Guild Wars 2 Intro to Environmental Art

As I'm a big MMORPG player, relatively I check out www.mmorpg.com and can find some nice information such as this. I'm looking forward to Guild Wars 2 as well as most of the the MMORPG community as it's practically the next MMORPG we're looking forward to next. Well anyway, Peter Fries wrote this article, who is an environment artist who helped work on the expansions, Factions, Nightfall, and Eye of the North. In the article Peter Fries speaks in depth about creating the environments himself and other artists as well. He explains the time and efforts put into it to make the player experience better regardless if it requires redoing a whole area over from scratch. Read a bit below:

"The list of considerations that an environment artist has is very long. Building a game environment involves technical concerns, like the impact of polygon density on display frame rates, collision mistakes that unintentionally trap players, and the idea that even the darkest place needs to look good in variable lighting. Our amazing internal technology and tool developers continually deepen the parameters available, from the motion of particle fields to perturbation patterns in the surfaces of water bodies. As the technology of the game improves, prop and map artists are constantly revisiting older assets to improve those as well.

I can think of no greater challenge our environment artists have than trying to live up to the vision of the studio’s amazing concept art team. Imagine being expected to actually build the incredible things that our art director Daniel Dociu comes up with, while he stands right behind you watching. Daniel doesn’t want to hear about your technical limitations, he wants to know why stray sprigs of grass aren’t breaking up the harsh line where a building’s façade meets the ground, or why rust hasn’t stained the masonry underneath that downspout. You know you’re in for it when Daniel starts furiously sketching on a stray napkin from your desk to illustrate his point!"

To read more go to the Guild Wars 2 blog here!