Am I the only one who feels concerned about the art direction?
I don't know if some of you had the same reflexion, but if I was living in a cavern and a friend had showed me images of the trailer and concept arts of GW3 without telling me what game it was, I would have never guessed... and it's quite concerning!
I've been a player of both previous games for years. GW1 is one of my top favourite games of all time. I never thought GW2 not to be true visually to the soul of the franchise even though it has different art approach: it still has all the main ingredients of a GW game.
The little we know about the lore sounds cool and interesting, but I really don't like what I'm seeing... The trailer and the character concept arts scream Overwatch or Fornite to me... not Guild Wars.
It makes me more and more concerned that they are shifting away from their original artistic identity (classical heroic / epic fantasy, with a subtle painterly look), to go for a more cartoonish action/motion-oriented style but less realistic and mature.
It's particularly visible in faces we've seen in the last post. I don't now if it's the artist style or a more assumed direction, but they look like a lot what we can see in the fore-mentioned games. Same with the trailer: the character proportion look unrealistic, the materials all look plastic / clay-modeled (especially the armor and the mount), and the fact that it's in UE5 don't help differienciate the render to other recent games.
Also, the environments: I cannot leave out the fact that they just look like Kena: Bridge of Spirit to me... Same fairytale vibe, bright, colorful ghibli-esque or zelda-like environments, with strong atmospheric effects and coloration, and half-stylised half-simplified flora and architectures. We are very far away from the more grounded, somewhat realistic, mature, and sometimes deeply melancholic environments of GW1 and GW2.
I could say way more things about this topic but I don't want my post to be too long. I would be really happy to see your take on it!
