Older low res outfits and zones

Nemesis7884 · February 22

When you go back to an older zone or wear an older armor set you realize how much lower res and fewer details a lot of these things are - so I am wondering...of course it would be too much work to update those all manually - but wouldnt that be exactly something that AI could do?

Emeratis · February 22

I think that there is plenty of reason to update old zones and styles to modern standards, especially if we are going to be spending more time in older zones. Other mmos and games have done this to great success, because over time a team gets better at expressing things artistically and grows and that growth can make some of their earlier works look dated. I would like them to invest at least somewhat in renewing older things like they are with the class skills so the game feels more cohesive.

That being said, using ai to do it? Absolutely not. AI is garbage that does not understand nuance or theme. It often still confuses basic things and to many people, especially artists, it sticks out like a sore thumb for what it is. The only time it remotely works is if artists, coders, writers are there to "correct" it and even then that is just making those people do extra steps to do something that they could have done without ai mucking it up. I don't trust ai to be remotely able to satisfyingly update anything and I want it to stay very far away from anything in eso.

Nemesis7884 · February 22

Emeratis wrote: »

I think that there is plenty of reason to update old zones and styles to modern standards, especially if we are going to be spending more time in older zones. Other mmos and games have done this to great success, because over time a team gets better at expressing things artistically and grows and that growth can make some of their earlier works look dated. I would like them to invest at least somewhat in renewing older things like they are with the class skills so the game feels more cohesive.

That being said, using ai to do it? Absolutely not. AI is garbage that does not understand nuance or theme. It often still confuses basic things and to many people, especially artists, it sticks out like a sore thumb for what it is. The only time it remotely works is if artists, coders, writers are there to "correct" it and even then that is just making those people do extra steps to do something that they could have done without ai mucking it up. I don't trust ai to be remotely able to satisfyingly update anything and I want it to stay very far away from anything in eso.

realistically the choice would probably be ai or no update...i doubt there are enough resources / revenues to consider something like that otherwise...

Emeratis · February 22

Nemesis7884 wrote: »

Emeratis wrote: »

I think that there is plenty of reason to update old zones and styles to modern standards, especially if we are going to be spending more time in older zones. Other mmos and games have done this to great success, because over time a team gets better at expressing things artistically and grows and that growth can make some of their earlier works look dated. I would like them to invest at least somewhat in renewing older things like they are with the class skills so the game feels more cohesive.

That being said, using ai to do it? Absolutely not. AI is garbage that does not understand nuance or theme. It often still confuses basic things and to many people, especially artists, it sticks out like a sore thumb for what it is. The only time it remotely works is if artists, coders, writers are there to "correct" it and even then that is just making those people do extra steps to do something that they could have done without ai mucking it up. I don't trust ai to be remotely able to satisfyingly update anything and I want it to stay very far away from anything in eso.

realistically the choice would probably be ai or no update...i doubt there are enough resources / revenues to consider something like that otherwise...

Strongly disagree with that. One of the biggest draws of this game is it's rich and robust cosmetic systems. The monetization model is changing as of this year where cosmetics will become one of the primary moneymakers alongside subscriptions. Other games I play have updated skins and cosmetics knowing having things look modern increases desirability and sales. MMO competitors such as world of warcraft have also updated old character models, sets, and zones. Eventually it's something that most live service games realize is an investment in the future. If the developers are serious about their comment of wanting eso to be a 30+ year game, it will eventually have to be done in some capacity. It's shortsighted to think otherwise.

As for AI, again, I do not trust it can do the job properly. Many of them are trained on generic often stolen data and that means that in updating things, it will often confuse things. TES high elves have a very different aesthetic style to their clothing than world of warcraft's or lord of the rings or any other fantasy setting out there with high elves, but if the data is trained on all of those it will picture a high elf as something it's not. The same can be said for orcs or any other race. This is a major problem for the IP/lore/identity of the game that is why I want ESO to avoid ai like the plague. We already still have people in the fandom who don't want to believe eso is canon and I don't want that discourse to get worse or have some credence by things that can be avoided such as the ai usage.

