RWBY: Grimm Eclipse Launch Trailer!

Console release is later this year

I've heard it's being discussed for future updates, but could a while off.

It's not being developed by a major studio nor published by one, so why would it be mentioned at E3?

if you can come up with a way to make the processing power required to render the models in a different art style from the rest of the game not a monstrous taxation on people systems, probably.

It really shouldn't be that hard. Neither version of the models look like they are really pushing any hardware limitations (exceeding 100,000 tris per character, massive textures, complex shaders, etc...), so it really shouldn't be that hard to use either art asset. My guess is that it's due to bad texture optimization, animation compression, networking code, and engine optimization to keep a steady frame rate during network play.

The problem with using an engine like Unity is that it is a catch-all engine and therefore not optimized for one type of game more so than another; that is something a company's engineers have to do. Take Rocket League for example, which was built using Unreal. That game runs phenomenally even though the engine it is running off of wasn't designed for that type of game, it was designed for FPS and third-person shooters. This is because Rocket League had some fantastic engineers that made that engine cater to their particular project. If you look at a company like Koei who makes Dynasty Warriors, which is essentially what the RWBY game is, they have far better models (better meaning higher poly counts, more complex textures, and shaders) than the RWBY game and have more characters on-screen. Therefore we know that these results can be achieved on PC, but for whatever reason the RT game engineers are not able to duplicate these results with an engine like Unity. My guess is that engineering issues with keeping a consistent frame rate across a network led to this change in art style more than anything else, so the blame lies solely with the RT game engineers.

@AxelDrake, "make the processing power required to render the models in a different art style from the rest of the game not a monstrous taxation on people systems".
You have no clue what you are talking about. Art style doesn't matter at all when it comes to rendering. You could have however many art assets on screen that all are of the same or different art styles and it will still require the same amount of processing power because each one of those would be a separate draw call. What would effect rendering and processing power is if by changing art styles you change poly count, texture compression, shader/material complexity, or whether the assets share materials or not. However, if all those settings remain the same, then having a single or multiple art styles on screen wouldn't effect rendering at all. So, if I have two assets that use the exact same texture compression, shader/material, and poly count, then it doesn't matter if one of those is in a Disney art style and the other in an Anime art style, both are equally taxing on the processor.

If you have a garbage system that couldnt run the game well with the original models. thats a fault on your end. Why should the rest of the community suffer a lower quality product because of people playing on a commodore 64.

Bitching aside. it should at the absolute minimum be an option if not the defualt.

@CClark, I totally agree with you that the game should have a bunch of graphics settings that the user can adjust to match their machine specs. Beyond that, there is the min spec on Steam which should tell you whether your computer can run the game at all or not.

However, as I posted earlier, I seriously doubt this is a problem with the end users' machine specs. More likely, this is a problem with the game's engine code itself and the fact that it can't support those models over network play and keep a consistent frame rate. The only other reason I can think of is if this is like the Mighty No 9 where they deliberately lowered the graphics quality to make it easier to optimize the game across multiple platforms upon release.

It has level select, if that's what you are asking.

Yes I was thinking the same. The early access version is doing well because people understand that it's not fully fleshed out, and that's ok. When it's out as a full complete game, people are going to have higher expectations and will be disappointed. At the rate you guys are coming out with big updates, i could see this being released in a year and a half, at bare minimum. Just work on it a bit more, come up with a stable combat system, choose how you want to deal with the graphics and add more missions. Don't waste the potential this game has.

You do realize that a full release means that on July 5th there will be a big update that adds and fixes a bunch of stuff, right? That even though the current version isn't ready for full release, they believe the next version IS ready? Because that's how releasing a game in beta works. You don't put out the finished and polished version before release and wait to see if the community thinks it's good enough and then just say "Ok, on this date we'll call this version final and 'release' it." Wait till you've actually played the full version and if you still think that it's not good enough you can let them know. But for now we should be fair and trust that if the dev team says the version coming out in a few days is going to be ready to be called a full release that it will be.

If I am understanding this correctly, we will only have team RWBY for now, but we will get other teams later down the road.