Well this has been an interesting thread to read, and one I haven't had a clear idea of how to approach. Let me see what specific and general things I can reply to.
First of all, that screenshot in OXM was taken without any lighting except the single light used to build the level. As you can see from the E3 screens and video, the lighting makes it seem much closer to the original. A number of times I've glimpsed the artists' screens in the corner of my eye and had to double take to see if they were looking at their own work or had brought up the original screen for reference.
Lighting is going to be a massive undertaking. Oddworld has always had a surprisingly specific lighting style, and our environment artists have talked long and hard with Lorne about how to replicate it. But you have to remember that we can't just airbrush in some shadow or highlight wherever we want. We aren't playing with paintings, we're creating 3D spaces, and the lighting has to make sense in that context.
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A lot of those things are still place holders I Would have thought. So bearing that in mind, I think I just wet myself a bit from excitement.
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Shit, I'm surprised nobody pointed out how awful Abe looks in that small Wii cutscene. That's terrible. Placeholder, right?
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We're beyond the stage of having placeholders, but this is still alpha, so of course not everything is final. But the character models that have been done are final. What about Abe looks wrong to you, Nepsotic?
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Do the scrabs seem smaller than they used to to anyone else?
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Elum looks pretty tiny, too.
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They're the correct size. They probably look different because now there's perspective, whereas before everything was perfectly side-on and represented as being equally distant from the camera at all times.
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The areas lack a certain uniqueness to them that they had in the original too, somehow...
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A lot more uniqueness is going into different areas in New 'n' Tasty, compared with the large amounts of cut-and-paste art that went into the original screens.
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Oh, and why does that slig explode in the lightning barrier o3o
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Heh, we spotted that. Just a little mistake of the wrong death event. It's a simple fix, and it's probably already been done.
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I also think that the falling meat doesn't look like it's falling quite right.
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It's funny how slow things fall in engine when they're obeying all the same laws of physics as they would in reality. The falling meat has a number of simple numbers to describe its initial speed at spawn, mass, speed of rotation. It's a simple matter to play around with them until they seem right, but as others have said, sound plays a huge part in conveying their plausible physicality.
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The only thing I really noticed was the bird portal effect that Glitch told me in person was a placeholder.
I think any point before something so glaringly pre-alpha has been replaced is too early to make judgements.
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The placeholder effect we used in the Eurogamer footage has been replaced by this one.
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Also, I don't like how the mud at the end says Abe's name when he was greeted. This is something that's been bugging me since MO. The natives in MO I can understand greeting Abe by name because by then word about him has probably gotten out, but the scrubs have probably never heard of him, and in NNT he's just starting his journey so how does anyone know him by name what the heck
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But you don't even comment on the Native
scrubbing the floor.
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The slig looks like a weakling, and just not scary (would lowering its underbelly/underhead make it look bulkier and more menacing?).
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Sligs aren't bulky, they're scrawny.
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I always wondered how the mudokons actually got into those balls.
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They raise and lower. They're lowered to the ground to let Muds in and out, then suspended in the tower overnight. As Employee of the Year, Abe's cell gets suspended higher than anyone else's.