Asherons Call: Turbine Comments on Screenshots

Scenario of Turbine:

The original screenshots we released were in-progress shots of where the game was at as of the middle of January.

What we released to WCoD are much more recent and a number of the pieces needed to make things look good were in place (unlike they were in our In-Progress shots). Between the middle of January and the middle of April the Art team had a good amount of time to polish various areas of the game.

The screenshots seen in the Where In Dereth ToD contest are indeed spotlights on our terrain. One of the biggest areas of the game currently that needs improvement is our trees and other landscape fixtures (rocks, flowers, bushes, etc). Those shots display a pretty dramatic change for the better in the game.

We are presently considering changing pentagons to parallelograms.

Joking aside, the bulk of our effort for the Expansion Pack has been texture revisions and clean up (a huge task given the 6+ years of old textures that needed to be redone). Armor pieces that are new as part of the expansion pack (Rare Armor and the Viamontian armors) are, in general, higher poly than normal armor, but pre-existing models have for the most part remained unchanged (a few have been touched up to resolve texture mapping issues).

We will be looking into addressing avatar models (perhaps with some armor redesigns) once we return to Live efforts.