If I remember correctly, they did have that real time morphing in the early videos of PD Orta. I think they shortened it to suit the gameplay.
i thought zwei had some of the best music. sea of ice, meccania, shelcoof, the ruins (although i liked the version that played during the trailer more).
PDO wowed me… many times. the only way it could have wowed me more was if they brought back the golia, randoula, maybe even the guardian dragon. PDO showed us things that the saturn hardware simply couldn’t, and while it was amazing, i would have loved to have seen the reinvention of some of the older creations.
i’d like to submit that zwei was not in the same style as PD1 and that saga was a huge break from the style of the first two, so i don’t see why PDO should be looked at differently. and following the story it is a completely different era, things SHOULD be different.
Saga wasn’t a great break of style IMO.And even if it was it isn’t beeing criticized cause it’s a move in the right direction as opposed to Orta.
What Gehn said… PDZ and PDS felt like they were EVOLVING the style rather than simply CHANGING it… It was just right. Orta pretty much failed in that aspect… A lot of things felt out of place or changed too much… even the coolias look almost nothin like they did in Zwei…
And the era isn’t that different, just a few decades after PDS.
here’s what i think:
PD gave us this little adventure on the back of the blue dragon. not much story to it, it was just supposed to be about showing keil and the player all of these amazing things that they would not have seen had they not been drafted into this mysterious mission. it’s just the idea of experiencing all of these things that the rest of the population will never know about, being gifted with this brief glimpse of a world beyond your understanding (which quite literally came in the form of the vision the sky rider gave). hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy is similar in that respect; arthur dent was just an average guy, until he met some aliens and went on his zany adventure.
PDZ was a darker atmosphere than PD, it gave the dragon its origins and strengthened the bond the series had with lagi.
saga was a break in style because it was a completely different type of game if nothing else. i could have stood for the series to only offer short glimpses into the world if all of them were shooters. i liked how what saga brought to the table, it showed the scope of the world and lives of the people in it. but i think it also could have just been a shooter like the others.
orta gave us the continuation of the dragon in an even darker world and closure to the adventure. the empire had stregnthened its presence, but the same themes were there otherwise.
i thought the coolia in zwei looked the most unlike the rest of the series. the originals were like dopey beasts of burden, zwei was like dinosaurs, saga made them look more like the originals but less dopey, and for the brief bits where you can see a coolia in orta, they look mostly like saga’s.
an era isn’t a set amount of time, it just marks when the focus of the times change. the saturn games were in the era of the towers. orta is in a new era.
i don’t see how you can say that zwei and saga were just evolutions of the series but that orta was some blasphemy that doesn’t belong.
I’m glad I’m not the only person here who reads that kind of stuff. 
I agree with your point about the other three games having different themes in their own right, but I do think that PDO moves much further away from them all in its own visual style. A lot of it can be attributed to the different era (and the different Empire) as you said, but it was the overall atmosphere of some scenes and Episodes in PDO that I found out of place; it seemed like that kind of change was simply due to different artists and a different artistic approach.
Take Episodes 2 and 4, for example: they each seem to have a really bright, colourful, up-tempo and vivid atmosphere, and that felt out of place to me; the atmosphere of the games had always been very bleak, somber, subdued and serious in the past, and arguably just dark in places; those Episodes almost felt like something from a different game series entirely. They weren’t bad because of that, but it did make the overall style of PDO feel a bit incoherent and fragmented, in my opinion; especially when taken alongside the previous games, which any new PD game will be.
I can’t help thinking that some of the very different enemy / location designs in PDO would probably have been more welcomed by fans if they’d seemed more imaginative and more thoroughly thought-out. On one hand the old games can’t become a barrier that holds new ideas back, but on the other hand if new designs don’t fit in with the rest of the series, they need to be able to compete with those other designs.
