Can you elaborate on this, because that seemed pretty bizarre, like it's opposite day today or something...

You sure do like to turn a perfectly reasonable statement and attach some nonsensical hyperbole on it as a label without providing any substance.

Why does everyone indulge Hortz? He will NEVER drop the whole animation obsession. If kings bounty looks amazing then go play kings bounty. At this point I feel the word troll would be redundent.

*sigh* anyway, while elemental looks great at the moment, the upcoming beta will give us a better "feel" for the game (even if its only cloth map) and then perhaps a discussion on animation would be more pertinent. At the moment any discussion on the matter is equivalent to saying "Elemental should look good!" well, no kidding?

This rings hollow to me, like saying that I have obsession with breathing air.

You do realize that the word animation stems from latin animare=to infuse spirit, to enliven, action of imparting life. And that is exactly what is the function of animation in games?

Your mentality is very strange to me, and I guess, to the general public who buys games, too.

Animation is important, yet the mainstream is not the target audience of a 4X game. Rather it is players who prefer to think and plan, rather than run and gun. Good animation & graphics are of great value in a game where the primary mental stimuli is visual ie. a shooter or perhaps racing game.

Howver in a TBS the stimuli is primary intellectual. This isn't a "We are smarter than the mouth breathing FPS masses" comment. This is simply the truth. I still play 2D games from years ago because thier substance was always more valuable than thier shine. You may love kings bounty SOOO MUCH because its animation is good (Honestly - played it, and its nothing to write home about) but if the devs time is divided between animation and gameplay improvement, they will see far fewer sales if they focus on the former over the latter, simply because of the target audience.

And how per-se is it like "an obsession with breathing air"? Did you actually think about what you wrote or did you just spout whatever counter argument fit the sentence? I now, after writing this, realise I just fed the troll after telling others not to... *sigh*.

Heh, it's ironic to use Kings Bounty as an example of how animation is required.. the original had eye-bleedingly bad animations that I can still remember well over a decade later. 

Hertz, don't be worried about it.  There have been several dev quotes about small details being visible at extreme zoom levels, such as squirrels and so forth, which should mean that the gameworld doesn't look static.  I hope it looks a good deal better than KB:TL, though which is quite ordinary looking and overinspired by Warcraft 3.

As long as what is important remains clearly visible, then I won't have any complaints.

Who cares about the animations. I got Kings Bounty, I did the main campaign and then it will fade out in the pile of finished games while I expect Elemental to give me hundreds of hours of entertainment. That's important, that my bucks are going to get me far more gaming hours than I will ever get with Kings Bounty no matter how good its animations are.

Look at the animations of Civ 4, really simple and no one cares about that fact.

Heh, don't mention Civ, I miss 2d.

If you guys would stop feeding the troll he wouldn't be so bloody annoying.

Patently absurd is a perfectly reasonable addition.  As has been explained to you many times, by many people, 4X games place less emphasis on graphics than other games.  So saying that they are important especially for a 4X game is absurd.

Speaking of turn based combat, fantasy and animations we have a new player in town-

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gc-09-disciples-iii/55371

so much for your strange outdated fringe mentality concerning TBS games...

I have decided that you would make an excellent politician, what with your ability to warp the meaning of words. I wasn't aware that "fringe" had gained a new meaning. So when almost everyone agrees with you, it means that you have a "fringe mentality." I guess that means everyone on these forums except for you is on the "fringe" because we don't need super fancy graphics and would rather have good gameplay. And I guess that when you're the target audience for this game you're also on the "fringe."

Isn't "gameplay" suppose to be an overarching structure of the game, how can you pull out what your eyes see and your brain experiences from that structure by manufacturing false juxtaposition of gameplay vs visuals?
That doesn't make any sense...

Crysis>Tribes 2 in graphics. Crysis is a beautiful looking game.

Crysis<Tribes 2 in gameplay. Tribes 2 is just that much more fun, despite people having maybe half a dozen polygons for a face.

And no, gameplay does not equal graphics. Otherwise all we would have is boring Crysis clones. Seriously, what you are asking for is to make the same game over and over again, with slightly better graphics. If you had your way, there wouldn't be a 4x genre. There would be Crysis.

Hortz, I admire your persistence but I think one of these days you're just going to have to realize you're selling your "pretty graphics" campaign to the wrong crowd.

Dishonesty is annoying.

First, graphics is not animation, visuals=graphics+animation.

Second, visuals make the gameplay happen. Your narrow definition of what visuals means is your problem. For example Plants vs Zombies is a brilliant game, and it wouldn't be so without a specific kind of visuals, the same can be said for Defense Grid: The Awakening(also high level of animation).

