Casual (Opinion) Friday - Art

IceIX

Not sure if this would become a regular thing or not. Been a bit of random chatter around the office(s) about some of the cooler and less cool pieces of art created for the game. Characters, particularly cool looking UI elements, ability animations that really stand out, that sort of thing. At the same time, there are other art pieces which... could be better. Thought it might be cool to gather some forumite opinions on stuff. This isn't a poll or a "We're going to work on things according to the results", just a good old fashioned talking thread. So, The Good, The Bad, The Ugly.

IceIX personal thoughts:
Favorite piece of character art is Thor (Modern) followed by Captain Marvel. I know Thor (Modern) gets a lot of flak, but I just dig the general Coipel look. My absolute favorite goes to a version of Iron Man that we had working pre-launch and never made it off the drawing board though. Maybe someday...
UI-wise, love the usability and general display of the Character Info screen. Everything's there all in one easily viewable screen and it's all easily navigable. Great piece of UI work.
I'm going to leave off with that and not post dislikes for fairly obvious reasons. Although I think you all can probably guess a couple of them.

TazFTW

The pose for Invisible Woman. Ugh.

Nighthawk81

The in-match graphic for Captain Marvel is hideous.

Trisul

2* Human Torch active player portrait is creepy.

I really like the Storm art and ability effects.

Unknown

I think Baby Torch has a goofy face, Invisible Woman has an oddly long neck, 2* Daken's Chemical Reaction animation looks a bit off (3* Daken's doesn't) and Beast wears a facial expression like someone just gave him a surprise wedgie.
Also, most of the females have exaggerated ****, but that's a comic book thing. (I do like ****, mind you. I just prefer them to be proportionate to the rest of the body.)
Oh, and Sentry. Need I even start on Sentry? He's like L'Oréal's poster boy. What with people's recent outcries for a nerf, World Rupture may soon be changed to a power called Because I'm Worth It, where the board will be filled with sparkly bits much like Bagman's cocoons that serve no purpose except to look pretty.

But enough of that, compliment time instead: I particularly like the artwork for Fury, Punisher (spot on!), Deadpool (all of him - I love how a different version may appear randomly), Ares, Hawkeye (2*), Daredevil (though I feel the character is way too unreliable, but at least he is nicely drawn IMO) and Venom. And while Bagman is somewhat useless except for easy PvE nodes, he was at least draw with a sense of humour (his animations, I mean).
My favourite animations are Torch's Fireball, Hood's intimidation, Punisher's Molotov Cocktail (notice a pattern there? ), IM40's Unibeam and Ballistic Salvo are kinda neat too, I like how Venom leaps at the screen for Devour, and I like Daken's Chemical Reaction leap too (for 2* baby brother version see comment above).
I also like the new designs for the cover token pages (you know what I mean... hopefully), and that characters appear while the game is loading.

I appreciate that the characters are drawn more realistically than they are drawn in comic books normally. The costumes, of course, are comic book costumes mostly (which makes especially the women's outfits kinda ridiculous frequently ), but the characters aren't as "cartoony" as they might have been and I like that.
(Before someone takes offence: No, I'm not insulting any comic book artist. I'm just stating my opinion on what please my sense of aesthetics.)

Spoit

Still not a huge fan of the disco ball. Especially now that the TUs are a similar color and shape

TazFTW

Jdberia wrote:

The in-match graphic for Captain Marvel is hideous.

Yeah, I'm not too fond of Beast's in-match either. But I do like his standing on one leg pose.

Nonce Equitaur 2

For the first part, for the most part, I think the art is excellent.
Some of the animations get on my nerves, such as Loki's Illusion power.

I was actually going to work on images for the user interface this weekend to show how it could be improved.

There are many great UI suggestions in Suggestions, and I suppose I could collect them up if necessary. I suggest several of them in the grand plan and tedious abilities.

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When a character is chosen to activate a power, there is a heads-up display showing the 2 or 3 powers.

