Starcraft 2 has got too much style?

yea i remember the art from warcraft II , it was sooooo awesoome. i hope they return to that grittier style

 

Blizzard games don't have simple, stylized graphics because they are making some sort of tradeoff between graphics and gameplay, get that out of your head at once. Blizzard is an extremely successful developer and they can afford the best of the best graphics-wise. They can afford to have the best graphics and still pay their programmers and designers to make a great game. What Blizzard does is create graphics that best suit gameplay. They go way out of their way to make each unit, building, each piece of the environment look extremely distinct.

Have you seen some of the alpha screens for the original StarCraft? StarCraft uses sprites, just sets of 2D images that are animated. In the alpha, they were throwing around unit sprites that looked freakishly realistic, smooth, everything. If you saw the Goliath sprite from the alpha before May of this year, you'd swear that it was a leaked screen from SC2. Interestingly enough, the art that made it into the final game was much simpler, more exaggerated. Why was that? Because they wanted the units to look distinct!

The problem with going for "realistic" is that, at a distance, at a glance, "realistic" units really do all look the same. A haze of smoke wafting over the battlefield blocks the player's view. A tank that looks like a real tank up close looks, viewed from afar, like a real tank viewed from afar. A real tank viewed from afar typically looks exactly like a rock. When the player is viewing everything from afar, with realistic graphics, everything looks exactly like a rock. This is not good for gameplay! Players need to be able to look, comprehend, and act. Fast. Exaggerated, simple, bright. It's all easier for the brain to swallow.

On top of the gameplay restriction, you have to remember that graphics are also naturally restricted by the system drawing them. Blizzard caters to the widest possible audience, and quite a large proportion of their audience will want to play the game with a lower end video card. Blizzard can't throw a hundred, million-polygon, heavily textured units onto the screen and expect everyone's computer to be able to handle it. So, they do what they can with those limitations, and from what I've seen, they do it well.

 

hey do you have any link to that page who shows thoose sprites from alpha starcraft 1 ??

 

you mean this? the scouts looks very cartoon-ish
[img width=640 height=480]http://home.planet.nl/~aggel005/alphabeta/alpha/alpha11.jpg[/img]

 

Dkuvrotsky said:

I think the cartoon style is well balanced to set it in line with Blizzard's other games in the genre. The style, which I would rather refer to as "Crayola" is also well-suited to RTS games with large armies. In Warcraft III, you do see units leaving tracks, but they're typically hero or other rare units so it's not as hard on the graphics engine. It's also nice to be able to see your units so clearly on the battlefield, whereas if this were a single-unit RPG with naturalistic styling it'd be very hard to quickly visualize where everything was. To put it a different way, in a naturalistic RPG-style Starcraft II, all the marines would probably have to look somewhat different from one another or you'd start to wonder why the same scratch and rust patterns (necessary to make a naturalistic rendering viable) appeared on every single marine in exactly the same way.

Another thing that may be causing this to lok cartonish is that you've been seeing a lot of Terran and Protoss units so far--I do personally think that the Protoss head figure on the main website does look much more cartoonish than the terran figure, but all that aside the vehicle and mechanical units are just prone to looking more cartoonish. Recall the Zerg nydus worms, for example--I don't know how many polies they were using, but it looks like they might be accomplishing that with a great deal of semi-transparent textures. The Zerg are hardly cartoonish at all, but they do fit into the terrain very nicely.

Perhaps the biggest surprise with the new styling is how well the terrand and protoss in fact fit with the terrain, and indeed that every piece still fits so well with the other pieces. If there were only Zerg playing you'd have your wish about the game being more naturalistic / Diablo II style and less cartoonish.

There are a lot of things being done right about Starcraft II, though--I'm very impressed with the unit shadows, for example, and the animation of doodas like grass is also quite good. The cartoon rendering is improving, as well--this is a style that has a lot of potential to grow. In time, it will become even more realistic.

 

starcraft 2 looks awesome at the moment. but still needs more laser and explosions. ^^

 

The only thing I'm complaining about is the map atmosphere. It seems to bright and flashy, like or similar wc3.


I KNOW SC2 IS NOT WC3, DON'T FLAME ME! I'm just saying, the terrain doesn't give me that rugged, the world is in despair feeling like sc1 did, with an exception to the desert tile set. However, I still love the game play the demos gave us and most of the units. But I'll miss that sad, dark feeling in the environment.