My short review as I’ve been playing campaign for 8h so far: If you liked Anno 1800, no need to hesitate, game is super fun and more polished than 1800 was at launch 😍
That’s a good question, but for me Anno (even before 117) has been a very single player focused experience, so I don’t know the answer. Maybe someone else can chip in there
I‘m looking forward to next year when AAA studios will continue to disappoint even harder while indie games flourish and gain market share. Maybe the AI bubble pops too. One can only hope.
On a pedestrian level, I’ve really liked the slow move from “SNES aesthetic” to “PS1/PS2 aesthetic”. My first console was an N64, so I guess I never had much nostalgia for the 8-bit days, and I feel like 3D gives a lot of opportunities for intelligent asset reuse to give a game lots of content.
Yes! For instance, say you’re making a character action game about big flashy jumping attacks. It took a long time to make the attack animations and now you need to provide the player with unlockables to encourage exploring, or some DLC.
If you have a 2D game, you’d need to do a LOT to integrate any new cosmetics, or characters, into your existing protagonist. But in 3D, if your character finds a hat, it’s very simple to just attach it to the model. Even swapping to a new playable character, you can retarget animations as long as proportions are similar.
I’m still not quite getting your point, sorry. Why would 3D make it easier to attach a hat to the character or retarget animations than 2D? That seems like a specific engine feature limitation and not inherently a shortcoming of 2D in general? It sounds like you’re comparing 3D to a primitive 2D engine where you need to manually draw and animate everything on screen instead of to a modern 2D engine with character bones, parenting, etc. Perhaps I’m actually out of the loop regarding the current limitations of 2D game engines and am thinking more in terms of a comparison between 3D and 2D animation software.
It might be simple attachment if a character is using skeletal animation, eg Intrusion 2. That art style isn’t used often because the direct limb tweeting is often overly visible. Often, most character frames are hand drawn or at least prerendered.
In these hand drawn styles, a character’s head could appear to enter Z depth as part of the drawing (imagine a 6 frame animation of a character spinning a sword like a top). When that happens WHILE they’re also wearing an attached hat, the hat must rotate and adjust for the depth as well - which means new drawings, even if you’re able to specify the positions of the character’s head during each frame of the animation.
We could be talking past each other with bad descriptions that need visuals, though.
I appreciate your more detailed description. I think I get what you’re trying to explain. It just seems to me (at a very shallow level, I’m no expert) that all else being equal, 2D should be able to do just about anything that 3D can, but more simply (with some exceptions, of course - trying to reproduce a 3D look and behavior in 2D would obviously be an order of magnitude more work than just doing it in 3D).
To your point, I’ve generally noticed that bone-driven 2D animations tend to look kind of janky, like marionettes, but I didn’t think that it was a technical limitation as much as just the animators taking a lot more shortcuts. In other words, why would limb tweening be inherently more overly visible in 2D vs. 3D? It seems that it would be hard to do a pure comparison that controlled for other variables, but intuitively it seems to me that in a comparison that did control for those 2D would turn out easier to produce content for than 3D.
Again, to your point, I can understand that if we compared popular hand-drawn or pixel art 2D assets and environments with popular styles of 3D assets and environments in common usage, especially across indie games, 3D could very likely come out ahead in productivity.
Sorry if I have dragged this conversation out too long. I have an interest in game design/development and game art and hope to some day get into both myself with some small games, so this is a topic that I would very much like to have a solid understanding of so I can make the most efficient use of my time.
With 3d you make the model and it’s “naturally” 3d (obviously). If you want to make a 2d sprite have a different perspective, you need to animate (often times draw) it specifically. As they mentioned it before, it’s mostly useful for animations and movement. It may not even be “reusability” as much as “lack of need to think about perspective” or “scalability”.
Another point is that with a 3d engine under low-storage concerns (like say, the N64) you can do a lot of fuckery like having a total of ~10 textures and just apply various color tints (and maybe a blur here and there) to make it seem like there’s more. While 2d engines do support this nowadays, it’s still hard for artists to “fake” such a wide gamut of sprites, just by the nature of the medium. There’s no model to apply a texture to, so you’re limited to having a base sprite and recoloring it.
You could do a modular approach in 2d. For example, a character is built of the body (arms+face), hair, pants, shirt and shoes and change them individually. Same for houses with roofs, doors, windows and walls, etc.
However, as already said, you’re limited by perspective a lot. Each new perspective requires almost double the sprites.
With 3d you make the model and it’s “naturally” 3d (obviously). If you want to make a 2d sprite have a different perspective, you need to animate (often times draw) it specifically. As they mentioned it before, it’s mostly useful for animations and movement. It may not even be “reusability” as much as “lack of need to think about perspective” or “scalability”.
Oh, absolutely. I was thinking more in terms of 2D doing traditional flat 2D views like side-view platformers or top-down views. I can completely understand that as soon as you try to emulate 3D with even something as simple as an isometric view it’s going to be much more work than just doing straight 3D.
Another point is that with a 3d engine under low-storage concerns (like say, the N64) you can do a lot of fuckery like having a total of ~10 textures and just apply various color tints (and maybe a blur here and there) to make it seem like there’s more. While 2d engines do support this nowadays, it’s still hard for artists to “fake” such a wide gamut of sprites, just by the nature of the medium. There’s no model to apply a texture to, so you’re limited to having a base sprite and recoloring it.
I can understand this too.
You could do a modular approach in 2d. For example, a character is built of the body (arms+face), hair, pants, shirt and shoes and change them individually. Same for houses with roofs, doors, windows and walls, etc.
I imagine that a lot of 2D games use these kinds of techniques.
