Region borders (example of how CW2 graphics lost the plot)
Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 11:10 am
Hello
Anyone know if there is a way to better see/highlight the region borders when looking at the map? A hotkey perhaps? This game is like playing chess without seeing the chessboard :/
If I were playing any other AGEOD game, I would not be asking this question, which leads me to say the following...
As much as I like AGEOD and what they have produced, I really think that from a graphical/artistic point of view, CW2 represents a HUGE poorly considered step backwards. Just look at their first ever releases (BoA, AACW even AJE and others) compared to CW2. The quality of the art and presentation and visual feel of those games in all areas all seemed part of a tasteful, cohesive, consistent well thought out and balanced graphical style and approach that is evident in all aspects of the game and common across many of the titles, perhaps with some minor differences. It actually made me want to play the game. Very clean and functional graphics (from unit counter art to map to UI buttons etc) with a definite color platelet that all just blends and complement and fit in so well with each other that you know that such work could not have happened by accident. A clear direction about the style of graphical representation must have been decided upon and adhered to very early on and is clearly evident.
But what happened with CW2? The ball was dropped. It seemed that AGEOD wanted to "change things up" and graphically change the look of the game. But why? Nothing was broken. In fact I would have considered their graphical approach/style to their games to be one of the best you will find in any similar wargame series. When I believe I heard that the graphical team that did the previous games didn't do CW2, I was not surprised.
The problem with the CW2 graphics is two fold. One is that there simply is no consistent graphical feel to the game, like there was no solid artistic direction or style that was being adhered to except "make it different to the other games, use lots of drop shadow effects, background shading perhpas". As a result, it looks like different parts of the games graphics was randomly given to several amateurish graphics guys, all working in isolation from each other with no real direction or style or functional requirement being adhered to, and the result is a terrible mish-mash of colours, styles and graphics that just make you realize juts how awesome the previous games were.
Secondly, the games graphics fail dismally in so many ways as far as basic functionality. Apart from "looking good", graphics also have a functional role to help the player understand and play the game. The worst offender in CW2 is probably one of the most important graphical aspects of the game: the map itself! The basic fundamental graphical requirements to enable the player to readily play CW2/the AGE engine seemed to not have been considered when creating the map.
One of (if not the most) important aspects of this game (and any other game using the AGE engine) is that the map is actually subdivided up in to discrete areas or regions. The game is all about units occupying, moving through, controlling and fighting over these regions. Players are constantly making plans and decision all based on the location and relationship of these areas to each other. Not begin able to see them is like trying to play chess on a chessboard that has no squares. It is as basic and as simple as that. You would think that allowing the player to readily distinguish these regions by looking on the map would figure rather highly on the "design a map for this game" brief. Well for all the previous games, it seemed it did. Here I have posted comparative map screenshots from AJE and WiA and AACW (both of which is from a comparative region east of Pittsburgh) all taken at level 4 zoom out. Just by looking at the map you can see clearly distinguish the borders around each region, as well as other things like roads, railroads and rivers.
[ATTACH]33311[/ATTACH]
[ATTACH]33312[/ATTACH]
[ATTACH]33313[/ATTACH]
Now lets look at the equivalent CW2 map view. The region borders (even the roads) are so faint and inconsistent even at the most zoomed in levels compared to the AGE engine releases.
[ATTACH]33314[/ATTACH]
Without even considering if the map looks good to you or not; functionally, can you easily tell where the region borders are so you can do all your planning etc? It is crazy that functionality as fundamentally basic and simple as this seems to not have figured in the final release. I take yo back to my chess without seeing the chessboard analogy. And look at the overall graphical "feel" you get from these screenshots. It is hard to believe that after 9 years of development, that CW2 represents "a better way" of doing things. The baby was thrown out with the bath water when AGEOD decided to "revamp" the graphics.
I can not envisage a discussion along these lines having occurred during the development of CW2:
[INDENT]AGEOD: Hey, do you think we can really reduce the visibility of the borders around each region when we look at the map? Being able to distinguish the borders is not as important to the player than hiding them and making the player think they are playing a game that has no regions.[/INDENT]
[INDENT]ARTIST: Yeah OK. I think players will be more interested in playing on a map that is over saturated with colour, very busy with lost of "realistic" looking colour shading/gradients anyway. Adding region boundaries makes the map look unrealistic and we know players don't like unrealistic!
[/INDENT]
This all seems symptomatic of a game development process that simply got lazy and lost sight of some game design basics that made previous games (a large part being the graphics and graphical representation) so good. So much so, that you would be forgiven for thinking that BoA, AJE and AACW were created after lessons learnt from CW2.
If CW2 was released with essentially the same graphics as AACW I would have been more than happy. I literally didn't even bother playing the game (bought it 18 months ago!) until I recently gave up waiting for a full(er) UI mod to come out and decided to start modding what I can of the game graphics/UI in an effort to bring it back to the level of the other games. I will release them shortly. If I could I would redo the entire map but with around 6,800 graphics files related to displaying all the maps regions (includes winter tiles) I don't think that is going to happen.
I just hope AGEOD realise how badly CW2 graphically compares and looks to their other games (even their very first Birth of America 9 years ago) both from an atheistic point of view and just from a basic player playability point of view (can we please see the regions?) and never release another game with such poorly considered graphics.
