Recent card's premium animations are ugly.

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There is an inconsistency in the quality of premium cards, but it's not something recent. It has been going on since the beginning. Some cards just look better. For example, Olgierd: Immortal looks fantastic and that one was added in the most recent patch.
 
Some premiums are worse then other, that's true. But then that's always been the case. That said i do think they have gotten a bit worse recently, possibly because of struggling to meet the deadline of one expansion so soon after another.

However let's put this in context. Gwent is to my knowledge the only one out of the main TCG games that has moving pictures as premiums at all. And frankly the absolute worst animated card is better than a hearthstone "premium" card that just has a gold frame and that at some point you might have to mill just to be able to craft a card you need for your deck (because their card crafting is so very very horrible and greedy)

PS. It annoys me that the Free Company Knife Juggler throws her knives but doesn't catch them.
 

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When special cards like Winch are boring I get it, it's hard to make something compelling out of these concepts plus they're cards that go into the graveyard immediately anyway, but stuff like the new Zoltan and the other gold dwarf cards are definitely dissapointing.
 
The premiums that barely move are the ones that disappoint me. I don't see a point in making something premium if it resembles it's non premium counterpart.
Well, it's not a criteria for me personally, as long as a movie card looks good I don't mind.
I prefere a well animated barely moving card than one that's poorly done but moves a lot.

Having said that, I understand what you mean but often times the lighting looks much better on the movie version so it still feel like an improvement to me.

I agree that animated cards aren't always well done, in fact some of them hurt my eyes quiet a bit (no offense to CDPR designers, I mean, it must be incredibly hard to do, you can't have 1oo% success on that kind of thing and a lot of them are outstanding).
The usual suspect for bad animation being hairs, it must be insanely hard to do them properly because they ruin the art quiet consistently (Priscilla, Yen conjurer ect).


Now, to be honest, it's not the end of the world. In fact it's sometimes an advantage to have a poorly animated card in the pack because I can just be "Okay, I'm gonna keep my ressources and play the original version".

I'm a drawer in the first place so I don't mind playing non movie cards if they look better than their animated counter part and my OCD is not serious enough to make me feel bad about playing a deck that's not solely made of movie cards.

The cases that hurt the most, however are cards that would look fantastic if only they haven't that little detail that ruins everything. The best example I can find is Vivienne Oriole. The art is amazing and the movie version has everything to look even better but her arm and hairs (yup...again) look so fake that it ruins the entire thing for me personally.
 
I was wondering about that too. I'm playing Nilfgaard exclusively and was super excited to see the Ard Feainn Heavy Cavalry and Tortoise be animated as I pulled them as Premiums before. While the Tortoise is "OK", it bothers me that it doesn't resemble the original art of the card (the standard card has a pose that the animated version simply does not have).
The Heavy Cavalry is simply ugly, very low-res, I actually had to go and check my settings and my other premiums because I thought I changed the graphics quality.

I was curious if this is something recent, but judging by this topic, there are always 'sour grapes' in every expansion. It's a shame, because my starter and base set premiums are freaking amazing!
 
"Movie cards" were amazing. It's an important factor in my love for the game ( + the witcher's lore ofc), as I big cards game player. So I try to transmute all the cards that I play.

Latest extension's animated illustrations are lower quality I guess. Not all, but just see Percival Schuttenbach who lost 50% of his details :disapprove:. That's too bad, especialy because of meteorit's price.

Not all cards are easy to animated I guess, and that is definitly not an easy job.
I won't stop to play because that, but I hope they will improve the quality. Shiny cards are important :cool:
 
Art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. You're always going to have someone who likes what they see and you're always going to have someone who does not like what they see.
 
I would be careful with the beholder argument. It can be leveraged to say that anything is true even if it's clear that it is objectively false.
Back to the movie cards though - i think the best ones are those which set up a nice scene or have a bit of character. For me it's quality over quantity so as long as the animation does the job well it doesn't even need to move a lot. For example one of my favourites is the scoiatel smuggler, the one that rides a boat underneath a bridge. That one makes do with just a small movement and a nice bit of voice acting.
 
Overall quality fell consistently expansion after expansion. The last cards have a definition and work much lower than the first, possibly because of the cutting of the Gwent working group, fewer people should do the same as before in the same period of time.

Something that I have noticed in this last expansion is that there are many illustrations blurred and with excessive shadows, facilitating the conclusion of the work by omission of details.

The 3 legendary dwarves that form a single image are practically black and white with only an initial layer of color above the base shading. If they were bronze, it wouldn't be too bad, but for Gold cards it leaves a lot to be desired.

My favorite of that set is Iris, even though the excess of shadow and lack of detail leave it well below its counterpart in the classic set which seems to me a beautiful card, both in art and in the execution of the animation (which I think they can be quite simple if they manage to maintain the essence of the card).

CC has a lot of great art, SYxp has some bad ones but some great ones, this last has a lot of bad ones and very few great ones.

I am comparing under a Gwent-Gwent standard, without needing to take any other game as an example, they are simply not being able to follow their same steps.

I hope that the future direction reflects a more finished work and less notoriety of the lack of time that the artists are having.
And stop taking expansions of thieves and grimy humanoids, they already bore me with that.


Art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Tell that to Betsy, she sure is horrible even for her mom.
The art look unfinished and the animation rushed. The effect is just a powwercreeped Ifrit. All bad with Betsy.
 
But yeah i think we can objectively say that the artists are struggling to produce the images on time and up to the previous standards. And that's fair enough. I mean these are high standards that Gwent has set for itself.
Consider that all or most of the artwork on these cards presents unique and realistic human or humanoid characters. In quite some detail.
And then consider the other card games on the market. Magic the gathering arena uses images which were already made for the physical cards and those come out maybe three times a year. Hearthstone doesn't care about card esthetics at all.
In HS one dwarf is the same as any other dwarves. I wouldn't be surprised if they copy pasted the beards on from the same copy paste file. And they are the market titan atm with by far the most resources they can use.
I hope that the developers of Gwent keep this in mind and press the advantage they have with the look of the game and the cards. And that they either adjust their expansion tempo to the forces they have or expand those forces to match the tempo properly.
 
Art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. You're always going to have someone who likes what they see and you're always going to have someone who does not like what they see.

In certain cases, this might be true, however things like pixelated, low quality textures are not 'artistic choices', they are subpar animations when compared to other cards. I have no issues with the movement itself, but the resolution/quality of the image has to be improved a lot to match earlier cards.
 
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