Please don't continue with the "lazy" armour design in this game

slumber_sandb16_ESO

First let me say I'm not unhappy about the -quality- of items, the visual quality is great. It's the style, or model, of many armour pieces that I'm unhappy about.
Second, since there is no general discussion or suggestion sections I figured this would be the best place.

Specifically this:





Can you see it? The complete lack of any armour thickness on the arms, legs and chest. Many, or most, pieces of armour regardless of wether its light, medium or heavy has zero thickness to it, instead it's skin tight. In fact it's practically just armour painted onto the character's skin.
Another thing I dislike are the hip plate things hanging off the sides of the character, they're supposed to be part of the chest armour but they're instead floating on the side of the character with nothing visibly holding them up. Same thing with the knee protection where at times they have been very far from the actual character because my boots and leg armour were of two different sets.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to bash the game or anything like that, I like the game and will probably keep paying to play. But this kind of armour design -really- needs to be thrown out the window and replaced with a far better design philosophy.
The way it is now feels extremely lazy and, to me, ruins a lot of visual potential that armour in this game COULD have.

At times my shoulder armour and helmets have been very large while my boots, gloves and chest armour remain skin tight which makes me feel like I'm playing a stick figure .. or spongebob.
I'm wearing these big bulky helmets and shoulderpads but the rest of my armour with the chainmail, leather straps, belts and all kinds of things are just ..flat. Completely flat.
It feels lazy and for a game released in 2014 .. seems like a waste of potential.
I'm not saying armour should make a character look like a giant ball of metal, but some bulk needs to be added. Not even clothing is skin tight with that many layers and we're not running around in spandex.

The floating armour pieces also needs to be redesigned I think. If boots have kneepads then design them so they are part of the boots and not floating over the knee.

Future armour put in the game should not have this kind of skin tight design in my opinion and that design philosophy needs to be thrown out the window, and current armour should be improved greatly as soon as possible.
This is the next generation elder scrolls game but it can't match the old generation elder scrolls game in armour design.

Please, please don't continue with this kind of design.

Eris

I have to say you spend much more time looking at that sort of thing than I do. I'd never have noticed it had you not pointed it out.

Still, I think part of their problem with simplicity over the older game is that in the older game the video card only needs to render you and the mobs, not the 100 other people in the room with you. To keep the graphical detail of the single player games they'd have to require a 780ti or better running 4 card SLI or whatever the equivalent Radeon card.

derpmonster

I agree with this completely and it's been something that's been bugging me a lot, too.

slumber_sandb16_ESO

I tend to notice details like that a lot

I'm not saying they need to make the visual/graphics quality of the items better, they're great as they are. I'm just saying If I'm wearing leather boots with several straps and metal plates attached to it then there should be some bulk to it, even if it's just slightly. It would look better than everything being skin tight and flat. To me at least.

Mishoniko

Wouldn't be the first or last MMO (or game in general) to have armor textures just be replacement skins and not add polygons. Graphics load and development time for new armor skins are the usual concerns, but also the extra work required to make sure animations don't clip (badly) through the new shapes and how much the work increases with multiple body types.

That said, yes, it would be awesome if gear had more actual shape and depth, especially high end gear where it serves as part of the payoff for the hard work needed to get it.

Malediktus

Bodypainting armor is bugging me a lot, I can see the positives about it from a performance view, but GW2 manages with non body paint armor in their WvW with 100+ people, too. Maybe adding tesselation (since TESO supports DX11) as an option would help?

sociald100ub17_ESO

I have to agree with Eris. I really don't even notice it as I have way more things to worry about than this. I think in general the armor looks good and that's enough for me.
And as noted by others, the performance requirements for rendering should they give you what you want would mean that the vast majority of people would probably have to turn their graphics down to play the game.

fiachsidhe

I agree, the armor design is obscenely lazy. Not only that, but they made some dumb choices on racial styles. And the lack of variety between materials in each racial category is pathetic. Its like the art director just didn't care. Or the lead designer/director didn't.

