ArenaNet Artists, Richard Anderson

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Category:ArenaNet_artists

Above is a list of the artists employed by ArenaNet and working on the Guildwars series. The thing I love about this game is its art, there is so much that show such detail it allows the modellers to create a truely unique world.

One of the artists i’m going to have a quick word about is artist Richard Anderson. The reason I have picked him out of the others is because of his unique art style, he paints very jagged paintings that come together without being neccesarily detailed or sharp. They add an interesting image and become something clear but yet different. I like his style and he talks alot about it on the following link, his methods and ideas which I found useful and interesting.

http://idrawgirls.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/concept-artist-richard-anderson-guild.html

Heres some examples of his work;

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Artist – Octavian Bene

Octavian Bene is an artist I have just fallen across while looking on the internet, his designs and paintings especially with bodies and landscapes are breath taking.

 

Here are some of his best works in my opinion, I love the detail on his castles and how he manages to show the sense of scale with these structures. He reminds me much of Daniel Docui’s work and infact one piece is so similar I think he must use him as an inspiration. I would love to be able to portray the scale and atmosphere he does here.

 

 

MMO’s and F2P

As a PC gamer quite often you are seen as the gaming group that only plays MMORPG games as they simply don’t work on consoles. However, throughout my life I have seen an increased amount of them be released… and fail. The biggest success I have noticed is having a fan base converted into a MMO, such as Lord of the Rings, or Star wars. These give you an automatic starting point and quite often people fall in love with it easier, however the biggest problem in this industry in World of Warcraft.

MMO’s work on a basis of releasing a game that is capable of keeping a player occupied long enough to play to the top level and a little bit beyond until new content can be released. They then work on regular content releases to keep people playing and eventually offering these massive worlds. The problem with this concept is that it is not possible for a new game to be released with the amount of content one of the old successful ones has, in this case i’ll use World of Warcraft. Usually people get bored or run out of content and un-subscibe.

A trend that has been spreading lately has been a F2P concept in which players pay for content but have no subscription, they also can up to a certain amount earn content. While it is seen as the new “great thing” I believe it is a method to stop a game dying completely, while new players come in the content is more limited than before, quite often subscribers have an in-game advantage as well. All this points to a presurising system that encourages and almost pushes the player to grind to boredom or pay money. This in my opinion takes the fun out the games and definately ruins them for me.

In the future I as a consumer would love to see a F2P game that gives you all the content, but paying can get you cosmetics perhaps help you along the way to better items. However the items should never give an unfair advantage in Player vs Player confrontation. This way the player can play ALL the game and not be fed up by people willing to fork out money.

GAME, Digital Distribution and the Concequences

Lately it has been said that GAME and its asset Gamestation have been forced into administration. Most likely the main reason is that nowadays everyone buys either from an online retailer or buy through a program such as Valve’s Steam store. The biggest thing about internet shopping is that you can easily compare prices quickly from around the world, in which most cases GAME was not the cheapest. It had to be said the pre-owned market was keeping GAME stores afloat with that being its main source of income, but again internet sites were offering pre-owned services and I think even that market was shrinking for them.

So with digital distribution of computer games being the biggest method of purchase nowadays what does that mean for users. For one it will most likely mean you need a good broadband internet as an essential, for some that don’t neccesarily want that this can be a pain. Another problem I persoanlly come across being a PC gamer is the massive amount of programs needed for you to sign up and create accounts to play, for one this is annoying and time consuming.

PC games are very much acount based, this is the main reason they mostly dissapeared from the shelves in stores and why you can’t really buy any second hand. I can see in the future this coming to a console, acount based games in which you download through say the “xbox 590 store” or whatever. While this can be nice on a PC I always see consoles as a much more physical game device. I would epscially want a hard copy to take to a friends house if he didn’t have the game.

While a deal has been made to save GAME I beleive they will have to adapt with some sort of online or GAME browser that deals special offers and keeps the viewers just popping on to see whats for sale (much like steam do) as well as continuing the stores. I would also like to see some more PC games other than the sims and MMORPG games, thank you.