Ashes Terrain Topography and Cohesion

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I enjoy this kind of thing a lot, grassy/flowery fields with vegetation that isn't overly flat or bland looking. The pictures below are from the Nesting Grounds in Throne and Liberty, it's filled with rivers and flowers and the excessive flatness of the area is contrasted by a few giant rocky bird nests and by the observatory ruins overlooking the area from high above. It's these contrasts and the beauty of the vegetation that make it notable to me.



I also enjoy stuff like FFXI's Uleguerand Range. It is a mountainous snowy biome and the reason it's memorable is because of the difficulty in traversing it combined with the beauty. Scattered through the entire range there are crevasses that you might fall into, leading through complex frozen cave systems with difficult enemies. The climb to the top of the Range is long and difficult, but also marked by beautiful views due to the height. Reaching the top lets you then slide down a snowy slope in order to reach a particular cave you can't get to any other way. If you fail to glide the right way, you need to restart the climb.


The Yuhtunga Jungle in FFXI was also memorable. When maps used to be unlocked via quests only, that area was really difficult to navigate by just walking through, because it's an actual labyrinth. I ended up writing a journal with the attempted routes until I mapped out a successful route through. I'll always remember it because no other area in any MMO made me feel as a cartographer/explorer in quite the same way.

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A mix of both, please. I enjoy large dramatic features like magic obelisks, tower ruins and so on, as long as they overlook terrain which is beautiful in its own right and as long as I can walk around and discover small details. I'm generally afraid devs will either overdo it with the dramatic or put so much thought into the subtle exploration that they forget to make screenshot worthy vistas.

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I like the concept of terrain that changes with the weather/tides. Tidal flooding changing your pathways through an area for example. Day/night cycles changing the way you approach areas (ffxi has undead spawn at night, TL turns some areas into pvp at night etc). Mob tribes fighting each other in certain conditions and you adapting to them being distracted. Volcanic erruptions being both an obstacle and a source of minerals. Sudden weather changes meaning some resource/mob spawns that is suddenly more profitable than what you were doing, meaning you have to think on your feet and act fast to make a good profit.

Ok but please remember that Chrono Odyssey is basically an Action Combat game and therefore uses that style of Camera for a lot of the screenshots you would see.

There's a meaningful difference in how good a world can look when it's designed to be seen from that view, compared to Ashes which will often be played from max zoom overhead. Ashes is 'better off' being designed visually like an isometric game.

Short version, if you're almost never looking at the horizon or seeing the sky in-game, it will always look and feel very different even with similar models.

(not the forests thing, though, that mostly comes from the tree design being used right now, but they've said they will update the Jundark ones)

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I'm saying that the reason the models and scale look like that, is because of artists designing a world that is 'meant to be played at max zoom'.

We had a whole discussion years ago about this even in Alpha-1, but in the end, being zoomed out a lot is Steven's preference, so people ended up just assuming that we have to live with it, in the end.

Anyway, my point is that Chrono gets to look 'better' because it isn't visually designed for 'max zoom compatibility'. Same for New World. We know this because we've seen showcases where Ashes looks good in scale (first Ranger showcase) and then even within the same showcase it looked different (I think from someone else's screen, zoomed out, with the performance settings adjusted to handle that zoom level).