I knew it!!! Mucha is the bomb. His style is the primary inspiration for interior of a jazz bar I'll be opening next year.

You simply can't go wrong with those styles if mixed properly.

Also I'm sorry for the miscommunication. When I typed "vanished" I did not mean to imply that my posts were getting deleted but that the discussion about the art in the thread simply stopped. I was starting to get a complex. About the critics, personally speaking I think a lot of people that are bitching about the style, don’t have a fully developed, if any (to be honest), artistic sense and appreciation of the many historical elements being drawn from for this title.

Note: I'm not slamming peoples taste but merely trying to point out that there is far more to this art direction than the average youthful or pure video gamer will likely associate with.

BTW: I cant wait for the journal!

Delete me - Internet burp.

I don't particularly like the art. I think it makes the terrain look empty or sparce but that could be related to earliness in the game development cycle. It does remind me a bit of Wind Waker or Super Mario Bros. No offence intended.

Maybe the terrain looks a bit sparse, assassin, but at least you won't need 10 years of gameplay experiance to recognize "ooh, that plains tile has something 'extra' on it!   Oh, that's just hills tile?  I thought that texture meant it had some kind of special..."  (Currently driving me nuts in Civ4, yeah)

I was just talking about general aspect and the art choices like the black border and the choice of palette.

They said they'll raise the level of details. So i'm almost sure they will fill the map with lots of nice things without the civ4 effect (like said Ron)

Please draw as much as possible on Mucha - I love this style and it works so well with fantasy.

Another inspiration I would love (and think I can sense in e.g. the cover art) is Larry Elmore (illustrator of a lot of Dragonlance and D&D stuff, especially dragons). He is awesome, especially for the background environments. For the environment you could definataley draw on this.

The only true obejction I have to the art right now is the foliage. It looks like it was done in paint, with the exception of the pine trees (my apologies to whoever spent their time making it). Same thing with the rocks and boulders. They look incredbily flat and two dimensional, with little tecture. However, as it is early in development, and I have not even seen the game in motion, I can't say any of this for sure.

Yeah Elmore is good. He does remind me of Boris a little too much however. On Mucha we both agree for sure.

I'm excited about the art too.  It's great to see something different for a change.  Besides, has no one seen the success of TF2?  Not to mention the forthcoming Battlefield Heroes.  These games are not realistic graphical representations but more stylistic, and they still utilize the full effects of modern tech.  It's similar to the way Van Helsing had a B&W intro with CGI.  I thought that was pretty sweet.  Plus, the added benefit of being able to run on a wide range of PCs.  Besides, if the gameplay is good enough, the graphics don't need to be at Crysis levels.  Stardock knows this because of GalCiv2's great success.

I think the art was a good idea in concept but hasn't panned out.  Yes graphics don't equal good gameplay but the current set of graphics is too cartoony to allow immersion...

I look at the trees and hills of the game and think it looks like 90's freeware.

I was going to ask how did MoM improve immersion with those 2D graphics... (or any other game of that time) But you say something about "90's freeware" so i won't bother.

In any case, i tought that inmersion was always a matter of gameplay first, graphics second. Also, art is something personal, the game is still in an early stage, and i still think that MoM's immersion factor was quite good despite 2D graphics (that i love).

And more importantly: no matter which style of graphics they decide to use, they won't be able to please everybody. Just let hope that they use well the style they decided to use.

One thing I am reminded of when reading this thread again is Half-Life, where they used the introduction of HDR to create a sort of strange glow in the sky, which didn't look like any natural colour. I am hopeful that, what with the capabilities of modern graphics technology, plus a bit of artistic creativity, Elemental will show us some things that are really unearthly.

I assume most of you here will have seen Demigod, at least some screenshots. Demigod is a beautiful game, it's also very weird, and it has an astonishing sense of magnitude (which may or may not be appropriate for Elemental). I hope Stardock are taking notes from GPG's art team.

Yeah I love TF2, I really think its art is wonderful and I'm delighted that Elemental is going in a similar direction. I think we're in a really weird little trough in terms of the technological limits of potential graphical fidelity at the moment where you can get very close to having things look totally realistic, but if they don't perfectly match up to reality they end up being very weird and unsettling to look at (this is sometimes known as the "uncanny valley) Thus if you instead create something that doesn't try to ape reality it can still be beautiful in and of itself but avoid the dangers of just missing out.

This also has implications for how things age over time as if you're trying, and failing, to achieve photorealism then future games will obviously get closer to achieving that with the improved technology available to them and thus make your game look dated. If on the other hand you're creating something more stylised then it can be "perfect" in and of itself as there's no ideal (reality) to compare it to which it can be said to be falling short of. An example of this would be how, even though someone mentioned it derogatorily above, in my opinion Wind Waker (out in 2002) still looks beautiful and pristine whereas something like Morrowind (also out in 2002) which had a more realistic (even though it's obviously in a fantasy setting) graphical style now looks very dated and shabby. This could prove important as if Elemental turns out to be on a par with MoM then I like the idea that it will still look good when I'm playing it 15 years in the future

its true.  Stylized art ages much better than 'realistic' art.  I forsee more games going that route in the future as our graphics continue to improve.  Because there will come a day that nobody will be able to achieve the highest end of 'realistic' graphics available to the gaming market, so few will try.

For anyone interested I spent a lot of time finding the following cornucopia of images from the bye gone era. If you are interested in see some rather high resolution scans of all the greats and many forgotten fantasy artists then go here.

@SD - I think the site is perfectly legal in its host country but it would clearly be shut down in the USA. If you don’t think the link is proper then do your thing.