Why I Have Something Nice to Say for the New Year

Personofsecrets

For a few hours now, it seemed like The Elder Scrolls Legends was finally dead. And that was cause for a moment to reflect on something that I liked about that game.

Yes, something that I liked. And despite the balance issues that I dislike in both TESL and Tales of Tribute, there is a shared aspect between both games that hits the mark.

The artworks, yes, the artworks.

I enjoyed the artwork that TESL went for so much that I spent around a couple of thousand of dollars to collect the cards. And before you say something, I won that money back, so I don't want to hear it! #Esports

I'd recommend you take a look at the cards from that game. Cards like Daggerfall Mage, Supreme Atromancer, and Ayrenn are gorgeous, especially the foil versions!

The game obviously had super high production value. Again, despite the various and numerous issues, it was polished very well.

One context that you should understand from that time and which still persists is that developers feel like their game has to be flashy and have all kinds of special effects. The explicitly stated reason is very often to talk about how great Hearthstone looks.

And although I dislike the bright colors, board layout, and card templating from Hearthstone, one of the reasons that Hearthstone was even made was because they had all of these great card art assets laying around from the floundering WOW TCG. Seriously, many awesome artists worked on that game.

An industry person even informed me that, at one point, Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell were doing some of the early work for the WOW card game, but stopped after higher ups accidentally were trash talking their works style in an e-mail chain. Anyhow, if you don't know them, they are pretty legendary to say the bare minimum. That said, Blizzard still had the privilege to use plenty of other great artists for what eventually became the WOW TCG and that translated directly to Hearthstone.

The art was quite good. I also recall some pieces, like Sylvanas Windrunner by the great Mark Zug, that didn't even make it to Hearthstone. Rest assured, it's legendary.

https://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryPiece.asp?Piece=1691902

What I appreciate about TOT is that they kept the art simple and didn't try to do too much. Just because everyone else wants to make Hearthstone 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, etc, doesn't mean that anyone really has to. And I found a little bit of information onling about the art direction.

“[Art] is one of the bigger challenges that the team had,” Lambert tells me. “Painstakingly, is the word I’d use,” Calmon-Huang adds. Lambert continues, “[The challenge was to] make this feel like a physical game, even though it’s a digital game - make it feel grounded in the world to normal people who aren’t magic playing this game. That led to a lot of decisions. In terms of the style, the art team - and our art director - really nailed that visual look. The card art feels medieval, and they took a lot of inspiration from those times.

“There was a period where we were looking at just art across the centuries and from all over the world,” Lambert says. “We took inspiration from Japanese woodcuts, African paintings - there’s a lot we were referencing. And of course, a lot of Renaissance art as well in order to come up with this kind of style which I think really hit the nail on the head.”

“The inspiration was definitely, ‘Try to keep it in a grounded, real world’, but we still need to have a little bit of pomp and a little bit of flair in there,” Calmon-Huang adds. “We use little tokens to keep track of your points - rather than having a scoreboard. We have an hourglass to signal the end of your turn, coins, and arrows to signify who is being favoured by the patrons. It’s a lot of painstaking design process to go in and be very strict in terms of how we show that stuff.”

https://www.thegamer.com/the-elder-scrolls-online-high-isle-tales-of-tribute-interview/

It's nice and appreciated that they didn't just go along with the rest of the world when it comes to the art of TOT. It's a pleasant game to look at in a world full of games with overwrought visual assets such as Horus Heresy or Shadowverse and clones such as Eternal or Runeterra. And although I very much appreciate TESL, I'm glad that those assets didn't make it into TOT. It's best that they are saved for later and something more original be allowed a chance to shine.

As the late great Albert Einstein once said "Keep it simple silly!"

Anyhow, happy New Year and let's hope for postivie developments for the Elder Scrolls Online.