Aesthetics and Environments

Hello!

I've read about WTOR on Greenlight and here on your forum -basically, wow. This concept has massive potential.

A couple of things that I thought of when I was watching your videos:

1. I heard in one video that you haven't put in the textures yet for your ships (It's pretty obvious admittedly). But, I have to say, the flat white style looks pretty sharp. Especially because its shiny high tech "mac" look would contrast brilliantly with the natural environment the player would encounter. It would be cool if the textures you implement (or at least one style of them) would be a white wash theme with blue (or other bright colour) holographic display.

2. For lack of a better phrase, will there be opportunity for visually intensive set pieces? I don't necessarily mean choreographed action sequences, but thrilling environment views? Though it was a game with progression on "tracks," Halo was great at producing fantastic landscapes. Basically, the games I love are the ones where I can screenshot them for awesome Desktop wallpapers - if that makes sense...

Hi!

We're going to do our very best to make the environments as beautiful as possible. We have some really great ideas for some of our planets natural environments too.

We're keeping the clean high tech look of the ships, but you can expect much more polished textures with better environmental effects such as reflections and normal mapping etc etc.

Lastly, because we're not leaving the map creation entirely down to procedurally generated content, we have complete control over how the levels/(areas I should say) will be designed. So you can expect to find amazing areas with great vistas. And some awesome environments that offer great challenges and both dynamic and exciting game play scenarios!

So what you are saying is that the planets will have a rough outline that will be procedurally filled in?

No, the way we create the maps utilizes procedural software, the desired result is then saved out and modified by hand. Everybody will play the same game on the same map. There will be elements of RANDOM generation during game play for object placements and NPC spawns both in space and on land.

Sounds good, thanks for taking the time to answer, I posted this before I saw the first live stream video (great by the way), sounds awesome!