Project D vs Blade & Soul

[Renevatia]

I stumbled across this beautiful video today as I was strolling through the meadow of youtube and I though I'd share some insights and personal opinions here.

Behold
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMcYJLgEyDQ

This amazing piece of work was canceled and it puzzles me why such a complete piece of environment was deserted. Apparently the developers of this game decided to go their separate ways after the environmental artist was overloaded with work and stuff like that, which is understandable.
I am very sad to see that such great artists (look at those concept arts at the end of the video) having to give up such project. Anyhow, the team decided to contribute to BnS i believe and gave the team that was working on BnS everything they had been working on. That's why you see the similarities in those two games I guess. However they turned it to something like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRh3PvrRWk
Which IMO is inferior, though that could be argued to be my bias opinion or just 'there is not that big of a difference. Here is why I think it is inferior and a bit unfair that BnS is the game that survived.

Even though the character animation of BnS is much more derived it almost makes it automatic, much like watching a animated movie instead of choosing what you can do inside the game, but that might just be my opinion as a action game nerd but I think as a fantasy based game the value of an overseeing environmental artist should be of greater importance than the character artist and a fantasy based game should never skimp out on the environmental graphics and designs to accommodate to anything else besides playability due to lag. From what I see BnS has thrown away the element of exploration for eye candy in the animation and the design of the character.

The difference between the two would be the recreation of the sense of scale. This is very important in making a picture or a scenery grand, literally. in almost every scene of Project D there are small foreground objects that can be compared to the background to make the scale amazing, I believe it is that element that people are looking for in a open world fantasy based game. The small floating shiny dots, the architectures, the stands, the small bridges in town and the birds in the sky, it all falls into a nice scale. It is not even a matter of resources of the target audience because those foreground objects are mostly just dots (refer to DS about this, I could be wrong lol), and I don't believe that its an element that a fantasy based mmo should forgo. I guess some people might just say its just dots, big deal, but look at BnS video and focus not on the character animation but the background and w.e. foreground they have and maybe you will see what I mean. Putting a build on that giant ass frog was a genius move.

Who do I have to kill to get a chance at something like this.

Art aside, I think it will be better if you have this giant big beautiful world that you can travel around look at pretty stuff that cannot exist irl than if you have this pretty good world but pretty animation on the characters to play with and..watch.

discuss

[p.nano]

Have you played Blade and Soul 1st & 2nd CBT?
I'm assuming you haven't.
I'm also assuming you haven't played Project D yet since it's not in commercial release.

These are just trailers, and the fact that you're judging these two games by just two videos is completely idiotic in every sense.

A game is not defined by its graphics, nor its character to BG scale ratio.. And looking at Project D's video, I don't see anything defining actual gameplay, or how the interface would blend in with a "grand and vast" world as you define..

Blade and Soul's environment is actually a lot bigger in comparison to your character when played at proper resolutions (have you tried 1080p on a 21" monitor or 42" TV? Don't think so.) Project D's character animations also feel very generic - just seeing that classic walk animation makes me cringe.

They both look very good, but I can see why one was canceled and one not.
Project D's art style feels conformed to the generic 3D mmo - Blade and Soul's artstyle is something that the market hasn't really experimented with. The character designs are very different, facial structures, and the battle concept (albeit not new) seems a lot more refreshing - and it is.

I've also played TERA, and I'd say TERA's environment is better than Project D's judging by my gameplay. Why? Because when you are in battle with monsters 3x-10x times bigger than you, you can still see everything.. etc..

Play before you judge.