How to design a iconic faction and easily recognisable.

Daedrick

I will give you a tip, its not how planetside 2(or even 1 for that matter) developers are doing it. Imo, the colors are tasteless and flashy and would never ever even be remotly considered for an army patern in reality. But thats not the point, not trying to make it as much realistic as possible here, just trying to give devs another insight about their artistic direction. Also, since there are no official forums, Im posting it here, hoping that some devs come across it. Now, into the real subject, shall we.

Obviously, for a game such as this one, factions need to be easily recognisable and I totally agree with that. But they are doing it wrong. Imo, they went the ''team fortress'' way without the caricatural aspect, which is key for a design such as this one because as I said earlier, its not believable. As of now, they are making their troops half caricatural, flashy colors but with semi realistic looks and it simply doesnt look good in my opinion. It looks like cheap GI joe. You either go full caricatural or not at all. Best exemple is team fortress.

You can read this article for a way better explanation why they choosed that design; http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/team_fortress_2

Quotes from it explaining their vision; “We found that silhouette and animation were better long-range identification characteristics than texture detail or color, so we used those for class identification....We spent a long time designing just the silhouette shapes so that, when viewed only in silhouette with no internal shading at all, the characters are readily identifiable to players from all angles...''

But now, dont go on raging just yet, because team fortress is a good game and all, but since planetside is in my opinion more serious and hardcore than team fortress they should go with the more realistic(read believable) designs and less with the caricatural by avoiding flashy colors and cliches such as gaz mask wearing black and red suit bad guys.

On a side notes, gas mask are often used by ''evil guys'' in films and videogames. From; http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GasMaskMooks. ''An extremely popular form of the Faceless Goons, achieved by taking your enemy Mooks and giving them all gas masks. Note that this almost always occurs in situations where the gas masks serve no real practical purpose, as chemical weapons aren't even a factor in whatever conflict is involved. '' (Clic on faceless goons to learn more about that cliche)

Now lets look at what planetside should aim for by getting inspiration from a relatively succesful game. EVE online. In that game too, it features multiples factions fighting each others, but as you can see, unlike planetside, they achieved an art style that differentiate factions while still being very recognizable and iconics.

 

As you can see, each factions got their own style. If you believe this is not a good exemple, you can look at this picture and try to guess which ships is to whom(warning huge picture/file size)  http://cruddy.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/eve_chart-4096_name.jpg%3Fw%3D450%26h%3D351

Now this is the kind of work that planetsides developers should get inspiration from. They got it half right, one faction have hovering tanks, while another dont. One faction use laser rifles, while another use conventionnal ammo. Thats perfect, keep it like that. Now the only thing they need to do, is make so the aesthetics match that kind of design. Take exemple from eve online, one faction can be dirty and use rusty equipment while another can be pristine and use top of the line equipement while still keeping the same weapon balance of course. See minmatar versus gallente.

Thats the art direction they should aim for, and switch to, imo.

skyexile

http://www.planetside-universe.com/forums/

Is effectivly the PS2 Official forums. the devs post there and read them.

Each factions tank, weapons and armour loosk totally different to eachother, so im really not sure what you're talking about.

everything TR is smooth and new looking
Everything NC looks like it would be used by the rebels in star wars and is all giant squares and is all rusted and beat up, cause they're povo.

VS is crazy scifi with scaled patterns allover it.

Trolltaxi

To the OP:

In my opinion Planetside2 art style will serve the MMO-FPS genre pretty well. While you are right with the need of decision of cartoonish/realistic style, I'd add that dealing with that amount of players (hundreds in your area/on your screen even in PS1) requires more vivid colours than like in your example, in EVE.

Red with black, blue with gold, purple with teal will never give a good camo. The art team had to sacrifice realism in the altar of playability. This is a good decision. No one would really like to play a game where everyone has urban/forest/desert/ice-mosaic patterns not even mentioning ghuille suits. That would be the most tactical, but would result in a pixel-hunt, not an intense, epic scale warfare - what Planetside really is.  

 

Trolltaxi

doublepost, del pls. sry.

 

Bravix

EVE is a terrible example. It doesn't matter what faction someones ship is, because a Caldari ship can shoot a Caldari ship. The majority of the time, you won't even see the enemies ship up close because you're 50km out....you might know the type of ship but you won't actually see the ship.

 

Planetside, there isn't an "Overview" saying that those 10 guys in fron of you are all enemies. You have to recognize them visually. Now, if you read up before making your post, you'd see that all the factions look LARGELY different. If they were all red, I could tell the difference if I was within a reasonable distance.

However, there are vehicles (Lightning, Galaxy, Sunderer, etc.) which all factions share. They will likely look the exact same except for a colo scheme change.

I dunno, I'm a guy who likes ARMA II (AKA realistic as hell) but I've never had a problem with the colors Planetside uses.

Oh and also, there will be camo skins available if that's what you're looking for.

HtSgtMAD

it will get worked out during beta and I cannot wait for that to start

Cinge

I don't understand, in the first planet side each faction was VERY recognizeable. There was no way you were mistaking a NC or a TR or a VS.  Not to mention the defning vehicles and the graphics of the fire(big round vs multiple small rounds vs lasers and plasma balls).

RedKnights

Yea the technology upon the release of PS1 was pretty poor, but as soon as the fighting started you knew who you were fighting due to the sound design and the colors of fire which varied depending opon the side you're on.