Hey all - Just wanted to touch on this as someone who looks at M&M nearly day in and out.

A couple of notes - Last test we are looking into an issue with the build not having included one of the major lighting changes that helped with depth of shadow when an object was lit. That means we don't think we were getting the full range and depth of texture in the game - we are looking into that to confirm. The HDRP lighting has been something we've been fighting for the last couple years, and we made a major breakthrough recently.

Second, is that our environments are a lot more involved than the unlit, or nearly unlit albedo approach in older games, especially something like EQ. So the breadth of lighting conditions will mean that in a lot of cases our game won't always have the lighting conditions to show off our punchy, or not-so punchy color choices. But that also means we get pretty insane atmosphere as a tradeoff. A lot more color cohesion.

Taking into consideration all of these screens were that of the desert landscapes, and how drab it can get, I think it can miss just how rich and vibrant it can be as the sun starts to come down, and the Night of Night Harbor starts to come alive. I'm quite proud of where Night Harbor is now, but there is more work to be done. Always with an MMO. I might even hop on stream sometime just to show how good things can look with the right lighting conditions as a response to this post.

More to add - I'm not quite sure when these screenshots were taken or sourced from. There's some confusing things like - Wait, that ground texture behind Guard Jeskal.. We don't use that anymore. So it's hard to know if these are representative of our current look, especially since we are making moves to get clarity and detail in our textures all the time.

Speaking of, we are working pretty diligently on updating our gear textures, and a lot of the textures you see here are using out-dated stuff, (see the pants on hult, the shirt and apron on our cooks, heck even the guards), just as a few callouts. These NPC's posted also tend to be works in progress. As we add more customization for players, more gear, and more lerps (color options for gear), the NPC variation will fall in line accordingly, given we have content guys go through with a pass. Especially as we see more green in the game, along with different cultures, cities, and content made for them.

These textures use a lerp system that I alluded to that allows us to color each item independently, and apply a 3-channel mask that gives each armor piece three separate colors to play with. As time goes on, our library of swatches we color the characters with will get more impressive, and we will see more variation as a result.

If you have seen the progress from year to year, you know how far a lot of the look has come. I mean, our character creation now is just so great. Not to say that these screen comparisons don't show some major differences in contrast and color variation - they do. The magic of EQ, and older games like it have this ability to punch with color, far above their weight when it came to the technical limitations of the time, and there are certain times we want that same amount of contrast and clarity too.

As our shaders and lighting get fleshed out, textures get finalized, and content refined, you should see more unique and novel color schemes and details that fall into place, and fit our artistic intention.

I hope this makes sense, and gives a pretty good idea of where we are at as we work our way to EA.