Nintendo Switch

[moosegrinder]

The art direction on both is incredible, yet entirely different. As for power, well, it was made for the Wii U. It's never going to look like something that pushed the PS4 pretty well for the time. BotW does lack colour fidelity but that doesn't make it bad visually. Because it isn't.

[Ghosty]

Just now, moosegrinder said:

The art direction on both is incredible, yet entirely different. As for power, well, it was made for the Wii U. It's never going to look like something that pushed the PS4 pretty well for the time. BotW does lack colour fidelity but that doesn't make it bad visually. Because it isn't.

 

No I agree. It just takes a little getting used to. If the rumours are true I'd be very happy to see what Nintendo can create with refreshed hardware.

[Stanley]

7 minutes ago, Ghosty said:

 

From a visual aesthetic point of view. The richness of the colour palette.

Breath of The Wild is way more to my tastes, it’s an absolutely beautiful game, I much prefer the muted pastel shades, and everything else. It’s kind of a pointless discussion though. 

[Ghosty]

Just now, Stanley said:

Breath of The Wild is way more to my tastes, it’s an absolutely beautiful game, I much prefer the muted pastel shades, and everything else. It’s kind of a pointless discussion though. 

 

Once you get to the first village, then it starts to shine. At the starting area it looks rather bland and boring. Maybe that was intentional.

[the_debaser]

15 minutes ago, Ghosty said:

 

Horizon Zero Dawn is a good example of what I'm trying to say. Compare the two.

Horizon looks wank compared to BOTW. It’s absolutely uninspired. 

[Stanley]

1 minute ago, Ghosty said:

 

Once you get to the first village, then it starts to shine. At the starting area it looks rather bland and boring. Maybe that was intentional.

The moment I stepped out of the cave at the beginning I was utterly gobsmacked as Link looked out over Hyrule, it’s stunning. At no point did I think it looked bland or boring. 

[Jolly]

Yeah, I'm not BotW's biggest fan but still think it's an absolutely stunningly beautiful game. One of the best in that regard. 

[R0b]

Why do the Final Fantasy games have what looks like touchscreen mobile phone-esque digital buttons around them?

[Benny]

Takes in this page so hot you'll get the squi(n)ts.

[Stanley]

4 minutes ago, Rob Rule said:

Why do the Final Fantasy games have what looks like touchscreen mobile phone-esque digital buttons around them?

Probably because they’re mobile phone games ported over with little to no work done on them. 

[Stoppy2000]

56 minutes ago, Stanley said:

The moment I stepped out of the cave at the beginning I was utterly gobsmacked as Link looked out over Hyrule, it’s stunning. At no point did I think it looked bland or boring. 

Was about to post about this exact moment. It's amazing. 

[R0b]

That's what I was assuming, @Stanley- just amazed that A) they'd bother to port FF Legends and B) they'd leave the buttons in. They'd better be touchscreen compatible...!

[Stanley]

8 minutes ago, Rob Rule said:

That's what I was assuming, @Stanley- just amazed that A) they'd bother to port FF Legends and B) they'd leave the buttons in. They'd better be touchscreen compatible...!

Seems very lazy doesn’t it. 

[Bojangle]

Id imagine it’s something mad about them no longer having the original source around. Can’t blame them for not going all out on something about 20 people will be interested in.

 

I mean they either go all in and give it the FF3 DS treatment or they port a Gameboy game. There’s no polishing a Gameboy game, it’s still going to be black and white. 

[TehStu]

2 hours ago, Majora said:

I thought Breath of the Wild had a lovely art style but I'd jump at a Pro enhanced version that eliminated the frame rate issues and boosted the resolution to 1080p.

 

In all honesty, this would be enough. I care less about the handheld screen, but it lets the telly scale it slightly better if it's going out at that resolution, presumably.

 

If we get new hardware, someone make a thread!

[fat flatulent git]

6 hours ago, Stanley said:

Which games does it struggle with? 

 

The Outer Worlds

[deerokus]

That runs poorly on base xbox one too. It's just a badly optimised game. 

[Chooch]

12 hours ago, Ghosty said:

 

Horizon Zero Dawn is a good example of what I'm trying to say. Compare the two.

