EU Graphical Update Feedback - Hands and Feet

[Siddiax]

Taking something like the feet and replacing it with a higher quality model is going to require all of those sandals and open toe shoes/boots etc to be reworked around said new foot. This in turn opens up potential issues with rigging and seams between the different model pieces.

It's a huge amount of development time AND QC to do well. I'd love to see it but I'll be absolutely gobsmacked if SE pull it off without massively sacrificing something for it.

Can't say it makes sense for them to increase each face's poly count and give them new textures but not update bodies and hands/feet. I'll assume that they're not quite ready yet which is probably the reason we haven't been shown anything so far.

[Yencat]

Can't say it makes sense for them to increase each face's poly count and give them new textures but not update bodies and hands/feet. I'll assume that they're not quite ready yet which is probably the reason we haven't been shown anything so far.

That's what I'm thinking/hoping as well, otherwise it's going to look even more shocking answering a Linkpearl call with the Frankfurter fingers right next to the updated faces and hair.

[Sebazy]

Can't say it makes sense for them to increase each face's poly count and give them new textures but not update bodies and hands/feet. I'll assume that they're not quite ready yet which is probably the reason we haven't been shown anything so far.

Look at it this way:

8 races, 14 unique heads once we factor in genders (sorry Hrothgars!), 4 base variants of each head, that gives us a worst case of 56 head models to update if we assume the worst case of them not being able to use morphs to transfer the updates across all variants at once in their development tools.

Now compare that to the hand and foot models alone. How many sandals, open toed shoes and glove models does this game have? Now multiply that for racial and gender variants. It's going to be in the 1000s. It'll be way more than an entire expansion's worth of new gear.

Again, SE *might* make the decision to create an updated base body for each race and use that going forward, but that's tremendously tricky to do well and with artistic consistency. It's an extreme example, but remember how weird Everquest looked circa Planes when you had a mishmash of old and new player models? Now imagine if WoW had have let you mix and match it's revamped models with the classic ones. Again, it'd just look strange.

It's not the option we want, but unfortunately it absolutely makes sense from a development perspective.

[boopadoop]

kiss kiss bump

[Zeastria]

What you see is low polycount - thats why you have those sharp edges. :P
They will need to increase the polycount on models (feet,hands),
No amount of texturing will fix it.. it req editing of the mesh.

[Sebazy]

But things don't strap over or around the body in this game, a fingerless glove replaces your bare hand with a glove with a new hand in it.

Right, which leaves you with 1 of 2 options:

1: New base hand, existing items get left untouched and stay as they are.

2: New base hand, existing items get updated to match the poly count of the new hand, thus where my sandals strap reference comes in. You still need to remake the old item's unique geometry and detail to work with the new hand model.

This isn't WoW where you have a couple of shared models across all the gear and items are simply unique textures over those shared models. The vast majority of items have clearly unique geometry, all of which would need updating to work properly.

A strappy leather sandal isn't just a texture baked over the existing foot likely because of the combination of dyeable items and customisable skin tones? You can confirm this quite easily with Reshade and the mesh edges filter:



Those straps are geometry cut into the block foot and wrapping around the ankles. That's geometry that needs to be remade if they want to update those sandals to a new foot mesh. Sadly it's not as simple as polishing and upscaling the textures.

Option 1 is viable from a production standpoint, but nightmare fuel artistically.

Option 2 makes sense artistically, but is a complete horror show for the production.

I suspect both options will have the QA calling in sick

[Yencat]

Yeah, you're right I'm not sure if it'd be a much better solution if new ones got upgraded and old ones didn't.

That particular flat sandal model is really should be retired though, seeing the heel of the foot turn into some sort of fleshy wedge that melds into the sole is nightmare fuel.

[CidHeiral]

I thought about this as well and tried pausing the Viper trailer to see if the hands were updated. It seems like they've been changed to some degree but it's honestly hard to tell with such low quality video/images.

[Siddiax]

Went back to check and there's definitely some sort of improvement to the hands - while not very easy to tell they appear to be less blockier than they are currently. Screenshot was taken from the leather textures preview with the Viper artifact set.