For example, clicking on Patch's icon brings up Berserker Rage, Best There Is, and Healing Factor, with full text of the ability. In Best There Is, there could be text like
"27 tiles bear his icon. 27x237=6399"

An additional box full of info could be shown when the heads-up display is brought up.

Board Status
8/9/10/10/7/09/11


[Red] Strongest enemy color

Team ............. Enemy ............. Total effect
[Strike] +134 .... [Protect] -47 ...... enemy takes +87 damage
[Protect] +80 ... [Strike] -47 ........ team takes +33 damage

Countdowns/Attack tiles/Impending Enemy
[2] Pistol -- Maggia Thug 356 + 33 = 389
[1] Flame Jet -- (Unowned) 945 + 33 = 978
[Attack] (4 tiles) 245 + 33 = 278
[!] Thunderclap ready 967 + 33 = 1000

"27 tiles bear his icon. 27x237=6399" would become
"27 tiles bear his icon. 27x237 + [Strike] 134 - [Protect] 47 = 6486"

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For the screen

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FORM A TEAM OF FEATURED CHARACTERS
CHOOSE YOUR HEROES

The character icons should have power color flags just as in the Roster, but smaller. Even I have trouble quickly remembering the power colors when I'm in a hurry.

In this screen, each character's tile icon should be shown above the hero. Above the Fight button and in line with Train / Info should be a row of color tiles, each covered with the icon of the controlling character.

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For the Raise Level stats screen in the Roster
A level-shifting button would still be very helpful. Here's what you said about it.

IceIX wrote:

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

The comment on OBW's tile match damage does bring up the issue of level-specing. Many people have their characters carefully leveled so that they'll tank for each other in a particularly way.

Easiest fix -- some sort of mechanism for putting a character at a lower level. For example, I might want to drop my Hood eight levels for awhile. On the character screen showing the stat block, there could be a "-1" and "+1" button, with the "+1" button initially grayed out. If they press "-1", then the "+1" button is activated, along with "1 available level", which would increment each time "-1" was pressed.

Ideally, we want players to always level characters to max level. What you're talking about would definitely work, but it would also be yet another UI element that would be very potentially confusing for players when only a very small minority of users would actually make real use of it.

Hulk, Colossus, and Captain Marvel all need to be in front for their powers to work. Patch needs to control tiles. Character level control is getting more and more important. Many people had Patch optimized before Level Shifting, and their careful character leveling was ruined by the level shift. There was a lot of discussion on this.


This is all a wall of text, though. I want to make images, but that will take a few hours.
The above UI post could look vastly better if game icons were in the forum.

OnesOwnGrief

Personally? >.> Every piece of Invisible Woman art, all of it, Is bad to look at. Also, Beast pose in battle is pretty terrible as well. I actually like his Mutagen Mutation art more so than most in the game. Was also mentioned before on the forums of the placement of Daken's claws being incorrect during Chemical Reaction. The facial expression for Trickery also feels off to me, too. The art on the left side of of the current PvP fits it more. Those are my only main gripes in terms of art besides that not being Iron Man's Model 40 armor (nobody seems to care).

The rest of the art in the game I think is quite good considering you don't get much 2 art in Marvel games. My favorites being the art for Falcon and Deadpool. I also like the art for the goons too, especially the Maggia Hitman. What I'm most curious about are the art assets in the game that aren't tied to actual skills. Some of those are quite good but only appear on the cover pack screen or background art of PvP events.

IceIX

Jdberia wrote:

The in-match graphic for Captain Marvel is hideous.

I'm assuming then, that you're not going to be a fan of this one:

IceIX

OnesOwnGrief wrote:

The rest of the art in the game I think is quite good considering you don't get much 2 art in Marvel games. My favorites being the art for Falcon and Deadpool. I also like the art for the goons too, especially the Maggia Hitman. What I'm most curious about are the art assets in the game that aren't tied to actual skills. Some of those are quite good but only appear on the cover pack screen or background art of PvP events.

Erg, yeah. Like She-Hulk's normal pink skinned human form. Love to have that used elsewhere.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

Jdberia wrote:

The in-match graphic for Captain Marvel is hideous.

