a repulsive mess of brown threads. Why can't they just draw a line from point A to point B without this spider web-ish quality? I do realise the road shouldn't be completely straight like the edge of a ruler, but right now it takes twice as long to travel on a road because it curves around so much.

[tniem]

Originally posted by yin26
Simply: The tried and true Civ 10-year-old gameplay will NOT be enough to get me to buy Civ 3. At the very least I was hoping for the game to have a major facelift to justify my $50. So far, my money will be going somewhere else.

Agreed. I really hoped for a lot more. I was hoping that they would take some of the elevation features of SMAC and make it more realistic and more understandable for Earth.

I personally do not believe the colors they choose are that bad. In fact I kind of like them, but the screen shots are just hard to like. It may be because of the jpg formats, but I just don't like what I have seen.

Civ 3 for Ugliest Game of 2001!

Correction: Civ 3 for Ugliest Game of 2002. I just don't see it coming out this fall - two games from the same company in the same 6 week period. Not likely.

UR, thats silly, and I'm sure you know it, there won't be any turning corners on roads!

I'll tell you my opinion on the roads. They're ugly, not because they're swirving everywhere, but because they are too big. The main road is 3 times as big as Civ2's, the rest are 1.5 times as big as Civ2's.

They are also ugly because of the colour they used, they've used a colour thats closer to a beach/desert road, rather than a dirt road.

The last reason why they are ugly is because they appear to be floating.

This is how I would fix it.

1. Make the small roads, the main roads. and make the small roads half their size now. So that they appear almost gone, but you can still see them clearly.

2. Make it a darker brown.

3. Lessen the usage of roads when getting further from the city.
So for example, all the tiles surrounding a large city, will be messy, but the next tiles won't be as messy, and so forth. This will also help to unclutter it. Otherwise making it look like pointless roads everywhere.
What I'm suggesting is, that you have control of making the main roads, but as your culture grows, so do roads around your city.

4. No indentation!, roads are not like that! But rivers need that!

5. The last thing I can think of is that the roads don't appear to be anti-aliased, I think that would greatly help lessen the appearence of an ugly road. Because if you notice the big roads, they are quite jaggy, and seem to jump out at places. This will also get rid of the floating look.

[Kevin Ar18]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Why can't they just draw a line from point A to point B without this spider web-ish quality?

I didn't want to say anything about this, but since someone else did, I will too. I agree there. I don't particularly like how the roads are done. It's just so much more confusing than the Civ2 model. In some places you have two roads right next to each other on the same tile! It get's kind of hard to tell where the tiles are that have roads because they curve sooo much, whereas in Civ 2 they were nice and straight with just the right amount of curviness.

I don't think you actualy walk on the roads.

If there is a road on a tile, then that counts as 1/3 of your travelling distance. That's how it works, remember?

(not saying it will be 1/3 in civ3)

[Kevin Ar18]

Yeah, I know that, but that was not what I was talking about... I was talking about how they looked.

[yin26]

I could live with the basic look of an individual road, but slopped together this way, I doubt ANY road would look good. This is one of those cases where realism should take a back seat to artistic design.

[Capt Dizle]

Much ado about nothing. Click me-irate's link.
Yin is pulling a joke or something with some early rendering.

Do you folks really think Sid would let something out that bad?

LOL

[One More Turn!]

My vote would be for ugliest game of 2002.

I can live with a game without pretty graphics, but they have to clean these up if they want to compete for my $$

[loinburger]

Wutang! I was hoping that Firaxis would bring back the familiar "ugly as ****" SMAC screens!

[November Adam]

Hey! Just took a look at these shots, I don't mind the blending together, as long as they have a grid overlay (subtle mind you). The mountains look ridiculous, if I didn't know better I would think it was a phalax symbol or something. I think the artist should have popped into a plane and took some photos from a birds eye view.

Civ 2 had great irragated fields, and farmland. It was closer to how they looked. The artist should just bump up the detail.

Has anyone seen the map for Middle Earth The Card Game? That was a well drawn map.

I understand with tiles it would be hard to blend from say a mountain tile to a prarie tile, but couldn't they have created more than one tile for mountains? Say one for mountains meeting ocean, meeting forest, etc. Sure this would be a lot of work but it would create a nice map (I think). Granted I'm not sure what the memory requirements would be for this, or the programming required.

i think the color palette is very limited, it's like the picture was adjusted with a yellow filter over it or something. ECH!

[Father Beast]

I don't know what all you dogs are barking about. the screenshot looks good to me. I want to print it out and hang it in my bedroom for good feelings.

[Imran Siddiqui]

FB, I agree . I quite like the screenshots. I don't know what everyone is complaining about...

[Zylka]

The graphics look plain... hokey. The overly bright, easter like colors remind me of the onset of a psilocybin trip. Nice job with the mountains as well, I had no idea the majority of the earths rocky peaks look like north American hoodoos.

All in all, the tint is plain horrible. The overall look should be dulled down and darkened, a take on civ2's looks with more blending, countour variety (visual only), and attention to detail. Tip for firaxis when civ4 rolls around; don't hire graduates from art schools that advertise on the back of match books.

Cheers

[Zylka]

...another tip. Art history is a nice place to look for creative inspiration, but not to theme an entire f*cking game on when you have pictures of "real life" to use.

No, that must be wrong. When civ4 comes out, can you please base it on van Gogh's "Stary Night?". I want to feel like I'm in an absinthe stupor whenever playing, which could get expensive...