Elemental: EARLY test of the engine

Already looks good to me  

Still hard to see exactly how it all works, but we will see eventually.

Wow, I really like the game's art direction. And it's only going to get better? Yay.

Do I understand that the farms will be inside city walls?

That would be strange...

WOW! Awesome! I have alot more faith in the art direction now. Keep up the good work!

Ooooooow nice Looks very different to the other screenshot where the town/city looked like one big castle; diversity is good

do we get a 'classic' setting where it looks like that?

I'm shocked at how much emphisis there is put on "early"   I mean it doesn't look that different from the other screens we have.  It doesn't look bad.

Thanks Frogboy! I think it looks great! Enough eye-candy, tell us about the Magic System!

Brilliant stuff. Now show us those same buildings on fire!

You know you want to

If you're referring to the black outline graphics being placeholders, I actually like them.  They remind me of Inkscape art.  Though they're missing a little "verve" or some spark to draw everything together, I like it a lot.

Hey that's not half bad if the final version has more detail and clarity then that it should be damn good. 

Excellent stuff for an alpha render. For my old fogy tastes this stuff is just fine as far as I'm concerned as long as the game play mechanics are topnotch - which I'm sure they will be given SD track record.

Just a bit more detail to the ground itself, and I'd be quite happy with the look.

Is that a person in there?

Looks pretty good already as everyone has said. I like the way the shape of the walls isn't just square - it gives the settlement character.

Your art style for Elemental is the single best art style I've seen since TF2. Can't wait to see what it looks like in the final form.

Would be possible to get that pic to 1280x1024, Frogboy? I really like it.

I don't think it's diversity; it's probably the "zoom out/zoom in" detail changes. When you're out on the cloth map, it's just a castle showing the location (and maybe relative size). Then you zoom in and see that

And I'm with everyone else - no need for "early" disclaimers, I really like that art!

I'm not going to say anything about overall graphics, since I figure I'm to biased to do that (if Stardock showed anything above pong graphics I would probably say they are great)... But as far as specifics, I see the 'cotton candy' trees people were complaining about are gone and replaced with more detailed versions. Also, are the objects in the bottom left corner (rocks I think) tilted? If not it appears some of their shadows are going at the wrong angle... Unless of course there are multiple suns?

@Ephafn, Why is it weird to have farms inside the walls? Minas Tirith had the wall which fenced off the Pelenor Fields. And in an old game I have, 'Stronghold 2,' I always built my farms in walls to keep them from being pillaged and burned by every passing armed peasant...

Man, that looks great. I've got a hard time imagening how you're going to make that look BETTER without ruining the impression!

Like it.

Agree with earlier post about the shadow angles (multiple light sources?).

Most medieval cities had the fields outside. However, there were exceptions.

My main interest will be the flexibility of the building customisation (can we have buildings made of crystal / flesh / mud / trees) ?

Are all these buildings customised then?

It quickly becomes extremely inefficient to grow but a handfull of crops inside the city walls. Now if you add more "modern" inventions such as irrigation and crop rotation, it quickly starts to be a huge waste of space. In "reality", a random armed peasant isn't going to spoil your crops. If it's a high-risk area, it's much easier to have one-two men guarding the fields than to build a mote and wall around it.

Really, have you ever tried to spoil a field of crops? Trust me, if you take a sword and whack at it, there's not much that is going to happen. And if you're going to try to light it on fire on a hot summer's night, good luck hiding that torch of your in a world that's not a light-polluted hell-hole (like ours).

Edit: That the worst thing we have to complain about is the placement of a crop field, I think that Brad and the others can rest assured that they're doing a great job. It's like balance issues in World of Warcraft. When everyone is whining about how underpowered they are, there is balance. When one side starts whining about their icons, they are clearly overpowered.

Hmmmm...

I only have one gripe. The black egdes around every object makes it look a tad bitmappy, or maybe like stickers on a frigde.

The french diablo clone silver fall had the same cartoonish effect but to me it seemed like all objects where sort of not part of the enviroment.

Man I keep looking at this picture, and I get all giddy. That looks absolutely perfect. Absolutely gorgeous. A small gripe is the trees, now that I look on them. They look a bit pastel-ish and not at all like the rest of the art. But man, I love it, I love it, I love it.

I love the screenie too!  My only concern is if it will be nice and 3 dimensional.  As it stands, it looks a bit Paper Mario-ish.

Great work DEVs. Thanks for the glimpse!

Personally, I like the look of the trees.

Looking forward to more treats.

Read the disclaimer.  It won't look like that when its released, those are probably just placeholders until they've got the full graphics up and running