Why the art team have never made a bad expansion

[Echocho]

Their work is impressionistic. When a game director or Activision asks for a player unfriendly system to be developed they have something specific in mind, you're not allowed to take liberties.

Art on the other hand is the exact same no matter who's in charge. Someone asks for something, you interpret what they want, put your spin on it and come up with a suggestion.

Essentially the artists can use their own judgement and creativity to come up with something the players will like, regardless of what the original request was.

A developer can't do that. If you're told to create azerite you have to create azerite, you can't deliver valor points and expect it to go down well.

An artist on the other hand can be asked to create a castle made out of a giant pumpkin, but deliver one made out of a giant eggplant instead and it'll probably be very well received if the work was really good.

[Beerbill Society]

Blizzard spend too much on art and too little on actual development. That's why.

Not saying the art team doesn't do an amazing job, but that's how it looks like.

In their defense: It's easier to sell crap that looks good than is to sell good things that looks like crap.

[Airlick]

I'm not sure what the point of this thread is, since it's all self-explanatory. Devs don't get as much liberty as artists, they get strict outlines of the systems they are supposed to develop and can't very well make something completely different. Artists only need to follow the theme they get, hence no medieval European castles in Pandaria, but other than that, it's guns out time for them. This doesn't mean developers can't try to make bad systems less obnoxious, though.

[Malacrass]

You can buy artistic talent with money and a big name. It's something that people in the industry may not like to hear, but there are many, many, many skilled artists around who would love to make good (or even okay) money with their passion.

And considering that Blizzard is a monster in the business, their name alone allows them to cherry pick the best of the best for anything related to art. That's why art and music are rarely, if ever, an issue.

The only weakspot is story telling and general game design. All the money in the world can't guarantee success in those fields. Got to find the needle in the haystack.

[Razzako]

Blizzard spend too much on art and too little on actual development.

Source?

/10chars

[Deleted]

Well... Yes.

Sometimes I forget people don't understand things that are obvious. I do wish we had a collective consciousness sometimes. Things like flat earth could be completely removed.

But, on topic. Yeah... Many people don't get game development and just sit on the big chair and demand. It is what it is.

[Alkizon]

And still new models were/are the main reason for my leaving... so they aren't that great (merit fully belongs to art team); but with regard to locations - everything was/is at least tolerable.

[Heeresman]

I'm not sure what the point of this thread is

We could no doubt put that question to about 50% of threads created on this forum.

#tumbleweed

OT: I think they do a fantastic job.

[Kaleredar]

Their work is impressionistic. When a game director or Activision asks for a player unfriendly system to be developed they have something specific in mind, you're not allowed to take liberties.

Art on the other hand is the exact same no matter who's in charge. Someone asks for something, you interpret what they want, put your spin on it and come up with a suggestion.

Essentially the artists can use their own judgement and creativity to come up with something the players will like, regardless of what the original request was.

A developer can't do that. If you're told to create azerite you have to create azerite, you can't deliver valor points and expect it to go down well.

An artist on the other hand can be asked to create a castle made out of a giant pumpkin, but deliver one made out of a giant eggplant instead and it'll probably be very well received if the work was really good.

In a studio you create what was assigned to you. If they ask for a pumpkin castle and you give them an eggplant castle they'll probably ask you what the hell you did with that work day. For any job, you ALWAYS deliver what is asked of you.

That being said the artists are usually in on the ground floor of conceptualizing things more and are given a "broader stroke" approach to how they interpret a given idea. An art director might come and say "hey, we're thinking of doing swamp trolls, give us some dinosaurs the swamp trolls might ride." Which, to reiterate, does not mean you're then given leeway to start making kodos that lava Tauren might ride, but means that you are allowed to interpret what those dinosaurs may be, what the armor might look like, accessories, etc. Then you get feedback from your director and other artists and continue to work on your design.


I also feel like people are confused about how gameplay systems are designed. They most likely did NOT go "hey Steve, we have this idea called azerite, it's going to work exactly like this, go make it for us and it'll ship with the game." Regardless of whether you like the system or not it likely went through months of internal testing between numerous devs.

Working in a studio environment requires a unified direction. That's the only way anything will get done and the only way things like art will look and feel cohesive. If you roll into a studio trying to take a system given to you in some pet direction you can expect to find yourself fired. And that's not a "blizzard" or "activision" thing. That's a "working in a team" thing.

[cparle87]

In their defense: It's easier to sell crap that looks good than is to sell good things that looks like crap.

Tell that to the guys who point to those guys who built Westfall on the Unreal engine and complain why can't WoW look like this.

[Beerbill Society]

Source?

/10chars

My personal perception, have seem many interviews they show how geared up art team is and how they take pride on its work, never saw that much on other teams. (I think one interview that shows that really well one about Pandaria and how the art team made the whole textures hand painted directly over the terrain, you can see the kind of gear they have and it's pretty sick.)

[Muajin76]

What about the content creators? Don't they contribute to the art sa well or do they only work on game expac development?

[Beerbill Society]

Tell that to the guys who point to those guys who built Westfall on the Unreal engine and complain why can't WoW look like this.

Being made in Unreal doesn't automatically make it looks great, and talking by my own personal experience with it, WoW art team can do something way better in their own engine any day over any indie developer on a third party engine, there is a huge skill and resources gap.

Besides, doing a project on copyrighted content has failed before it started.

My point is, you can see many games today that look great but are shallow as fuck in all other aspects, meanwhile, when I play some old games I can't believe how much effort they put on the game systems, which are much more complex and interesting than we have seen today, the only problem being graphics.

What corroborate to that is Classic being a thing today.