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So…seems like Dark Souls 3 may have taken place before Dark Souls 2?
I’m not sure Ringed City takes place concurrently with overall DS3. Isn’t it in some weird space-time flux and the real Ringed City is actually what you see it being when you fight Gael?
“later immortalized in a fable” still sounds like the past
the continuity might be a bit jumbled generally. iirc their development cycles partially overlapped, and i know there were some people like Kay Plays speculating right off the bat about 3 being set earlier, since it references things that are supposed to have been long forgotten in 2.
what threw me off was identifying the sentinels as golems, which are already a specific thing in DS2 (lorewise and mechanically), when they were originally characterised as non-corporeal entities, somehow inhabiting suits of armour without much further explanation. it rings overall of trying to “fix” DS2 by attaching these weird innocuous loose ends to some epic backstory of ultimate sacrifice
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I mean, the DS2 description sounds like a golem to me?
The bit about them being immortalized in a fable, for some Dark Soul hunters; seems a little harrowing. But it also says they swore themselves to the Judicator Giant. And there was a war with Drangleic and giants. So, maybe the Lost Bastille jailer like their story at the Ringed City and based his “creation” on them.
it does use that specific term on the soul description i think.
i don’t know, it’s very hard for me to break out of the idea that dark souls 2 just exists in its own separate continuity bubble; attempts to make it “fit” into something larger feel ingenuine. like the creatures known as “giants” in the other games appear totally distinct from the hole-faced tree giants featured so prominently in 2, and the only time i can think of those being referenced outside it is the seed pvp item near 3’s Firelink.
i wouldn’t say there’s anything inherently wrong with adding or even replacing elements of backstory later, but it’s only convincing to me if it somehow informs how i look at the game: who are these characters? how do they look and animate; what are they doing here; what can the surrounding environment tell me about how things came to be? DS2 already seems to resist so much of my efforts to read into it that i don’t think any amount of post hoc supplements are going to do much to reframe it.
i realise i’m going on a far tangent from a pretty trivial observation, and i’m kinda too tired to properly reflect on what i wrote, but i thought it epitomised a lot of my mixed feelings about the games.
anyway,
i do like the design of these guys a lot. only wish donning the armour set elongated your body proportions the way the xanthous crown appears to do for your neck
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Awesome, such a gorgeous game
It’s so cool that they had the idea to fake that rim of light from a backlight. Now we’d have the technology to do it (I think?) but we still don’t see it. Maybe with ray tracing
I think we’ve got all we need to do rim lighting properly; specular highlights show up strongest on oblique angles so things like Mario Galaxy’s slather of rim lighting are cheap/stylized ways to approximate a light shining near-parallel to an object surface when appropriately lit (the Mario technique basically forces oblique-to-camera angles to go to white). And it compounds with contrast between a dark background that our eyes are always working to pick out.
The only reason you don’t see it more often is that lighting artists just don’t set scenes up to cause it, and it’s more subtle when done realistically.
Sure looks lovely when faked like this, though. I wonder why this lighting style was absent entirely from FFXII.
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True, Mario Galaxy comes to mind. It’s funny that lighting artists don’t set up scenes like that because that three point light setup is the first thing you learn in lighting for photography. I like to use it for certain renders, too. Maybe it just gives off too much of photographer’s studio look and developers want something more “realistic”. I personally prefer artistic to realistic in art but I’m probably in the minority with that
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Maybe they respected Vagrant Story too much to imitate it, wanted it to still be unique. That’s what I would have done, probably. But who knows the real reason… If I know anything then that most videogame making decisions are based on either do we have the time or do we have the money
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I have a friend in Atlanta who did research on human reaction to light simulation and shading in video games (simulated environments) and basically she was saying that there is a ton of totally wasted math going on in modern game engines to create subtle realism in areas no brain actually cares about.
Not that any one here is creating policy for these things but yeah, go fake.
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Well, Vagrant story is pretty noir in its visuals. Whereas FFXII is very bright and well lit with the visuals. Even “dark” dungeons and whatnot, are pretty evenly lit and colorful, in FFXII. Lighting also tends to be more “natural”, in general. And I think that’s partially due to the difference in hardware strength.
This scene here, is probably the closest FFXII gets to that high contrast, sun setting on your face, look.
The remasters have tweaked things a bit. Contrast is much higher, now. So dark areas are darker, etc. And certain light sources in many scenes now, have more of a moody, glowing aspect to them.
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looks a bit too smooth imo.
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Also who is giant 4-armed battle lady? I need to know, for reasons
I had another config with half the upscale and slightly fuzzier scanlines, which was a bit more authentic to how it looked originally…but I kept going back to this, probably from seeing it in motion. That high smoothing is the SABR texture filter going over pixelated jaggies.
@Father.Torque 'tis Kali