However, as already said, you’re limited by perspective a lot. Each new perspective requires almost double the sprites.
I see the points that you made to another commenter but SNES and Sega Genesis were 16-bit consoles. They were a dramatic improvement (and many games on them were the pinnacle as far as I’m concerned) over the 8-bit NES and Sega Master System. I’ll take well-designed 16-bit games over pretty much anything else.
Not necessarily. Minecraft kinda went that way, but Factorio is still independent, and they were both released around the same time.
AAA games are often based on someone else’s IPs (e.g. Tom Clancy) or derived from a successful competitor (e.g. indie games). But I haven’t seen a ton of cases where the indie studio was bought outright.
So it sounds like you’re talking about knockoffs and not indies in general. Trying to make them equivalent ignores that the majority of game design innovation has come from indie games for many years.
Symphony was incredible for the time, but its difficulty was all over the place and pretty much becomes zero in late-game. Many, many Metroidvanias by indie developers have far surpassed SotN in quality.
It’s one of my favorite games of all time, but I understand that nostalgia plays a big part in that.
The Ubisoft trading community are coping to justify holding on to their tanking investments. It’s a gambler doubling down on losing.
Christ, how the mighty Ubisoft has fallen. They will go the way of EA and become a spyware company for the decadent Arab royals. I’m just crying that Ubisoft made some of my favourite games growing up and look what they have done to my boy-- a rotting zombie 🥲
I still recoil from the memory of Far Cry 3 dropping in the middle of the game because thier launcher had an issue, three times in one hour. Which reset my progress. Uninstall, never bought shit from them again.
It’s disappointing. I’ve been going through some of their older catalog recently and it just has a lot more passion behind it i feel.
AC Shadows felt like when i write an essay, where i get really motivated at the start, completely drop off and try to stuff the middle with as much as possible to reach the page count, then get motivated again at the end just to finish the conclusion. They always had their bugs, but lately it’s felt soulless.
In the Ubisoft trading community that I mentioned, some folks blamed UbiSoft’s downfall for “being woke”. As if Ubisoft’s blind chasing of money, abandoning most of their IP, selling broke products, and last but not least an executive telling consumers to get used to not owning games are not bigger factors.
“Why remember the past, Just forget it and all the problems it had. They surely cant happen again, especially if we just ignore that they happened in the first place!”
Its no wonder the world is falling apart with people holding onto logic like this.
I mean, they claim there’s one, but evidence says otherwise. Them spending a lot on their shitty arena shooter with boats didn’t make it any higher quality.
Yes because stocks are a straight up scam. It should be able to swing up and down as the market demands, but it doesn’t because every time there’s a potentially life changing movement up or down they halt it. They’ve done it many, many times before.
The most recent release is probably Anno 117 which came out yesterday. While decently looking it’s lacking features of the previous title (like coop mode and mod browser) with the promise they will be added later and is priced at around 60€ or 90€ if you want to gamble on the quality of the promised to be released DLC. They also relied on AI generated images in some of the assets used in the game instead of paying their artists. Optimisation for the game seems to be ok, but not great but it might be too early to judge that fully yet.
I don‘t get why they’d cheap out on artists, a couple people drawing illustrations is surely not gonna balloon development cost - and arguably one of the easiest places to spot when it‘s AI slop. It‘s as if they think there must be gen AI stuff in the game somewhere or the game‘s worse or something.
If you look at the older titles, there’s so much love and passion that went into the artworks. 1404 is 16 years old and has aged incredibly well, because of the high quality of the work that went into it. This is missing in 117.
I never got it to fully work right with my setup, but there are converters that will go from displayport to HDMI 2.2. Apparently there is a club 3d branded adapter that mostly works.
Getting HDR support to work was the straw that broke the camels back for me.
I honestly don’t understand why anyone (OEMs) use HDMI when DP is seemingly superior in every way. Why don’t any TVs come with DP? Why don’t streaming boxes come with DP? It’s confounding me.
oh im pretty sure this purely market competiton, not between the two ports but between manufactures.
like if you want to compete with a company (ex. sony) who is making x tv with hdmi, ideally you want a similar product available that has the same ports. The goal is to sell into peoples already existing ecosystem and sadly its hdmi dominant.
one time when I was presenting in class, my laptop only had displayport and I just stood there like a dumbass waiting for my files to be avail on a donor pc. Is dp superior? yeah, but the whole world is hdmi :[
okay so from what ive searched up, hdmi standard was a collaberation between hitachi, panasonic, maxell, philips, silicon image, sony, vantiva, and toshiba. Furthermore it “won” the support from a lot of entertainment companies like universal, warner, and disney.
;_; so basically, even though they came together to make a universal system, they spent money on it and therefore need to make the most out of it. All other manufacturers just follow along.
I also don't get it.. Just 1 DP port is sufficient for me.. And before people are saying.. just use a DP to HDMI adapter.. Well, I tried.. And it doesn't work either for some reason.. I still can not get 4k 120Hz. (yes my TV supports that, yes.. I also tried "gaming mode" on my TV)
Uh.. I bought this product (see link below) , but now I'm confused if this is an active or a passive adapter. Which adapter do I need for this.. A passive or active adapter to get DP++ working?
I don’t have any experience with it. But from what I know it’s supposed to only be on your output device and not on your TV. So you just need to check the specs of your graphics card to see if you can use a passive adapter. If it does not support it you should be able to use an active adapter. DP++ is simply a feature to have a DP output port send HDMI signals instead. An active adapter would convert DP into HDMI regardless of what your graphics card supports.
Both the cables you posted seem to be passive ones. The active ones will almost always advertise that they are active ones. I can’t vouch for the reliability or quality though. Never tried them.
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