Changed Barrow-downs - LOTRO artists, just a few words of advice

[TesalionLortus]

Some assets in the Barrow-downs were changed and while I don't mind the devs striving for some improvements if there is a chance, I immediately noticed a problem here that's super apparent IMO. If you change small things such as rocks, smaller parts etc, that's fine, I can get behind some serious alterations, but it would be wise to take proper care of key features.





The key features of Barrow-downs were always these high pillars/rocks looming over every horizon, and now it looks like this:










Which I don't think is nice.

1. They have these terrible brawny lines which make it super apparent it's all the same texture applied on all of these rocks because it's just soooo distinct, thus super obvious and immersion breaking + the lines don't strike me as particularly natural, I can really tell, at the top there, that it's super pixelated because the texture is skewed and the colors make it pop up terribly on this brown line.

2. Second, striving for more natural looking rocks is fine, except... it's like you're going overboard here and forgetting LOTRO's art style is no 2022 photorealistic Unreal engine, hence it needs a little bit of that "like a painting vibe" in its assets/textures/style in order to make it work and shine. Which it doesn't here, these giant rocks looming over the horizon, to me, are just so explicitly in dissonance with the art style of the scenery and the rest of the picture.

3. You can even see the seam of the texture, and it doesn't match, and again, it's super apparent, both from the distance and up-close! So that's very bad! (and why it's so apparent? because these are key features of the horizon so we're drawn to inspect them thoroughly and because you overdone the details so it's hard to hide it or make it work, whereas it wouldn't be as apparent with less color differences / less attempts at "photorealistic")



4. And even worse, these older rocks had this whitish, pale color in them, which made them perfect as these pale-ish obelisks looming over the Barrow fields! This was always like the key feature of the Barrow-downs - the pale a bit ghostly rocks. The new ones... they just feel like generic rocks, they don't create the same impression. Just some rocky rock formations trying to pass as realistic with all these rocky irregularities on them and that's it, but they don't create the same landscape immersion like the old ones did.




Now, I don't claim the old rocks were perfect, here is how they looked


(don't have a better picture and, well, they're gone now)

While obviously shapes are awkward and they do have a single line too - at the same time it's not as obvious and as highlighted/in your face, so they don't have these issues that the new rocks have that I mentioned above.









So... it would be cool if you take that into account and do something with these rocks to make this work.

Besides, that's my advice and feedback, *do take care to put extra attention* if you wanna swap any of these key features on older landscapes.

Advice 2: with delicate things such as colors and details and how these actually work when viewed on landscape... maybe test that with some reshade on or something? It wouldn't surprise me if that's hard to miss during development because the vanilla tends to have some of the details and colors on assets NOT pop up sufficiently enough, sadly. If you ever fix that (with some graphical improvements) but don't pay careful attention now, all of such mishaps will be super off and fake looking later, and that's not something we want!