COH Concept Gallery

But but ...

*cry*

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Yeah, please please please take a look at this, as some of the textures of the some of the newer things shift the color palette leaving us to scramble around the limited assortment of colors looking for a close match.

This...is exactly why I prefer this game over the other.

I love the modern, real world feel of City of Heroes.

Glad to see that this is still the main focus.

With optional orbital laser of DOOM! hackable by arachnos?

That helmet still looked better than the original film one, no matter who was wearing it.

He didn't say it was illegal if you were over 15 - just unlikely

Asymmetry, yay! Well, I have to try not to get my hopes up, because wishing and reality often don't overlap much. I've hoped for an asymmetry slider for quite some time, so we could move chest details and costume patterns off-center one way or another. I think that would be an excellent tweak, but I have no idea how hard it would be to implement. I'll stay turned for the details when the Player Summit summary is posted.

Love the gallery of concept art. And I'm curious to see what this mysterious idea of yours that "graduated to the big leagues" will turn out to be. David, having you on staff has really been a huge boost not just to Paragon Studios but to the players as well. Stick around a very, very long time!

K

Me.

What kind of film work do you do? I think the Marvel movie costumes have struck a good balance: they acknowledge each character's traditional colors while adding in a lot of neutral 'real-world' colors and textures. They keep just enough of the source material to make hardcore fans happy while making things accessible to the wider film audience.

I'm not sure if that interplay's ever been spelled out, but I like your interpretation! The idea of a simpler, purer Paragon under threat from a morale darkness sets up a lot of nice tension.

Sure. You take a texture layer (paper grain, mesh, etc.) and put it above your paint layer. Then you set the texture to Overlay (or sometimes Multiply) to blend them together. Adjust Levels and Opacity until it looks right, and use the Layer Mask to paint out areas that aren't really gelling. Hope that helps!

Well, as you know, we have the somewhat unique situation of having 7 year-old assets in the game alongside more modern stuff. The Art team is committed to keeping the game fresh, modern, and up-to-date, so as new tricks and techniques (like alpha glows, solid geo FX, and normal maps) become available, of course we want players to have those options and to evolve the game forward. (Just wait 'til you see the cloth folds on a certain upcoming set--it's simply jaw-dropping what the Character team was able to do). And don't worry, we won't be taking away any legacy stuff.

Yes. We want the game to stay visually up-to-date. You'll continue to see more realistic texture treatments on costume sets going forward.

Definitely! We have a few modern 'base coat' textures in the pipeline for exactly this reason.

I like that idea, but I didn't set up the button layout--perhaps the Designers wanted to emphasize the optional nature of the comic book? Would have to ask them.

That would be wonderful! It's just an issue of animation and FX time, I'm sure. We have to be careful how we budget those.

Let me clarify: I'm a giant fan of the old X-men costumes, and Jim Lee's run on the title is the reason I became an artist in the first place. If you want to see how much I love the colorful, comic book-y X-men outfits, please go here: http://david-nakayama.deviantart.com/gallery/12373396

My point is that those costumes would've been a failure on film. The general public would've taken one look, equated the super-suturated spandex outfits with the Power Rangers and summarily dismissed the X-men as kids' stuff. For you and I--it's not a problem; we like those costumes and it works for us. And it's not that specific colors are the problem; rather, it's the top-to-bottom application of 100% saturated color across the whole body. That's when it gets a bit out of hand and crosses into Saturday morning cartoon-land.

It's a wonderful series, and I whole-heartedly agree with you! But Kirkman and Ottley are doing something interesting here: on the face of it, Invincible is a bright, colorful comic that might be mistaken for kids stuff. It sets up certain story-telling expectations...that are then turned completely on their heads, resulting in huge surprises and reader pay-off. It's kind of like Happy Tree Friends in that way.

I've often wondered how they'd turn that series into a movie. Say they did it as a cartoon--then little kids go see it and run out screaming as Allen the Alien is ripped in half. But live action would have problems of its own; if the visuals aren't sufficiently bright and cartoony, then you lose the expectation/reversal thing. Probably why they haven't adapted it yet.

When it's only 5 pages, I think it's be better to just not have an option to skip it - just click "next" 5 times quickly to get into the tutorial.

Thanks for the response, NS. I took issue with the idea that mature, sophisticated people wouldn't find those costumes appealing. I agree with what you've said in this post, though I feel it contradicts the post I originally replied to.

