EDIT: And Imdrunkontea (seriously, where do you people come up with these handles?) proves my point about filtering perfectly. Can somebody in Vancouver go plaster that comparison shot all over PGI's building?
Despite being based on (roughly) the same engine and sharing source material, the visual styles of MWLL and MWO are very different. Both of them fall into the trend of color palettes that consist solely of brown, grey, and muzzle flash, though (seriously, we need more mainstream games that look like Mirror's Edge and Bulletstorm).
The difference is mostly in the filtering and lighting. MWLL has more visual map diversity including some
really good "unofficial" maps (I miss TC_UrbanJungle), but the vast majority of MWLL's maps are almost entirely monochromatic. To wit:
Extremity and Inferno are dark, ash gray but with harsh, glowy light effects (purple and orange, respectively)
Clearcut, Thunder Rift, Marshes, Kagoshima, Glory and Jungle are all stone gray with splashes of dark green.
Frostbite and Hel's Gate are bluish-white.
and Sandblasted, Mirage, Palisades, Dust Bowl, Death Valley, and Ivory Tower are all some variety of reddish-tan.
Furthermore, other than the small pieces of a few maps that get used over and over again in the showreels, almost all of MWLL's maps are either huge, open stretches of nothing (with a definite preference for arid desert and lifeless tundra) or sheer-sided canyons that just lead from choke point to choke point.
The difference, though, is that MWLL hasn't bothered with much filtering. Yeah, there's that trippy distortion on Extremity, some heat-haze on Inferno and something that loosely resembles fog on Marshes and Kagoshima, but by and large the game's visuals are razor-sharp, unobstructed lines of sight that extend for miles. It's
boring, but at least it's clear.
In MWO, they've chosen a kind of fuzzy, muddled filtering that makes the entire game blend down into one green-gray-brown blob. Apparently video game developers think it makes the game look "gritty" and "realistic", but I've never actually met anybody that liked any kind of haze, or film-grain filtering in their video games. Isn't one of the points of video games that we don't have to put up with crappy camera equipment in our entertainment?
As messy and muddy as MWO's visuals are (nothing "pops"), and as much as I hate that, the art style of MWO feels much more alive and involved than MWLL, which is dry and almost clinical by comparison. What I'd like to see is the filtering effects dropped from MWO and the contrast turned up a notch. I think being just a little bit oversaturated would work very well with the game's art style.
Edited by Straylight, 27 December 2012 - 12:28 AM.
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