The new Tribes game from Prophecy Games (official name coming 'soon') is about to kick-off large scale playtesting next Wednesday and Thursday (November 29th an
BattleBit is the perfect example that graphics don't make a game good or bad. It looks like Roblox, but when you're in the game your don't even notice, until suddenly you realize how funny it is. BattleBit is the best Battlefield game in a very long time, while the modern Battlefield games are graphically amazing. They're just shitty games. The graphics of it also make it very readable. There's not a bunch of junk making it harder to tell what you're seeing. It shows what needs to be shown and that's about it.
Why not? If it plays well, has a nice story, interesting setting or whatever else, doesnt have to be the best looker to be a good time.
I mean, you do what you want but feels like to me you make yourself miss out on good things that are out there just because they dont have top tier graphics.
Dusk isnt the best looking game, but its good. Just as an example.
They should give it good graphics. That will help pull in more new players and give the game a better chance of taking off. That being said, it shouldn’t be to worry, hopefully. These are early visuals.
"It’s important to note that the game is still very early in development, and these screenshots don’t show the latest state of the game, but it does give us a general idea of the style they are going for."
These are pre-alpha visuals. It's not uncommon for games at this stage to look even worse than this.
Not how it works. They have assets already made. You don't redo character models, weapon models for a beta release. At best you use stand-in models, when it's not important to look good. This isn't a stand-in model, replacement or anything else. A spinfusor is a spinfusor. It has all the animations, all the textured. Game has motion blur even.
Best that'll change is the lighting, explosions etc. But the map is already looking bad for 2023, so do the models. I'm not holding my breath for better visuals.
You do, in fact, actually redo character models and other stuff for a beta release. This is early alpha, they're using placeholder models and textures, probably from previous Tribes games, nailing the core gameplay loop before working on graphics.
They also have Starseige Deadzone and Starseige Raiders (Raiders isn't available yet, but has been playable for a while). They all share some weapons, but Tribes has been a different time period in the past, so I wouldn't be surprised to see the models change to fit Tribes better.
That said, yeah. All of it is possible to change. Graphics, particularly terrain, are pretty likely to be cleaned up. The first goal is to make it playable, then to make it as good as possible.
The last Tribes game before this was Ascend, released over a decade ago.
Polygon targets, textured sizes, shader technology and much else has evolved dramatically since then.
You may reuse old assets as placeholders during development (but this can be problematic for the same reasons why temp music in filmmaking is problematic), but you absolutely do not have assets already made. Assets change over the course of development, often right up until release.
I can't speak to whether or not these assets are from Ascend or earlier, nor can I speak to the visual production quality Prophecy is capable of, but seeing shoddy looking visuals from a pre-alpha title is normal.