Here you go:

 

 

[Strafe]

23 hours ago, Alex W. said:

I don’t think they’d spent millions on extra manpower and development hardware to make assets they wouldn’t even be able to test on a dev kit for the best part of a decade, no. Developers don’t project ten years in to the future, figure out what screen technology will be like then, develop the game to that specification on the assumption games hardware will actually be able to run at that resolution, then scale down for release.

 

Well, not console developers at least.

I don’t think you need to spend millions on creating 4k assets from the off and then scaling them down. You don’t need extra people for the pixels, it’s just a texture made at a higher resolution.
 

[Alex W.]

If you want that higher resolution texture to actually have more detail in it, you do need someone to put some work in. And you need to be able to actually render that out at 4K in real time and see what it looks like, aliasing, filtering, lighting, memory bandwidth and all. And I don’t see why they would’ve done that back when BotW entered development, to speak to this specific example, when 4K games hardware simply didn’t exist.

 

It’s also not generally speaking how games graphics are made. You don’t necessarily start at a “4K texture” and make lower quality ones, and I specifically very much doubt it’s how Nintendo works given how well their games’ presentations match the technology they run on. MK8 doesn’t look like a 4K game running on a 1080p/720p system the way Doom does, for example.

 

None of this is an argument against them doing a higher resolution version of the game, which I am sure will happen one way or another, but Nintendo are surely going to put the work in when the time comes. There aren’t 4K Zelda textures lying around waiting to be used.

[dataDave]

Years back just as the MK8 DLC was launching on the WiiU they had some 4K screens of the the new tracks. They weren't just renders, but actual real-time/engine shots.

 

The looked great, obviously.

[Alex W.]

Sure, but they didn’t go out and make a special 4K version of all the assets for that. The game just looks good at 4K. Zelda probably would too.

[Ghosty]

4 hours ago, Chooch said:

Here you go:

 

 

 

Cool, cheers. 

[MikeBeaver]

All that video does is make me want to crack on with a third playthrough of Zelda and forget that HZD was even a thing.

[rgraves]

Ah man, imagine what we might have coming with BotW 2 - 

[Ghosty]

11 minutes ago, rgraves said:

Ah man, imagine what we might have coming with BotW 2 - 

 

I suspect that Super Metroid and Breath of the Wild 2 have been in development for the newer Switch version for a while now.

[Stanley]

2 minutes ago, Ghosty said:

 

I suspect that Super Metroid and Breath of the Wild 2 have been in development for the newer Switch version for a while now.

You see now it’s just obvious you’re trying to get a rise, you know, now that the video comparison you watched demonstrated how much more impressive the lighting, physics, dynamic environments and emergent game play are in BOTW. 

[Dudley]

1 hour ago, Alex W. said:

Sure, but they didn’t go out and make a special 4K version of all the assets for that. The game just looks good at 4K. Zelda probably would too.

 

Given you can run them on a PC at that kind of res, we know they do.

[Ghosty]

3 minutes ago, Stanley said:

You see now it’s just obvious you’re trying to get a rise, you know, now that the video comparison you watched demonstrated how much more impressive the lighting, physics, dynamic environments and emergent game play are in BOTW. 

 

I did think of that after making the post. It wasn't intentional.

[dataDave]

2 hours ago, Alex W. said:

Sure, but they didn’t go out and make a special 4K version of all the assets for that. The game just looks good at 4K. Zelda probably would too.

 

I've done texture work before, starting with Banjo Kazooie all the way up to Skyrim's community efforts. I work at 8K, sometimes 16K resolutions and then scale my output down in order to both condense the details and hit the requirements.

 

For my main job I've traditionally designed websites that way, too. So many times I've done website artwork for the client to then want to use it for print as well (72dpi now suddenly needs to be 300dpi...). That's also helped immeasurably as more and more users are using Retina displays and I've never needed to go back and re-do assets. It's not much of a concern now with SVG, but still.

As there are more and more remasters these days it makes perfect sense to create your base assets as high as you can go, saving you time and money five/ten/twenty years down the line when they want to churn out that 16k 'remaster'. No one is going to want to go back and re-do hundreds of textures. What astonishes me is that the original games will sometimes ship with these really high resolution textures. This is how some PS2 games look so amazing when played on a PC. I don't think the texture bandwidth can be much of a performance bottle-neck, so they just ship the games that way.