Anyone know if there is a way to better see/highlight the region borders when looking at the map? A hotkey perhaps? This game is like playing chess without seeing the chessboard :/
If I were playing any other AGEOD game, I would not be asking this question, which leads me to say the following...
As much as I like AGEOD and what they have produced, I really think that from a graphical/artistic point of view, CW2 represents a HUGE poorly considered step backwards. Just look at their first ever releases (BoA, AACW even AJE and others) compared to CW2. The quality of the art and presentation and visual feel of those games in all areas all seemed part of a tasteful, cohesive, consistent well thought out and balanced graphical style and approach that is evident in all aspects of the game and common across many of the titles, perhaps with some minor differences. It actually made me want to play the game. Very clean and functional graphics (from unit counter art to map to UI buttons etc) with a definite color platelet that all just blends and complement and fit in so well with each other that you know that such work could not have happened by accident. A clear direction about the style of graphical representation must have been decided upon and adhered to very early on and is clearly evident.
But what happened with CW2? The ball was dropped. It seemed that AGEOD wanted to "change things up" and graphically change the look of the game. But why? Nothing was broken. In fact I would have considered their graphical approach/style to their games to be one of the best you will find in any similar wargame series. When I believe I heard that the graphical team that did the previous games didn't do CW2, I was not surprised.
The problem with the CW2 graphics is two fold. One is that there simply is no consistent graphical feel to the game, like there was no solid artistic direction or style that was being adhered to except "make it different to the other games, use lots of drop shadow effects, background shading perhpas". As a result, it looks like different parts of the games graphics was randomly given to several amateurish graphics guys, all working in isolation from each other with no real direction or style or functional requirement being adhered to, and the result is a terrible mish-mash of colours, styles and graphics that just make you realize juts how awesome the previous games were.
Secondly, the games graphics fail dismally in so many ways as far as basic functionality. Apart from "looking good", graphics also have a functional role to help the player understand and play the game. The worst offender in CW2 is probably one of the most important graphical aspects of the game: the map itself! The basic fundamental graphical requirements to enable the player to readily play CW2/the AGE engine seemed to not have been considered when creating the map.
One of (if not the most) important aspects of this game (and any other game using the AGE engine) is that the map is actually subdivided up in to discrete areas or regions. The game is all about units occupying, moving through, controlling and fighting over these regions. Players are constantly making plans and decision all based on the location and relationship of these areas to each other. Not begin able to see them is like trying to play chess on a chessboard that has no squares. It is as basic and as simple as that. You would think that allowing the player to readily distinguish these regions by looking on the map would figure rather highly on the "design a map for this game" brief. Well for all the previous games, it seemed it did. Here I have posted comparative map screenshots from AJE and WiA and AACW (both of which is from a comparative region east of Pittsburgh) all taken at level 4 zoom out. Just by looking at the map you can see clearly distinguish the borders around each region, as well as other things like roads, railroads and rivers.
[ATTACH]33311[/ATTACH]
[ATTACH]33312[/ATTACH]
[ATTACH]33313[/ATTACH]
Now lets look at the equivalent CW2 map view. The region borders (even the roads) are so faint and inconsistent even at the most zoomed in levels compared to the AGE engine releases.
[ATTACH]33314[/ATTACH]
Without even considering if the map looks good to you or not; functionally, can you easily tell where the region borders are so you can do all your planning etc? It is crazy that functionality as fundamentally basic and simple as this seems to not have figured in the final release. I take yo back to my chess without seeing the chessboard analogy. And look at the overall graphical "feel" you get from these screenshots. It is hard to believe that after 9 years of development, that CW2 represents "a better way" of doing things. The baby was thrown out with the bath water when AGEOD decided to "revamp" the graphics.
I can not envisage a discussion along these lines having occurred during the development of CW2:
[INDENT]AGEOD: Hey, do you think we can really reduce the visibility of the borders around each region when we look at the map? Being able to distinguish the borders is not as important to the player than hiding them and making the player think they are playing a game that has no regions.[/INDENT]
[INDENT]ARTIST: Yeah OK. I think players will be more interested in playing on a map that is over saturated with colour, very busy with lost of "realistic" looking colour shading/gradients anyway. Adding region boundaries makes the map look unrealistic and we know players don't like unrealistic!
[/INDENT]
This all seems symptomatic of a game development process that simply got lazy and lost sight of some game design basics that made previous games (a large part being the graphics and graphical representation) so good. So much so, that you would be forgiven for thinking that BoA, AJE and AACW were created after lessons learnt from CW2.
If CW2 was released with essentially the same graphics as AACW I would have been more than happy. I literally didn't even bother playing the game (bought it 18 months ago!) until I recently gave up waiting for a full(er) UI mod to come out and decided to start modding what I can of the game graphics/UI in an effort to bring it back to the level of the other games. I will release them shortly. If I could I would redo the entire map but with around 6,800 graphics files related to displaying all the maps regions (includes winter tiles) I don't think that is going to happen.
I just hope AGEOD realise how badly CW2 graphically compares and looks to their other games (even their very first Birth of America 9 years ago) both from an atheistic point of view and just from a basic player playability point of view (can we please see the regions?) and never release another game with such poorly considered graphics.