The theme of the game is the main criteria as to deciding whether visuals is successful or not within that theme, at this point in games development there is no basis for not having a high level quality of visuals in a game like Elemental, because the field in which it wishes to operate has already high standards, and anything less would make the game look regressive, outdated and unenjoyable because our perception has already gone through accustomization process to those standards.

Third, your Tribes 2/Crysis comparison is a total failure since it's based on a subjective opinion(completely faulty and unwarranted I might add) and an argument from popularity fallacy(which is btw heavy on the Crysis side).

Wow, that's so fu**cking dumb and dishonest.

Seriously, people on the internet just argue for the sake of arguing and being contrarians without a cause...

Wow.

Hortz are you Bill O'reilly ?

Yeah, that's why the beta is in the cloth map and not using the full game engine.

Good point hortz! Plants VS Zombies is a perfect example of a great game with mediocre graphics! Pointing our defense grid: the awakening as an example of a terrible game that has amazing graphics and yet sold far more poorly continues to support your position!

By the way, if the "popularity fallacy" is inadequate to measure a games quality (of course, why measure a games quality by how well it sells? Sales mean NOTHING!) how exactly does one measure a games quality if not subjectively? Shall we use the Hortz-ometer? I do believe I have PWNED you, my logically faulty friend

The field in which TBS games operates has "high level visuals"? Really? Are you basing this solely off of kings bounty? The visuals look up to par when compared to civ4 or say empire total war (Civ4 btw continues to sell well years after its release. The far more "shiny" looking empires having long ago been abandoned due to its shoddy gameplay). And I like the generalized statement that everyone has become accustomed to cerain standards! Your argueing against a huge group of people who obviusly have not my friend.

Someone from SD should seriusly close this topic. It's now just become a troll feeding ground.

I was under the impression that Elemental will fuse elements of Civilization 4, King's Bounty: The Legend, HOMM5, Disciples 3(link above), so just for starters, out of those games Civilization 4 is the only kind of game that you falsely without merit perceive as one that inherently doesn't require high level visuals.

Is there a special screen for combat in Elemental-->YES, is there a special screen for combat in Civilization 4-->NO

Other stuff in your post is just warped nonsense as a result of functional illiteracy.

Oddly enough you are not the first one to ask me that and I resent being compared to that despicable buffoon.

P.S.

And what's this stuff about trolling all the time, are you people really that infantile to label normal discussion as trolling, whatever the fu*k that is. Do you use such labels in real life too when talking to someone?

And gameplay != graphics....you negate your argument ('the importance of graphics') the moment you attempt to force that point. Graphics increase market appeal, certainly. It's difficult having a successful game that dosent wow your audience graphically....but again, GC2 did fine and, looking back, it looks absolutly ancient. What sold it was the gameplay, the fun things you DO, the INTERACTION between game and player. Graphics add to the immersion, but they are not what makes a GAME fun.

If the core gameplay is fun with ascii characters, it'll gain some enjoyability with pretty gfx.

If a game is a turd in it's own right, pretty graphics won't make it stink any less.

Now can we please move on.

ps. I'm glad you're enjoying the graphics more (per subject). We certainly don't mind being held to a higher standard...all we ask is to withhold final judgement until the game has been...you know...finalized.

Just one more thing and I'll be done with the forum for a while.

Is elemental going to be like this-

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gc-09-disciples-iii/55371

do you envision this level of detail in the combat part of the game in Elemental.

If not, to what game would you compare what the combat will look like?

edit: I see Boogiebac already addressed all this so feel free to disregard.

This is what I find funny - you make disparaging remarks about other people's intelleigence and yet you clearly don't understand the difference betweem gameplay and visuals. Did you ever play battle chess. The gameplay is exactly like regular chess, but the animations make it a unique experience.

However, some people, after they had seen all of the animations a few times, got sick of playing it and would turn the animations off because they basically wanted to play a game of chess. The eye candy was interesting for the first few games but after a while it actually became a distraction and an annoyance.

Just in case you have missed the point, the underlying game of chess is the gameplay, and is identical with or without the animations. And no one here wants EWOM to be ugly or is arguing against animations. What they are saying (and I really believe you understand this) is that the underlying rules of the game, the AI and so forth is a higher priority to them than the visuals. That was a polite response and I refrained from a lot of the snarky comments I wanted to make. So if you respond, Hortz, please show a little restraint and make your arguments rationally.

If you meen zooming in and seeing guys go head to head, then yes, but where a 'tile' of guys could actually be 100+ soldiers, not just 1 guy per tile.

So in scope it's more like the Total War series, but (as of our current design) gamplay can be paused to reorder your troops in a auto-turn-based fashion.

We'll have more concrete details on battles in the next few months.

Of course, like in King's Bounty: The Legend where a number represents how many units are in a tile...