Beauty is really something that distinguished even the early Anno titles (Anno 1602 and Anno 1503) from other similar games like "The Settlers" or even "Age of Empires". I remember that playing these games was just so <i>nice</i>... lush green landscapes, beautiful cities full of half-timbered and renaissance houses, palaces, ships in full sail on a blue ocean. It was also the first time I really came into contact with classical music as a kid.<p><a href="https://store.ubisoft.com/on/demandware.static/-/Sites-masterCatalog/default/dw5dae4c49/images/large/5ebc1bc50d253c2420445272-2.png" rel="nofollow">https://store.ubisoft.com/on/demandware.static/-/Sites-maste...</a><p><a href="https://www.gamesaktuell.de/screenshots/1280x/2002/10/adel.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.gamesaktuell.de/screenshots/1280x/2002/10/adel.j...</a>
Something is off with the specified directions:<p>> The sun keeps a position relative to the camera and thus the shadows always fall from left to right:<p>The video shows shadows fall from right to left.<p>> One can get into the unfortunate situation where the camera is positioned so that the sun casts shadows behind the camera.<p>The video shows no shadows because they are behind the things that are casting the shadow. There would be no shadows behind the camera.<p>Is this seemingly reversed notion of "casting" common?
This also happens in real life on the equator when the sun is at just the right point in the sky ordinary objects look like bad rendered cgi <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahaina_Noon" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahaina_Noon</a>
Just started playing the game a few weeks ago. It's very pretty.<p>From a game perspective it can seem pretty simplistic at first but there are a lot of interesting systems with hidden depth
In my own personal 3D game project I did the same thing, and then thought it seemed strange so I changed it back. Now I wonder if I have experienced this many times before in games and just never noticed it, and it only seemed strange in my own project because I was hyper-aware of it.
I actually thought this was a "bug" with the renderer, feel silly now realising it's a feature, a great one at that, now it's been pointed out! very cool. Anyone wondering if worth some play time, it definately is!
Played Anno 1800 a couple years ago, good game and pretty.<p>But the original Anno 1602 still wins in the looks and style department. As most 2.5D isometric games do..
I hate the "3D" in many video games, in particular in strategy games. Beauty is appreciated everywhere, but for me the most important part is the gameplay loop/mechanics, however you call it. In a (real) strategy game that's decision making. You're reading the map of sorts, and come up with a strategy based on what you see. This 'parsing' of the map is a crucial element, and in particular an element I don't want to be challenging. That is, I'm not a fan of "find hidden objects" genre. I want the map to be very clear, with important elements easy to spot. Well, all elements involved in game mechanics easy to spot, as it should be me who decides which is important.<p>And here comes the problem with 3D: The more advanced a 3D engine, the more varying looks of the same object (e.g. metamerism): The object can be occluded (happens in 2D to a very limited degree), it can be lit at various angle by Sun (various angle if the Sun moves) and other light sources, it may have reflections, there may be a perpective distortion, and maybe some more.<p>All this means that a particular element can't be easily recognized, because there's no particular look that your mind may look for. It's just less readable. Imagine a strategy game, where you don't control your mouse cursor directly, but it's attached to a string to the real cursor, and swings all around as you try to click things. Interesting gameplay? Maybe, but not what I'm looking for when playing strategy games.