The other problem with ai and eso is it could lead to fanworks being stolen and then legal issues for ZOS. We already had this happen before when a fan's artwork was mixed up with official art. Given how ai trains itself, it's likely that it also has an issue where it has more fanworks than official works due to most games in the TES series being extremely old/dated and outside of eso we have Skyrim which is over a decade old and Oblivion Remastered and if we want to be generous for "modern" TES art/assets we can include the art from TES Legends. Again, landmine of potential legal issues.

Finally, as I stated in my first post, ai often causes more work for concept artists and creators in gaming spaces, not less. Here is an article of concept artists in their own words talking about how ai makes their job harder and often causes more problems than it solves.

I truly believe half the time people asking for ai don't realize what they're asking for, because if they did, they would realize it's a terrible idea.

Diebesgut · February 22

... In Bethnik, they have redesigned baskets with apples and lettuce, for example, which look really good. Unfortunately, in Housing, the baskets still have that blurry, muddy look...

AcadianPaladin · February 22

My favorite zones are the original Alliance zones and I spend lots of time there. I'd love to see the graphics there upgraded. Too much work? That depends on whether the game wants to have a nice long lifespan I think. There are so many zones and so many armor styles; attention to refining what is already in game would be most welcome.

jaekobcaed · February 23

I personally don't see enough in older zones that sticks out to the point of feeling out-of-place. Could things be improved? Sure, but I can't think of a single thing off the top of my head that needs to be improved other than, perhaps, the water shader used in older zones. Even then, I still think the vanilla water shader looks great even by today's standards.

BretonMage · February 23

I'd love to see upscaled high-res versions of older outfits and furnishings. I don't know if that sort of thing is already done by AI, but I think it needs to at least be vetted by people.

aspergalas4 · February 23

Seconded on upscaled base game motifs, personally think the first 50 or so motifs need updating somewhat so they stack up against the newer styles being released. Too much of a quality gap which limits what you can use in the outfit system.

James-Wayne · February 23

It wouldnt be hard for them to go back to all the old textures and add more details with higher resolution. A while ago now I extracted all the base maps, diffuse, alphas etc and imported them into Unreal Engine to recreate the below from Craglorn. There are 10s of thousands of files so it would be a huge undertaking but not impossible.

Enemoriana · February 23

Emeratis wrote: »

Strongly disagree with that. One of the biggest draws of this game is it's rich and robust cosmetic systems. The monetization model is changing as of this year where cosmetics will become one of the primary moneymakers alongside subscriptions. Other games I play have updated skins and cosmetics knowing having things look modern increases desirability and sales. MMO competitors such as world of warcraft have also updated old character models, sets, and zones. Eventually it's something that most live service games realize is an investment in the future. If the developers are serious about their comment of wanting eso to be a 30+ year game, it will eventually have to be done in some capacity. It's shortsighted to think otherwise.

As for AI, again, I do not trust it can do the job properly. Many of them are trained on generic often stolen data and that means that in updating things, it will often confuse things. TES high elves have a very different aesthetic style to their clothing than world of warcraft's or lord of the rings or any other fantasy setting out there with high elves, but if the data is trained on all of those it will picture a high elf as something it's not. The same can be said for orcs or any other race. This is a major problem for the IP/lore/identity of the game that is why I want ESO to avoid ai like the plague. We already still have people in the fandom who don't want to believe eso is canon and I don't want that discourse to get worse or have some credence by things that can be avoided such as the ai usage.

The other problem with ai and eso is it could lead to fanworks being stolen and then legal issues for ZOS. We already had this happen before when a fan's artwork was mixed up with official art. Given how ai trains itself, it's likely that it also has an issue where it has more fanworks than official works due to most games in the TES series being extremely old/dated and outside of eso we have Skyrim which is over a decade old and Oblivion Remastered and if we want to be generous for "modern" TES art/assets we can include the art from TES Legends. Again, landmine of potential legal issues.

That is question mostly of how AI is used, not if AI is used.
AI shouldn't be used to create, for example, whole locations. Or concept art. That's true.
But AI can be used to faster produce technical things like textures and, maybe, simple models. Some important aldmeri artifact or new detailed khajiit armor requires work of real person, but basket of apples - not really, only some control (which can be done with less skilled person). And there are a lot of such textures and models... So AI can't do all work, but can make part of it cheaper and faster, which let more resourses for remaking important things by hands.

