Tea Monster, on 07 October 2016 - 11:52 PM, said:
World Tour is a very Gearbox solution to a problem - lots of head scratching and confusion about what went on to arrive at the finished product - like ACM and DNF. Did they give it to the janitor to project manage?
I have very similar concerns about World Tour, but I think you are being too rough here. This is a 20 years old game. The people at Gearbox doesn't get it, that's the problem.
For one, the concept is very strange. Duke Nukem traveling around the world, seriously? But more importantly, it's a concept that's hard to work with. The way the Build engine works makes it silly to make realistic structures. Also, was I the only one who see a similarity with another derivative game based on a similar idea? Not a good sign.
The art doesn't match the original game. The new weapon and boss are sloppy edits. But I don't think it was done by someone's 13 years old daughter. It was created by someone under a contract and without experience for this specific job. Duke Nukem has a pseudo-realistic style that's hard to adapt, even for a professional experienced with texture editing. I remember TX mentioning in the deleted thread that he suggested the artists should put more work on this stuff but they refused. So it seems we are seeing their first attempt with the textures. But this is not just a problem with the artists, but apparently a lack of supervision or quality control.
It's no surprise that the work with the renderer is better than the art. It's something that is not very different from a modern game. Plus Gearbox has an idea how much work it will take and how much it will cost to make a renderer. Not so much with art. They underestimated what it means to make textures for a 20 years old game. As usual, they probably thought that low resolution means low quality. However the original artists even created 3D models to make some of the textures in Duke 3D. Obviously that's not the case here. Gearbox underrated how much work and aptitude it would take to make good textures. But apparently the higher-ups in Gearbox find the result acceptable.
However there are also issues with the renderer. I have never been a big fan of mixing spotlights with sector-based lighting. As much as I would love to have AO in Duke 3D, anyone with basic knowledge about it would know that adding thick borders in corners and halos around objects is precisely what you should not do with AO. It's also blatantly obvious that it's full of glitches and artifacts. So the new renderer is a worthy technical accomplishment, but not properly adjusted (and debugged). The overall result is less of a feature and mostly visual noise.