The Saturn PD games are a hard act to follow, but a lot of PDO’s new artistic developments did compete in my opinion; I really liked the Sestren network in Episode 7, and pretty much everything in Episode 3, among other things. A lot of the new ideas seemed to fall short, though; the Episode 4 castle-flagship just seemed unimaginative to me, as did the golden statue boss…
[quote=“Megatherium”]here’s what i think:
i don’t see how you can say that zwei and saga were just evolutions of the series but that orta was some blasphemy that doesn’t belong.[/quote]
Who said that exactly? Cos all I said was that Orta’s style doesn’t fit in. Maybe it fits in to you, fine, be glad, to me and to other people it doesn’t, still, noone exagerated like that >_>
And how is the world darker now, if anythin it looks much brighter and happy-ish than the previous games… Not that this has anythin to do with not being a fitting style, just curious.
Lance : Hard to follo my arse!Even I could do better with those designs.It ain’t exactly the toughest job in the world you know?
I actually think it’s the easiest part of the whole process.
Orta is just 10 years after Saga.Saga is a lot more distant from Zwei than that and they still look very similar in design.
I think what he means is that technology and gameplay have evolved far faster in just a few years than during the days of the Saturn. And remember that Team Andromeda handed over the reins to a new company. There’s obviously going to be different interpretation. Just look at how different Defender of the Future is from the original Ecco the Dolphin games.
You honestly don’t think that it took serious talent to come up with the artistic side of the Saturn games? I’m not saying that Team Andromeda’s artists were Da Vinci reincarnated or anything, but compared to what most computer games have to settle with the unique art and design in the Saturn PD games seemed amazingly above-par to me. I honestly think that the visual style and conceptual quality of those games has set a pretty high standard.
But how can it be the easiest part of the whole process when (as far as most fans are concerned) it’s the largest area where Smilebit failed to deliver? Coming up with high-quality concept designs for something as abstract and unique as PD and rendering them up into functioning 3D models isn’t exactly a walk in the park.
PDO is meant to be set 37 years after PDS, and PDS came roughly 48 years after PDZ, but I see your point. Still, you have to admit that those 37 years were much more eventful than anything that happened between PDZ and PDS; the destruction of the old Empire and the foundation of the new Empire, the deactivation of the Towers that led to the Great Fall and the upheaval of the Continent’s environment and geography, and so on. That doesn’t really explain a lot of the changes though, which can only be put down to new artists and a new artistic direction.
The problem with Orta is that it wasn’t developed by the same team that made the original trilogy (the greatest games ever made). Sure there were a few key members but that isn’t enough. It was the tandemed efforts of the perfect people at the perfect time to create the perfect games.
The magic is gone. It always will be.
Team Andromeda was the greatest developer that ever was, and it is a sad thing indeed that we will never EVER witness games of their caliber ever again.
The problems with Orta are too numerous to list quite frankly.
We all should just be happy that we got three perfect games as opposed to none. Because we sure won’t be aquiring anymore…
perhaps i interpreted your tone differently from they way you intended, but you seemed to be contrasting the saturn games to PDO a little more than just saying that they style didn’t fit.
i think that atmosphere is part of style and i felt that orta and her childhood (in a prison cell), along with the society that shaped evren into a person so intent on murder, abadd’s sheer insanity, azel’s message, iva’s melancholy sidestory, and the DEATH OF LAGI were much darker themes. the use of more saturated color palettes didn’t really detract from that, in some ways it made it worse. zwei would probably be second most melancholy, then saga, then PD.
IMHO
i agree, but i also think that if the PD series is to continue, the stylistic change of orta will hardly be a bump in the road. the real differences come from so many new people working on it, but running off of hardware that is at least 4 times as powerful will also serve to make changes more noticeable
It’s really down to personal opinion, but I’ve always felt that PDZ and PDS were the darkest (or at least the most sombre) games in the series. PDO certainly had dark subject matter, but the pacing of the storyline and the presentation of events didn’t recreate the bleak atmosphere of the previous games for me. PDZ opened with Lundi’s village getting horribly destroyed, and the first episode was a depressing trudge through the smouldering ruins; PDS opened with Edge’s only friends getting murdered by Zastava, but PDO just didn’t equal those feelings of dread for me, not in the way its events were actually presented.