And not only well-known things like ChatGpt are used. It can be specially trained models, on specially collected data. For example, you can quite easily do such thing locally in Stable Diffusion. I'm sure there are some more professional and specialized things too.

SerafinaWaterstar · February 23

Whilst it would be nice to see these things updated, I would want it done by people.

If you think AI is the answer to anything, you need to do more research.

AllenaNightWood · February 23

there is supposed to be some visual overhauls done probably around the time of the new theives guild content coming

magnusthorek · February 23

AI is only bad if used wrongly. If there's a human with eve a pinch of "I" — and I'm not saying "I" as in nominative personal pronoun — behind the tool, it can produce great things.

Look at James-Wayne's example. I don't even know him/her, and it's a great result

kargen27 · February 23

aspergalas4 wrote: »

Seconded on upscaled base game motifs, personally think the first 50 or so motifs need updating somewhat so they stack up against the newer styles being released. Too much of a quality gap which limits what you can use in the outfit system.

ZoS was burned by this long ago. There are players that like the looks of those sets now and they would let their annoyances be known if that were to change. Even what seemed a minor change really had fans of that look upset.

Emeratis · February 23

Enemoriana wrote: »

Emeratis wrote: »

Strongly disagree with that. One of the biggest draws of this game is it's rich and robust cosmetic systems. The monetization model is changing as of this year where cosmetics will become one of the primary moneymakers alongside subscriptions. Other games I play have updated skins and cosmetics knowing having things look modern increases desirability and sales. MMO competitors such as world of warcraft have also updated old character models, sets, and zones. Eventually it's something that most live service games realize is an investment in the future. If the developers are serious about their comment of wanting eso to be a 30+ year game, it will eventually have to be done in some capacity. It's shortsighted to think otherwise.

As for AI, again, I do not trust it can do the job properly. Many of them are trained on generic often stolen data and that means that in updating things, it will often confuse things. TES high elves have a very different aesthetic style to their clothing than world of warcraft's or lord of the rings or any other fantasy setting out there with high elves, but if the data is trained on all of those it will picture a high elf as something it's not. The same can be said for orcs or any other race. This is a major problem for the IP/lore/identity of the game that is why I want ESO to avoid ai like the plague. We already still have people in the fandom who don't want to believe eso is canon and I don't want that discourse to get worse or have some credence by things that can be avoided such as the ai usage.

The other problem with ai and eso is it could lead to fanworks being stolen and then legal issues for ZOS. We already had this happen before when a fan's artwork was mixed up with official art. Given how ai trains itself, it's likely that it also has an issue where it has more fanworks than official works due to most games in the TES series being extremely old/dated and outside of eso we have Skyrim which is over a decade old and Oblivion Remastered and if we want to be generous for "modern" TES art/assets we can include the art from TES Legends. Again, landmine of potential legal issues.

That is question mostly of how AI is used, not if AI is used.
AI shouldn't be used to create, for example, whole locations. Or concept art. That's true.
But AI can be used to faster produce technical things like textures and, maybe, simple models. Some important aldmeri artifact or new detailed khajiit armor requires work of real person, but basket of apples - not really, only some control (which can be done with less skilled person). And there are a lot of such textures and models... So AI can't do all work, but can make part of it cheaper and faster, which let more resourses for remaking important things by hands.

And not only well-known things like ChatGpt are used. It can be specially trained models, on specially collected data. For example, you can quite easily do such thing locally in Stable Diffusion. I'm sure there are some more professional and specialized things too.

You cut off part of my comment where I linked an article with many artists working in the industry who have expressed a preference to have AI entirely out of their creative process for various reasons. Even if used ethically, it tends to lower morale amongst artists and similar to the blockchain trends of yesterday, AI today still causes more problems than it solves for a lot of artists in regards to work that nonartists might not understand. Even for smaller assets, ai often fails to account for proper lighting and other nuance which can make it stand out as artificially generated quite easily. There are artists who specialize in only doing textures or backgrounds or in game assets. Heck, some artists prefer to create these over people or animals or character work. They have a right to create what they love too and their job isn't any less meaningful than the character artists.