Tuerai

I noticed this first on the argonian NPCs. I couldn't tell if their outfit was supposed to be part scales or all armor, and then realized all characters were like that.

cubansyrusb16_ESO

Bring back black Daedric aswell also nerf the Daedric helm size its almost as big as the full chest piece looks silly.

circilion

I suspect the reason the armour is essentially "Painted on" Is so that we can see a few hundred characters at once time in Cyrrodil without our computers crashing.

The_Drexill

This was feedback I gave in beta long ago. The game runs *too* smooth for the armor to look so bad. I have a mid range computer, and can max the gfx out (and tweak some out of game settings to push it further) with zero lag, not even close to the idea of video lag...

They really could/should have made the armor look better.

Squishy

It only bothers me in conversations, when you see the heavy armors moving like skin

UnknownXV

circilion wrote: »

I suspect the reason the armour is essentially "Painted on" Is so that we can see a few hundred characters at once time in Cyrrodil without our computers crashing.

Seems simple enough to me. Disable high polygon / texture armors while in heavily populated areas (with an option to enable it anyways if your PC is beastly enough to handle it).

Mathias.vikenb16_ESO

Yeah and they should make your hair visible when using a helmet....

Beryl

I support the OP. This paper-thin armour always catches my eye. My character is a female elf, some of the heavy armour plates have "windows" or shortened sleeves. It is just silly how these metal plates transform into skin in those areas. Looks like a high quality tattoo.

My guess is that this was done in order to make mass PvP less laggy. Maybe if I was interested in PvP I would ignore this aesthetic detail, but I am not. I want to enjoy the look of my character and the present armour "structure" (no thickness, shoulder and leg protections floating in the air at a large distance) adds yet another parameter in the choice of my outfit. For now I chose to sacrifice some stats by refusing to use heavy armour and this is not exactly a kind of choice I want to do in an MMO.

Sleepydan

What has been seen, cannot be unseen.



Hope it gets improved

Valmond

My issue is the shoulder pads.
I'm wearing a robe, why do i need some elaborate, obvious, noticeable, garish shoulder pads?
Also the dangly things at the sides? robes have them (except Breton), and they look silly.

Censorious

I'd rather they concentrated on making the thing work properly than what it looks like.
Although I agree, this is seriously low on my priorities list.

ChampionSheWolf

This is very low on priorities for me as the idea of them having hundreds of rendered bodies in a single locale, I don't think there is a computer alive that could possibly handle that much detail in that much quantity. So in short, some concessions have to be made for the sake of sanity and processors.

Furthermore I doubt it's lazy just because you don't like it. It was obviously a conscious decision that was made.

Xaxxus

Its especially noticeable on daedric armor. In all the elder scrolls games, daedric is supposed to be the huge badass bulky armor with spikes all over it. On this game it looks the LEAST bulky of the heavy armor.

Mathias.vikenb16_ESO

Deadric armour, atleast the helmets was a huge disapointment:( why to they have the cool deadric helmets on the cinematic trailer and not ingame?

Efaicia

I'm going to agree with OP. It is very distracting to me as well and takes away from game immersion. It was rather disappointing seeing this in game on my characters.

Moonchilde

Beryl wrote: »

My guess is that this was done in order to make mass PvP less laggy.

A lot of people think this, but its not true. In most cases, the model required to display smooth organic movement (a body) will require more polys than one wearing armor that has surfaces that are rigid and require less polys and less movement.

I could take two models - one with painted on armor, and one where the armor has its own shape, and make the rendered armor have the same or less impact on performance. You aren't actually adding a separate armor model on top of the body mesh for this, you are just replacing the body part (upper, lower, arm, leg, hair) with a scalable model of that armor piece with the body in it, and swapping textures. You don't even have to do this for all the armors, only ones that are distinctive, like robes or heavy armor.

Painting armor on skin is something you'd do in beta before you released a content upgrade, or something you'd do as a proof of concept so you get a visual idea of what a product would look like when finished. I really hope that ESO is in both these situations, having released a playable game, and will upgrade the models as things stabilize.

