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 · 7:05AM

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 · 7:44AM

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 · 11:28AM

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 · 11:40AM

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 · 11:56AM

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 · 12:17PM

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 · 2:14PM

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