Yes, private databases exist and many companies use those over the public ones, but they can still be easily polluted and I mentioned two concerns for that already in the post you quoted. A majority of TES related artwork and concepts out there today are fanworks. I know because I maintain a private reference library for my own artistic purposes with an extensive tag system and because I'm a TES megafan a portion of that is dedicated to all things TES. Obviously they have internal things I don't but I roughly know what they're working with from my own private collection. The concern of legal issues with fanworks and/or having to dillute the pool to find more things to use are both valid concerns here.

Gonna just put a few examples of concept work done for ESO here that isn't the nicer more polished things you see when you look at the concept art pages on the official site or uesp because it's relevant as to why ai cannot do what artists can even on assets most people think it could:
joseph-watmough-crosssection-01.jpg?1579792996

joseph-watmough-crosssection-01.jpg?1579792996

joseph-watmough-elsweyr-zone-rockssm.jpg?1573847403

Both of these show how Joseph Watmough carefully crafted a biome for Elsweyr by exploring and putting together references in a way that ai cannot and probably never will. For his full works and more detail I recommend viewing the whole thing. Even assets people think are negligible are really not in terms of art/assets. While character art is flashy and draws people in easier, all assets are important and deserve to be done well and with purpose and thought put behind them.

I would rather them work slower and do this right than work fast and rely on shortcuts and mess something up. Faster isn't always better. A game that wants to last a long time needs care and attention to detail and consistency. I also would like to see them to continue to partner with the amazing artists they have over the years because that is part of how this game's art assets got so good in the first place.

AScarlato · February 23

If they did something like this I'd hope it wasn't handled by AI.

A world should be hand-crafted, which includes choices as to how people in the world dress.

As jarring as it is now, one thing I do like about the dreariness of attire in older zones is that a lot of people are supposed to be refugees from the war, or even all the villages that are destroyed in the base game zones.

I don't really trust AI to make choices that I feel actual world/game designers should be making.

aasterlingb14_ESO · February 23

Look, I'm just gonna be blunt here.

<snip> AI.

I don't care what you're suggesting it be used for, or if it should be "in addition to" human effort or fully replacing it. It's a technological cancer and I'm sick as hell of hearing about it everywhere. I cannot wait until the datacentres get imploded.

<snipped due to Cursing and Profanity>

Northwold · February 25

They already did a refresh of the base game zones that glowed them up to some degree. Not sure if it's meant to be a rolling process.

AScarlato · February 25

Northwold wrote: »

They already did a refresh of the base game zones that glowed them up to some degree. Not sure if it's meant to be a rolling process.

Since that was a while ago now and was never mentioned again, it feels like a project that is simply unfinished IMO. Like they have ideas they start and then just randomly abandon haphazardly.

It's mostly likely that the staffing shake-up made them drop the project, but in some ways it seems like they are a bit all over the place with direction. Especially now where the direction is now seasons, experimental projects, and whatever may capture their whim that can be sold on a quarterly battlepass.

This may sound critical, and it is. Unlike the past it's hard to tell what, if anything, is being committed to for the future.

aspergalas4 · February 25

kargen27 wrote: »

aspergalas4 wrote: »

Seconded on upscaled base game motifs, personally think the first 50 or so motifs need updating somewhat so they stack up against the newer styles being released. Too much of a quality gap which limits what you can use in the outfit system.

ZoS was burned by this long ago. There are players that like the looks of those sets now and they would let their annoyances be known if that were to change. Even what seemed a minor change really had fans of that look upset.

While you raise a good point I think ZOS should do it anyway. They'd get used to the changes, its not like the design needs to radically change, more the texturing and way dyes are applied so it synergises with the newer sets (thinking how the ancestral sets match up better compared to their base game counterparts). Doing what needs to be done shouldn't be held hostage by a tiny vocal minority wanting things to stay as is.

BardokRedSnow · February 25

People need to get over the fear of using AI for literally anything, AI is just a tool, it is still up to zos to review and approve alterations using AI. And anything AI would do would be leagues better than the outdated older motifs we have now that almost no one uses.

I'd be fine with them using AI for any graphics updates, most game developers are already using AI, and all of them in the future will. Zos is probably already using AI for this purpose as we speak because of microsoft and also to make up for the cuts in staff. They've been using it to aid at least partially with customer support including detecting terms of service breaches, so why wouldn't they use it for development as well.