Malediktus

Body paint armor is a disgrace for a year 2014 game, but there are issues which bother me more. Complained about during the beta already thought.

Terminus

This discussion is dripping with constructive criticism,
and should be taken very seriously by the graphics artists of ESO.

Charwyn

This thread is good!

ESO has some good concept artitst. Also it has some very bad ones (just look at some of the loading screens, the one with three daedra is TERRIBLE).

Looks like the dev team is really fresh out of the fridge. I hope, they'll eventually fix this one.

Joviex

I think a lot of people are truly clueless on how much rendering power would be required for your armour, at the level of detail you want, and also rendering 50+ other people on the screen simultaneously.

Moonchilde wrote: »

I could take two models - one with painted on armor, and one where the armor has its own shape, and make the rendered armor have the same or less impact on performance. You aren't actually adding a separate armor model on top of the body mesh for this, you are just replacing the body part (upper, lower, arm, leg, hair) with a scalable model of that armor piece

You have just hyper-minimized the problem. If the design was done like this from the start, maybe, and even then it would have required more modellers.

Texture artists != modellers. Also, you would then have scheduling issues because of more models getting done, versus shifting some of the asset load to texture artists solely (who must still texture the armour pieces in a two stage op).

Unless you are working in a CG sector, or TV/Media/Games, really, and really, really know WTF you are talking about, you just can't "slap" something into a pipeline like this.

Also, you are minimizing the polycount and vertex counts. Yes, swaping the model of an arm for a modelled armour piece is fine, but that is zero gurantee that it will hold the same counts.

So now you have more QC to do there. More time == more money.

Then you have the entire animation problem.

Using textures, flattish to the character == most animations will work fine.

Now we have protruding stuff all over, you are going to have inner-penetrations you will either account for, or get more *** telling you how the animations completely suck cause all the hammered mail they use pokes through their head.

Arm chair game makers. Very funny.

Moonchilde

Joviex wrote: »

I think a lot of people are truly clueless on how much rendering power would be required for your armour, at the level of detail you want, and also rendering 50+ other people on the screen simultaneously.

You have just hyper-minimized the problem. If the design was done like this from the start, maybe, and even then it would have required more modellers.
~
Arm chair game makers. Very funny.

I've been working in Max and Blender since 2002, I am not an armchair game maker. Are you in the 3d modeling industry? Have you rigged and tested a mesh with attachments for performance? Do you know what nodes are? Or that a model can call multiple UVunrap textures, etc?

I'm thinking you don't and haven't, otherwise you'd know these issues were already streamlined and working well in games like Lineage II, which was out well before WoW ever existed.

Joviex

Moonchilde wrote: »

Joviex wrote: »

I think a lot of people are truly clueless on how much rendering power would be required for your armour, at the level of detail you want, and also rendering 50+ other people on the screen simultaneously.

You have just hyper-minimized the problem. If the design was done like this from the start, maybe, and even then it would have required more modellers.
~
Arm chair game makers. Very funny.

I've been working in Max and Blender since 2002, I am not an armchair game maker. Are you in the 3d modeling industry? Have you rigged and tested a mesh with attachments for performance? Do you know what nodes are? Or that a model can call multiple UVunrap textures, etc?

I'm thinking you don't and haven't, otherwise you'd know these issues were already streamlined and working well in games like Lineage II, which was out well before WoW ever existed.

and you would be completely wrong. I use maya, max, lightwave, modo, nuke, ps, you name it.

http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/community/profile.aspx?name=Joviex

you can easily search the Internet to see ive been contributing to both the CG and game industries fora long time.

I have been in the CG industry for fifteen years and software development a decade prior.

I am currently the supervisor for pipeline development for Nickelodeon Animation going on five years.

To compare working in blender or Max to an actual development pipeline in full production is extremely nieve.

Malediktus

Just look at GW2 WvW. Armors do not look like body paint there and yet you still get playable frame rates in 50 vs 50 fights at max settings. They just took the path of least resistance with the bodypainting armor.