are,"Is it cool? Is it engaging?" he says."As simple as it sounds, we constantly ask ourselves these questions. If it isn't, we go a different direction or iterate until it is. We focus on making exciting and dynamic characters and creatures that not only look great, but also expand upon the rich lore of our worlds."
Once Madureira approves a direction then the team creates a tighter production concept, which they create a 3D blockout from ."Animation then looks for potential issues with the design from a rigging and animating perspective, sometimes creating simple animations as part of the test, and then we move to final 3D art; sculpting, textures and materials, and so on," hey says.
"On the flip side our Personas give us the freedom to make cool one-off costumes that aren't limited by the style system. For the creatures and enemies, we've adopted a philosophy that each behavioural and / or combat difference should have a unique visual adjustment. You should be able to know at a glance that an enemy has a unique gameplay experience. This can range from as little as a colour variant to a full new model, animation, VFX and sound.
"All our characters in Wayfinder definitely have the look of our established house style," he says."One major difference is that we feature the characters more prominently, and they are much larger on screen, our past few titles having been isometric with combat mapped to a 2D backdrop. For this reason, the characters we create have to be much higher fidelity, with more complex rigs, facial animations, and so on.
The artist shares how keeping things fresh is the biggest struggle. He needs to consider which tropes to lean into, and which to avoid,"so that our world feels familiar, or immediately relatable but still new and unlike anything you’ve seen in our past games or elsewhere". "This is the first fully PBR project where the camera isn't locked in an isometric angle. It does present new obstacles, but it's also freeing in that we get to put a lot more fidelity into each character.