I know there has been a lot of hype surrounding Lost Ark after they unveiled the initial trailer in 2014. The video showed extremely detailed and beautifully rendered scenes that blew many people away.
Then in October of this year, G-star released the following video showing the game being play tested by focus groups. In this video, camera shot footage of the game play is displayed.
Some folks immediately noticed some differences in the quality level of the in-game textures versus the trailer from the 2014.
The 2014 trailer is highly scripted and likely using higher quality CGI cinematic versus actual game play footage and renderings from the actual game engine. Trailers are meant to be visually stunning but that level of high quality does not translate well in-game unless all you plan on doing is sitting their and admiring the visual qualities.
The same goes for the camera moving within the game world; great for cinematics/trailers, but in-game when we’re talking about anything with some form of action, is going to get old after you’ve seen it several times.
And since Lost Ark is being designed to be played with a fixed camera isometric view ala most ARPG’s, the focus during actual game play is going to be primarily with your character. And that is where extremely detailed surroundings do not work well unless again, you plan to sit there and admire the actual surrounding environment, than actually playing what is going to be faster action combat game play.
There there are actual design constraints versus a short trailer segment designed for visual impact. Highly detailed textures are going to consume a lot of disk space. The bulk of the client side data in games like this are graphics (environment and character textures, cinematics) and audio where 20GB is becoming the norm. With the sort of visual quality in every little nook and cranny shown in the 2014 trailer, there’s a point where that is going to consume way more client side disk space than required; and some areas, a player may never bother visiting again once they’ve moved on to higher levels in the game (if the monster level design works the way most MMO’s do).
This is why I try not to buy into the hype early on because trailers that can be visually tweaked out are never a good indicator of how a game will actually end up being at launch. Some folks are characterizing these changes as a downgrade in the graphics. I say there is no downgrade because there was nothing to downgrade to begin with; the trailer visuals were never the intended quality level for the actual game engine as they were rendered at this high quality for visual impact.
There’s a lot that isn’t known at this point including how combat actually feels, what kind of business model will be used and how these games (Lost Ark and Lineage Eternal for example) will be localized and tailored for the non-Korean market. So as always (like I did with Devilian), I’m reserving judgement on Lost Ark (and Lineage Eternal) until they are playable by a wider audience in some form of alpha/beta, and more details are released as to each companies plans for monetizing them.
