Free Realms Insight: The Art of the Realms & Pirates?!

By Nymo at Mar 16 2010

There's been quite a stir today in the world of FR, but first let's get to your look into the gaming industry with Free Realms: It's Free Realms Insight time.

Today, we're looking at one of the most important things for a game like Free Realms: Art.
Free Realms takes a lot of artists to make everything you see the game. From concept to the actual thing you find when you play the game. Not to mention several more artists to do the trading card game and comic books.


And it's interesting to note that quite a bit of the artists who worked for Free Realms can be found right on Deviantart.com, an website for artists to show off their work.

That's why for the past several months I've had this pet project of gathering FR art into a collection aptly called "The Art of Free Realms"
In it, you will find various pieces for the trading card games, the comic books, actual art you'll find in-game, and concept art.

It's great to get a closer look at some of the art that's gone into the realms, but probably one of the most interesting has to be the concept art.
Concept art is an important part of any game-making process to best visualize what will be added into the game, and in The Art of Free Realms collection, you can find a few concepts.

One notable concept art is this one called "Easterisland Pirates - concept", where the description says "A concept for an asset for a Free Realms Pirate environment"
ow, keep in mind, this is a concept, meaning that it may or may not make it into the game, like this prototype which clearly didn't make it into the game.
However, this illustration does seem to confirm something: Pirates are coming.

It was clear that pirate content was coming into Free Realms when just a while back fellow Insider White Fang noticed some pirate assets in the game's code.

And today, thanks to several Insiders on this forum post, Sony has teased us with images hinting at their "New 3-D minigame" via Facebook, Twitter, and the official forums.
With pictures of chests, palm trees, and parrots, is this a confirmation that Pirates are finally coming into Free Realms? And what kind of new 3D minigame will we be getting?
According to Sony, more info will be revealed tomorrow (or Thursday), so stay tuned to FreeRealmsInsider.com for the latest on that!


As with every Insight, I end with a question: What's better? Pirates or Ninjas?

Hope you enjoyed this edition of Insight, and let's find out what new minigame we'll be getting real soon!