I'm assuming then, that you're not going to be a fan of this one:

Looks like she is battling that dread force commonly known as constipation...

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

Jdberia wrote:

The in-match graphic for Captain Marvel is hideous.

I'm assuming then, that you're not going to be a fan of this one:

Are we getting a 2* Warbird, then?

And that is the worst facial expression in the whole game.

IceIX

Ben Grimm wrote:

And that is the worst facial expression in the whole game.

She didn't always used to be that angry. Here's an older unused version.

Houtro

IceIX wrote:

She didn't always used to be that angry. Here's an older unused version.

I like this one... More friendly!

IamTheDanger

For me, my most favorite is Psylocke. Dont matter which power animation, as long as i get to see her tan legs and long dark hair.
Also, you got to admit, OBW is super hot in the fishnets. And Captain Marvel's red animation is pretty cool to watch.

As for males, I'd go with Fury's purple ability animation.

Then there is the Punisher Retribution, and another personal favorite, Xforce, (as seen in my sig pic)

Sgt. JJ

wish list art; Psylocke firing Punisher rifle and rocket launcher .


P.S. I mean no offense to anyone, male or female, with the comments above. They are not serious or true comments, except the ones that are.

HailMary

I adore Big Torch's power animations. They're simply gorgeous. The animations for all three Ares powers, Hulk TClap, and Rogers' shield powers are great, too. CMag's understated MagTrans/New MagProj tile-swap clack is sweet.

On the flip side, Sentry, Marv, and UDaken's in-fight scowl-faces are... unhawt. Also, I've always been a tad bothered by the seeming crudeness of Thor's CTS animation: MMight & Thunder Strike have cool animations, but CTS frankly looks like someone found Powerpoint clip art of a shield and hammer and stuck it on the screen in front of a stormy GIF. CTS is his game-ending power. It should have an animation at least as fancy as his red and yellow -- ideally, as fancy as Torch's Fireball.

UI-wise, as someone who gets graphical lag on his MPQ device pretty regularly, I don't like the fact that submenus (e.g. Cover Cache) and event screens (e.g. PVP node-selection screen) are literally overlaid on top of their parent menus, and require rendering the underlying, unseen windows first. That seems... very resource-wasteful. Also, in the mobile in-fight UI, is there a reason for the topmost power-AP bar (next to a char's symbol) always corresponding to the bottom power in the pop-up ability-selection wheel, and vice versa? That's always seemed weird to me.

Unknown

(Made an account just to comment on this!)
I really like the character art for Psylocke, and the art for her red and black powers. (Not so much for her blue though...) I also really like all of the art for Thor, and the art for Captain Marvel's black. And, as ridiculous as it is, for some reason I like Sentry's model pose. Storm's art in general is great too, and 3* Human Torch's.
Don't really like Invisible Woman's character art, or She-Hulk's. The proportions seem to be off... And I'm not a fan of Captain Marvel's action pose, though I think Moonstone's is good.

I'm kind of disappointed they went with Carol Danvers Ms. Marvel, I was hoping for Kamala Khan.

Edit: That unused one is WAY better than the one they went with.

Unknown

Houtro wrote:

IceIX wrote:

She didn't always used to be that angry. Here's an older unused version.

I like this one... More friendly!

Agreed. It looks less like she walked in on her roommates doing something.

Kelbris

Can we just get rid of every single flashy overlay on animations? The flash on tile destruction, the electricity around powers in the power wheel, etc

It wouldn't change the speed of the game and they just contribute to lag. even an option to disable them would be great. it would be the closest thing to what I used to do back in the day when I had my **** computer playing flash animation games where I could turn quality to low without making it a mandatory option to keep up with players that turn it off

Might help with MPQ's abnormally large battery drain.my Battery Doctor app always says that MPQ is draining the battery fast, especially when my phone is idling

Kelbris

IceIX wrote:

Ben Grimm wrote:

And that is the worst facial expression in the whole game.

She didn't always used to be that angry. Here's an older unused version.

can't tell if about to go super saiyan or getting ready to poop

Please be the first one