SE5 screenshots ugly?

Nats · #1 July 11th, 2006, 06:13 PM

Is it just me or are the many of the SE5 screenshots shown quite ugly?

I'm particularly talking about the ground based battles screen shots. They look rather terrible IMO, worse than many Amiga games I used to have way back in the 80s! The other screen shots of space activity look ok-ish although I think the look of the GUI looks pretty ugly as well. I think SE4's GUI looked far nicer than the one shown here.

I obviously cant talk about the gameplay and certainly the real time fleet battles shown look quite promising, but I certainly hope these arent final shots. I cant imagine staring at that GUI for very long at all! I could probably put up with the ground battle graphics looking so bad as they probably dont happen all that regularly.

MM should take a look at Gal Civ 2's ground attack screen to see how it should look. And seriously folks put some work into the look of the GUI before August!

Nats

Suicide Junkie · #2 July 11th, 2006, 07:43 PM

As a minor point, SE4 dosen't really have any UI relating to ground combat.

bearclaw · #3 July 11th, 2006, 08:03 PM

Personally, I see nothing wrong with the UI in SEV at all. If I was, I'd have stopped playing the game with SEII

Ed Kolis · #4 July 11th, 2006, 08:08 PM

Keep in mind that the ground combat in SE5, unlike that in GalCiv2, is not just "two opposing walls of troops lining up and shooting lasers at each other", though - it actually has quite a few elements of (someone will flame me for this, but I don't care - it's true) real-time strategy games, so ground combat is almost a minigame in itself - perhaps an ugly one, but the underlying model is far better than GalCiv2's "the one with the best multipliers wins, and perhaps having more troops will help" or even SE4's "invisible walls of troops which are at least individually represented" model!

Captain Kwok · #5 July 11th, 2006, 08:25 PM

Some of the ugliness is the angle and compression of the screenshots, plus the fact that the 3d models are low on polys to allow most older systems to run the tactical combat without needing a speedy/costly video card.

The fact is that you can just skip over the visual tactical combat and just use the auto resolve strategic mode.

Raapys · #6 July 11th, 2006, 09:29 PM

Well, performance & gameplay > graphics is how I see it. If it was up to me the game would still be in 2D, to avoid spending resources on other things than gameplay. As such I'm glad they at least didn't choose to spend alot of resources on the new graphics.

As for the UI, I partially agree. I don't like the lower-right button-window, and I'd prefer if the end-turn button was on the lower-right of the screen.

Suicide Junkie · #7 July 11th, 2006, 11:54 PM

Oh, me too.
SE4's graphics are great, IMO. They do the job of informing me about what is going on in the game, fast and efficiently. So much so that I can play it on my P-166 laptop anywhere, anytime.

Atrocities · #8 July 12th, 2006, 01:32 AM

The game is still in the beta phase. SEIV Graphics are what they are... I like them, exspecially since I changed some of the base colors to green and yellow.

StarShadow · #9 July 12th, 2006, 02:50 AM

I agree, gameplay trumps graphics anytime. Hell, I still play Angband.

Atrocities · #10 July 12th, 2006, 05:03 AM

The UI may not appeal to you, but as long as it is functional, and believe me that is VERY important, then I tend to agree, eye candy is not important, but nice to have.

Functionality is more important than looks. Give me function, simplistic flowing logical function over eye candy any day.

My $0.02 cents worth.