DQ2 Graphic Change

#1

A quick one:

Why in the name of schwarzenegger did you guys change the graphic style? It was a beautiful 2D/retro/pixelated/perfect graphic in DQ1 and now DQ2 seems like a new flash tower defense like the ones on Kongregate. Ok, it’s up to you to decide, but it didn’t caught me like the first one did. And how dare you guys spit on the plate from which you ate!? By saying the cutscenes will be much better? What is wrong with the original cutscenes? I think they’re amazing! And I am an artist myself, miles away from any of those whom you are working with, but I still am. Anyway, just felt like I should get this out of my chest. I love DQ1 and I’m looking foward to play DQ2 - Don’t Touch My Gems…ops sorry, DQ2 - Mists of Ruin.

*Sorry for poor english

Graciously

Zedopovo

#2

Hey, thanks for sharing your opinions.

We know that anytime we change the art style it’s impossible to please everyone. The main reason we’re moving away from the pixel-art style is because a lot of people are not happy with the game being stuck at an 800x600 resolution. And as detailed in this article, the most common ‘solution’ people propose – “just upscale the pixel art” – is not going to work when the original art was designed for 800x600, because it does not cleanly double or triple to the most common HD resolutions, which means we get ugly blurring. If we wanted to use this method, we would actually have to reduce the game’s resolution. Sticking to the original game’s resolution and art style causes a lot of technical problems that are easily solved if we move to a different style that allows us to cleanly scale assets in non-whole-number ratios.

Just to be clear DQ1HD will retain all of the original graphics from the old version of the game, the player will be able to choose which art style they want to use for both the sprites and the cutscenes individually.

For DQ2, we don’t have the budget to do two different art styles, so we’re making the choice to go with the new one.