I had a closer look at the screenshots (with another 3d modeller friend) and there are some very bad signs.
Look at the closest building.
It's flat, essentially a fake building. Warband had these, but they were confined to the very edges of scenes. Unless this is just a mocked up scene for the blog only, it means this image is just window dressing and doesn't represent what the towns are going to be like up close.
What's more, there isn't enough space between buildings to fit a proper street system (with the exception of a very narrow street leading from the right side of the image to the castle, and they seem placed so that we see the front of them rather than to face the streets they're supposedly on.
The trees are floating throughout the scene, and clipping with the building under the conveniently placed bannerlord logo.
This is a little hard to spot if you're not a 3d modeller, but
the "normals" on the towers are messed up, meaning the lighting is broken. They're messed up in a specific way which can only be present if they've chosen to model the tree trunks at the corner of the tower.
Why they decided to do this is beyond me. It adds nothing to the icon since it's not even a pixel wide, but makes it far higher poly than it needs to be. What's frustrating is that this would be a 2-3 minute fix, and is something 3d artists are trained to spot from day one.
Is this a warband texture? Where's the normalmap, seeing as the warband version didn't have one (or didn't have a good one, iirc?)? Is that warband ivy, too?
Why reuse these textures which clearly aren't designed for PBR?
I love you guys and sorry for the hakarets and başarılar to you all but please guys i mean come on. Kemal would be spinning in his grave (he's a 3d modeller now, i hear)
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The problem with the textures is that they don't have good normalmaps, since they are essentially photographs.
They were included into the game around 10 years ago using graphical techniques that are incompatible with the system they say they're using in bannerlord (PBR). You could get away with not having good normalmaps in 2008, but not in 2018. Even pixel indie platformers are using PBR now. The very presense of this texture is a really bad sign.
A possible explanation somebody pointed out to me is that they're not using PBR for the environments, which would explain why the engine trailer from 3+ years ago looked so much better than this, and why the foliage and landscape in the recent gamescom videos look more or less like warband.
I'd much rather the entire game look outdated than only portions of it. Nothing is worse than artistic inconsistency. Some of those scenes are outright ugly while others are fairly decent. This seems to be an issue with character design too: the artist we heard from last week said she just used random ideas from games and films rather than from actual concept art.
If they have an art director he or she is not doing their job. And if they don't have an art director, especially for a game of this scope, well...GG
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Tesselation doesn't affect lighting and predates PBR by some time. It doesn't actually make scenes more optimised because tesselation can only add geometry, not remove it. As a result it can only be used on a few surfaces where it's really needed, usually oceans and sometimes dirt and rocks. But since the engine trailer
I've seen no evidence of tesselation at all. They've probably ditched it. It has limited uses anyway.
PBR is a rendering technique which makes lighting more consistent. It makes outdoor scenes in particular look a lot more realistic and allows for various lighting conditions in the same instance. There's no real reason not to use it in this day and age and ironically it makes the 3d artist's job a lot easier.
If they're not using PBR for environments I can't imagine why, so it might just be bad lighting.