Pirates of the Burning Sea environmental artist, "Eric" has penned a really cool article about how developers are working to strip the game's towns of their 'generic' feel. There are some very cool before and after shots accompanying the article that you can see below:

Hello there this is Eric, I am an environment artist here at FLS. I have been working on many exciting things for the past year in an effort to create the most awesomely monumental 17th century pirating experience! Our current task for the environment team is to create updated versions of all our in game towns to replace the generic re-used art that we currently have in place at most ports. That means a unique town for every port in the game! The best part about this process is the speed in which we are creating these new towns. In each town redo we will be keeping the same nav mesh so the overall layout will be very similar to the previous town. This greatly speeds up the revamp process since it gives us a framework to quickly build upon.

I recently completed a new version of the Spanish tutorial fort. Here are a few before and after screenshots to give an example of what kind of changes we are making.

The forts appearance and surrounding environment have been updated to create a much more fantastical experience. The overall design is reminiscent of the previous fort, but taken to the next level. This is the goal for each and every town revamp.

We will be completely replacing all of the artwork at each port to give them a drastically improved up to date look. We will be changing out geometry as well as textures and we will be re-lighting all of the unique towns with different times of day. You can also look forward to new props and new lively town elements.

It is a very exciting time right now for the environment team. Were going to keep at it until we have replaced all of the generic towns with exciting new looks! We have a number of town revamps currently in the works so stay tuned for more updates!

REALLY terrific looking changes and very welcomed, I'm sure!