Captain Awesome, on Dec 9 2010, 06:15 PM, said:
From an inside standpoint it's useful, but as far as content for the general player? It's fucking useless. Concept art is only useful for a developer, and even then it might not even be. Look at all the concept art for Duke3D that's been released, how much of that made it into the game? Point is, these people have jack shit to show at this point and need to cool it on the hype until they got some concrete materials to show. And you might argue "LOL, bUT IT'S NICE TO SE WHERE THAYRE GOING WIT THIS, LOL.?" Yeah, and you'd make a good point if this wasn't a remake of a game that's pretty simple to run with.
Don't generalize. What is a general player? Where do you come up with this shit? If you don't care to see concept art or art in general and maybe you know a few other people that don't either, that doesn't mean that everybody hates or finds concept art useless...
Concept art shown to the public is something that some game studios do when they are in the alpha stages with a game and can't show the actual game due to obvious reasons.
In the mod community however, showing your concept art for your project is a general and natural thing to do. Almost every mod on moddb.com shows it's concept art first.
Depending on the artist's skill, style and idea of his work, concept art can be anything from ugly, boring to interesting and very good looking.
I've been working on a few TC mods for doom3 in the past and I do happen to know a thing or two about this since I have firsthand experience.
Good concept art can give a very good idea about the direction, style and ambient that will inspire the dev team as long as the game will be in production.
In Duke Nukem Reloaded's case, the concept art happens to be well done and it manages to show us the direction at which they aim.
If the concept would have suggested a much lamer art direction, maybe people would have lost interest from day 1.
After seeing that concept art, I am motivated to see how their 3D modelers and mappers will manage to replicate that concept art into unreal engine 3.
Also, it's not that easy to remake an old and very well known fps game that has legendary elements that make it stand out in the crowd.
They don't just aim to remake duke 3d in high res textues + 3d models. Their goal is to make the maps, npc's and weapons from scratch, and use the duke 3d assets as an inspiration.
They want to pretty much achieve the same thing that those Black Mesa source dudes are trying since ages.
The problem here is that it's even harder to remake Duke 3D than it is to remake hl1, because duke 3d is even older than hl1 and the transition to modern looks is even harder to achieve.
Hl1 had much more things in common with toady's fps games than duke 3D has.
At least hl1 is a fully 3d game with textures that are big enough to make their high res reproduction process much easier.
It's much harder to fuck up trying to remake hl1 than it is when you try to remake DN3d simply because DN3D is a sprite based game with low res assets, that manages to deliver through it's ambient more than through it's graphics.