Not a fan of the Art Direction of the Races so far

Hey there!

My wife and I are EQ veterans and absolutely adore the original lore and world that was set up by the original team. We also really loved the original game and are definitely part of the playerbase that is looking for a social, old-school MMO that Pantheon wants to nail and are both preordering & supporting development. However, there's one aspect we both are really disappointed in and I'm hoping to see improvement here.

The races. All of them are just so ... meh? Ogres don't have the same appeal as orcs do, they're just big, ugly humans it feels like, the Archai are like reskinned elves, humans are humans.

The two Elf types don't seem to have much of a difference to them (as opposed to the great Koada'Dal/Teir'Dal schism that was so important to EQ), Gnomes are interesting but could've been given a new name since they're not like archetypical gnomes at all.

Dwarves are promising but for some reason are blue and have very marvel supersuit-esque outfits and are calm as opposed to the classical passionate dwarves everyone loves. The halflings are promising, though they feel a bit more like wood elves with their aesthetic than halflings, but fine.

And finally the Skar - we were sceptical of their original designs but wanted to wait for the ingame model (those backwards knees were cool!) but their redesign is even worse, they just look like hobgoblins now and not even an "ugly beauty" to them.

So far the Dark Myr and the Halflings seem to be the most promising design-wise (that underwater form of the Myr is very ambitious and we love it)

I realise this comes across as some rant but we really want this game to succeed and I feel like the art direction is making the mistake of trying to change every race to be different just to be different from what people are familiar with, which I'd like to argue is not always a good thing.

Can't we have more beast-like races (like the Kerran or Iksar)? Could we have more classical races? Maybe some Barbarians or normal dwarves?

Would love to hear what other fans have to say - do you like the art direction so far? Would you like to see different stuff? Which race design do you like, which one not so much?

Submitted September 13, 2018 at 12:13AM by DeafNoEyes https://ift.tt/2xcU39s