I don't think that the X-Men film needed to not use those costumes because of maturity, sophistication level, or age. I think it needed to not use those costumes because they didn't have the name recognition it would take to reach non-fans. It needed to be billable as an action movie, not just a superhero movie, in order to reach a wider audience. I agree that people would have dismissed it outright, but it would have been based on whether they were fans, not age, maturity, or sophistication. Christopher Reeve's Superman did very well in theaters-- but people knew who he was.

I think that atmosphere has changed, though, because superhero movies are now a wildly successful genre. I don't think Green Lantern would have done any worse if his costume hadn't had that weird texture to it. That doesn't mean that I think texture is bad (I think the scales for Captain America look great), but I don't think it, or darker colors, are required for people to take superheroes seriously.

Lots of people in this world think cartoons and comic books are only for kids. They are wrong. I think that we just need one more generation before that's no longer an issue, but I also think we need an industry that is willing to stand behind styles that aren't all darker and trying to be more like The Dark Knight. Not that I think what you've done for CoH has been a problem (the last splash page for SSA3 was great, if spoilerific), I'm thinking more of the upcoming Superman and Spider-man movies and how they don't seem to want to embrace the lighter, more positive nature of those heroes despite each of them having successful movies that did.

I guess that's where we disagree. I never had any expectation that it was for kids going into it just because of the coloring style or lack of texture. I saw a superhero comic, and I'd had it recommended to me by people with similar tastes to mine (though I'd been told nothing but that it was good stuff).

You might say the same thing about anime. When I was in high school, and anime (we called it Japanimation then) had just started to get big in the US, I worked in a video store. Mothers would come up to the counter trying to rent Akira or something similar for their kids. I would try to talk them out of it, explaining that they were for adults, and they would get enraged, yelling about not being able to rent a cartoon for their kids. They had it in their heads that "animated" = "for kids", which is as ridiculous as "movies" = "westerns". It's a medium, not a genre.

I believe that this is a problem with the public, and not some sort of inherent aspect of the medium, color, or style choices. It may take a few mainstream films like an animated Invincible before oblivious parents start paying attention to reviews and ratings instead of assuming that a particular medium or color style is only used for kids.

Anyway, thanks for responding. Sorry for the sidetrack-- this touched a nerve with me-- I've had to deal with comics, video games, superheroes, and even computers as being "for kids" from my family for most of my adult life.

Thanks again for posting your artwork, I'll stop derailing your thread now.

The feeling, as always, is moochal, my good man...

You heard it here first! New CoT is getting retrofitted back into CoT Classic!

/
// wishful thinking
/// so maybe that should be

I don't think the attitude that comics are just for kids exists anymore. But I think the attitude may have actually gone too far the other way: that comics and associated media are for everyone. I don't think comic books and in particular the style and metaphor of 80s-90s comic books are ever going to be 100% mainstream. They'll be acceptable to a point when translated well enough, as anything will be. But times and tastes change. Think about how many successful cinematic musicals that aren't Disney animations there are between Grease (1978) and Mulan Rouge (2001). I can name more successful cinematic musicals from before I was born than after. Is that because musicals are now just for kids? Of course not: musical productions still do just fine, just not on the big screen.

Does age have anything to do with it? Some, I think. Although the "comics are not just for kids" era began basically in the mid 80s, its still the case that it was the people who grew up during that era, moreso than the adults that were already reading comics within that era, that represent the bulk of the "comics are not just for kids" generation. The 40 year olds today are the 30 year olds in 2000 when X-Men came out that might have been the first generation to have grown up thinking that art style was totally mainstream. It would have been a fairly substantial gamble in 1999 to guess there were enough of us to sustain a yellow spandex X-Men movie.

One more thing about comic books: it can be an expensive habit, like smoking. Older people often give up comic books not because they outgrow them, but simply because life throws more things to buy than they have the money to comfortably spend. And once you're disconnected from it, for a lot of people tastes shift. Ironically, I think a lot of the people going to see Captain America and Thor today are the people who once bought those comics or at least knew of them back in the day, gave it all up to pay the mortgage, and now appreciate the movies at least in part due to the nostalgia factor. The irony is that it might be only now, when enough people have been away from comics for long enough, that that art style can *be* nostalgic and resonate with an audience in a strong way.


Anyway, back to the artwork.

You say that like its a bad thing.

Or it could be long dresses and robes for players