Dominions II - Low Budget and Overpriced? I think not.

[PvK]

Originally posted by UNIVAC:
... Blizzard started like a small company programming games for other companies.They started with low budget games.So when we are talking about warcraft 1, dont think about today's Blizzard, think about early 90's Blizzard. Low budget and small team is a poor argument for bad multimedia (gui, graphics, sound). If you cant do it better, look for someone that can help you.

When I wrote "Warcraft", I was responding to your "Warcraft III":

Originally posted by onomastikon:
... Think of Deus Ex I (the attention to detail) or Warcraft III (the cute voices, excellent graphics, extreme customer support (battle.net).) ...

Warcraft III is definitely an expensive project. (And incidentally, its value to me is less than 1/10th that of Dominions 1 - in fact, I have no desire to play Warcraft III at all, because of the yawn-inspiring formulaic and artificial game "design".)

As for Warcraft I, yeah it had a smaller budget than Warcraft III, but I'm sure it also had a reasonable actual amount of money spent developing it, and graphically, I'd say it's rather less appealing than Dominions II. Meanwhile, Warcraft's gameplay is just typical RTS fare (perhaps well-done RTS fare, but personally, bleh to simplistic fakey RTS).

However, I don't have any problem with the Dominions II graphics myself, as my imagination is way better than any computer graphics anyway. The only downside I experience is that it is depressing seeing some others feel the game isn't valuable because it doesn't have better superficial artwork.

Furthermore, notice that it is a lot easier to make pretty graphics for a game with a piddly number of unit types. Even the games with million-dollar art budgets tend to have to limit the number of kinds of character and objects you can meet, because it's very expensive to make each one super-detailed. I'd rather keep the hundreds and hundreds of unit types, with easily-made graphics, than have really pretty graphics of only a few dozen unit types.

I'm sure that if/when Illwinter continues, they'll continue to improve the visuals and so on. The modding tools due out with the first public patch should let Users start helping with modified graphics, if they want to. Meanwhile, I'm quite happy that Illwinter are still more interested in providing the best gameplay rather than trying to improve the graphics.

PvK

[ January 11, 2004, 03:08: Message edited by: PvK ]