During our pre-alpha we received a lot of feedback regarding our aesthetics. Players absolutely loved our environments and characters, but on more than one occasion we heard from people playing at high resolutions that we really needed to up the level of detail.

So to remedy this our artist Jove has been working insanely hard upgrading all of our environments and characters to a much higher detail level. The amount of time he’s put into working on this update is absolutely staggering, I am extremely thankful because the results are absolutely amazing!

Here we’re showing the Aduro race, which is nearly complete, in order to let you see the changes that we’re making across the board to all characters. Not only is Jove using higher detail textures, but he has been upgrading entire models along with their stances and animations.

During this process we realized that there was somewhat of a gender imbalance, which for whatever reason hadn’t been noticed in the past, and so we wanted to correct it at this stage. While it meant that Jove had to go back to the drawing board and completely rework some characters, we knew it would definitely be worth it, and would enhance the setting of the overall game world.

This was a great process to go through as it really sparked our brains and we went back to the drawing board on various lore and campaign story components. For example the change to the Inquisitor actually triggered a huge rewrite in the Aduro v. Shade arc in the campaign, and it is now ten times more interesting in comparison to what we had originally started with.

Of course along with the characters we’ve also had all of the environmental art and effects done in higher detail as well, and that process has already been completed. We still have a few more months ahead of us until all of the characters have been completed, and on top of that we’ve been working on a complete UI overhaul that we’d like to have ready for our next build.

Expect a follow up post once we’re ready to show all of the new art in action! So make sure to follow us on twitter, and like us on facebook, as we’ll be releasing new screenshots, videos, and info on Empyrios. We not only welcome all feedback but actively encourage it, so tell us what you think!