I actually thought the pacing of PDO made it felt more like an action movie than its predecessors, in a way. Even though the story was dealing with worrying implications (like Abadd taking over the world with a race of Drone-clones), those things didn’t have so much of an impact on me because the story was always leaping forwards so quickly, and the tone of the game seemed much less morbid. A lot of the scenes that should have had an emotional effect seemed a little melodramatic too, at least compared to similar scenes in the previous games.
I also thought that Lagi’s death was unnecessarily cushioned by the appearance of the baby dragon; if the game had simply ended when the credits started rolling (on “open your eyes… please…”), that would have struck me as being dark. The following scene with the baby dragon and Orta walking towards the sunset felt as if it had been tagged on to create a happy ending, though (in my opinion, anyway).
True, and to be honest I think that if a future RPG maintains the graphical style of PDO (and is successful in all other aspects), fans will probably get used to the change. My real complaint was with some of the less imaginative concept designs in PDO, which not only looked out of place to me but they didn’t seem inspiring enough to warrant it.
[quote=“Lance Way”]
You honestly don’t think that it took serious talent to come up with the artistic side of the Saturn games?.[/quote]
You got it all mixed up.I was saying that they di da bad job with Orta not the Saturn games.I was saying even I could do better than what they did with Orta.
It all comes down to opinion in the end, doesn’t it? That’s the bottom line really.
I was satisfied with Orta; it was the game I expected it to be. I was expecting change, and I was expecting a shooter along the lines of Zwei. So when I played Orta I was surprised by the depth of the story (for a shooter) and the amount of side quests. Although the style was different, the amount of cameos and references to the Saturn games was very rewarding for a Panzer Dragoon fan.
However - it seems that there are several things that a large proportion of Panzer fans had issues with. The dragon designs, especially, seem to come up often as a major gripe. While I’m open to new designs, I can understand why people were upset about them - the designs are different. I don’t think that reverting back to the old designs is very likely (it wouldn’t make sense story wise) but maybe - if there’s a new RPG - the development team will take notice of the features that fans didn’t like and replace them with all new concepts. After all, there’s nothing wrong with originality if it’s done right, in fact, it can often be a positive thing.
Since this is actually a “what was wrong with Orta topic”, one other thing that I was a bit let down with were the “sentinal” creatures at the end of the third episode. They seemed to be straight out of the Matrix, and although one could compare them to the Guardian Dragon from Zwei (their attacks were very similar), the fact that they felt ‘stolen’ did let the stage down a bit.
i can definitely see how it seemed like an action movie. PDO lacked a known enemy, you kinda flew through it without direction. in some ways i like that; orta’s exploration of the world beyond the stone walls. but in the first three there was a bit of a driving force and you knew that when you found it, there would be trouble. up until the end of episode 7 i thought abadd was a servant to orta. the villain introduced in the opening movie was the merciless evren, but he died off at the end of episode 4. so yeah, they were almost constantly throwing things at you in an action movie-like way.
i did however think that azel’s message was one of the most meaningful scenes in the series.
I liked the color of the fifth one, but I kinda had the same feeling that he’d fall out of the air. I kind of expected it, and it would have been funny, but shrugs I dunno.
I don’t like the fact that I can beat the entire game in one sitting. It’s really, really… Short. And that damn statue for the emperor… growls I know that you all mentioned it, but shouldn’t somebody in developing just spoke up and said, “Uh, shouldn’t we just leave that out?” It looks like a clump of clay with breasts and an eyeball…
[quote=“GehnTheBerserker”]
[quote=“Lance Way”]
You honestly don’t think that it took serious talent to come up with the artistic side of the Saturn games?.[/quote]
You got it all mixed up.I was saying that they di da bad job with Orta not the Saturn games.I was saying even I could do better than what they did with Orta.[/quote]
Show us then 
(easier said than done isn’t it ? :p)
But it seems I have nothing to do here, I personnally think Orta is cool
[this was my post for June and a light of hope in this topic :D]