Enemoriana · 4:12PM

Emeratis wrote: »

You cut off part of my comment where I linked an article with many artists working in the industry who have expressed a preference to have AI entirely out of their creative process for various reasons. Even if used ethically, it tends to lower morale amongst artists and similar to the blockchain trends of yesterday, AI today still causes more problems than it solves for a lot of artists in regards to work that nonartists might not understand. Even for smaller assets, ai often fails to account for proper lighting and other nuance which can make it stand out as artificially generated quite easily. There are artists who specialize in only doing textures or backgrounds or in game assets. Heck, some artists prefer to create these over people or animals or character work. They have a right to create what they love too and their job isn't any less meaningful than the character artists.

Yes, private databases exist and many companies use those over the public ones, but they can still be easily polluted and I mentioned two concerns for that already in the post you quoted. A majority of TES related artwork and concepts out there today are fanworks. I know because I maintain a private reference library for my own artistic purposes with an extensive tag system and because I'm a TES megafan a portion of that is dedicated to all things TES. Obviously they have internal things I don't but I roughly know what they're working with from my own private collection. The concern of legal issues with fanworks and/or having to dillute the pool to find more things to use are both valid concerns here.

Gonna just put a few examples of concept work done for ESO here that isn't the nicer more polished things you see when you look at the concept art pages on the official site or uesp because it's relevant as to why ai cannot do what artists can even on assets most people think it could:

Both of these show how Joseph Watmough carefully crafted a biome for Elsweyr by exploring and putting together references in a way that ai cannot and probably never will. For his full works and more detail I recommend viewing the whole thing. Even assets people think are negligible are really not in terms of art/assets. While character art is flashy and draws people in easier, all assets are important and deserve to be done well and with purpose and thought put behind them.

I would rather them work slower and do this right than work fast and rely on shortcuts and mess something up. Faster isn't always better. A game that wants to last a long time needs care and attention to detail and consistency. I also would like to see them to continue to partner with the amazing artists they have over the years because that is part of how this game's art assets got so good in the first place.

Nobody asks to replace all and every artist with AI. Nobody asks "Oh, fire everybody and make AI create everything in game".
It is good when companies - no matter small or big - can have real artist to do everything. I love artists. And while I use AI a lot to create portraits of characters for my DnD (both as player and master), I have more that 50 portraits, from head sketch to fullbody with horse, from about 20 artists.
But resourses of each company are limited. When game devs doesn't do something players want, there can be two reasons: it doesn't match their vision of the game (that's most part of "add new feature" or "rebalance like this") or they have no resourses to do it (because all resourses are used for something more important).
Updating old zones definitely is second case.
So here AI can partially help, by taking some simple work and do it faster and cheaper. Something cost less - more chances it will be done without impact on creating new things.
And yes, AI is bad at creating something new. But we are speaking not about creating new - we are speaking about improving old. You need a lot of work and research to create new armor or location. You do not need so much to upgrade, for example, texture of wood on woodworking station. Just look at it, it is awful!
So - no, AI can not be used to create new locations. AI can not be used to create specific to TES complex items. But AI can be used to do simple technical tasks with existing things.

And there is no problem with fanworks mixing with official art, because you do not need fanart in data for creating texture of wood.
You think of creating big things with AI, something that determines appearance of game in general - and there really are a lot of problems and AI shouldn't be used. But there are a lot of smaller tasks. Not "Let AI decide how Elsweys look", but "Let person decide how Elsweyr will look and draw concept art - and AI draws texture of stone and leaves - for person to choose best".

Northwold · 4:53PM

AScarlato wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

They already did a refresh of the base game zones that glowed them up to some degree. Not sure if it's meant to be a rolling process.

Since that was a while ago now and was never mentioned again, it feels like a project that is simply unfinished IMO. Like they have ideas they start and then just randomly abandon haphazardly.

It's mostly likely that the staffing shake-up made them drop the project, but in some ways it seems like they are a bit all over the place with direction. Especially now where the direction is now seasons, experimental projects, and whatever may capture their whim that can be sold on a quarterly battlepass.

This may sound critical, and it is. Unlike the past it's hard to tell what, if anything, is being committed to for the future.

I think it was done literally last year (though I can't off hand remember precisely when).