Like you said it's a tech analysis thread... But maybe she'll do a review / preview thread.

That isn't half of the studio and you know very well that these two studios are seperated. One is in Tokyo and the other is in Kyoto. The latter one was created to help co-develop games with Nintendo EAD.

Anyway, besides the first area, this game looks gorgeous to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06ZMXPK8M-g

I really don't see what's so horrible about it. You're dealing with a console that isn't much more powerful than a PS3.

Conegamer said: Ugh I am so jealous of you Tachi Still, very much looking forward to your write-up. Should be very interesting indeed! Would it also be possible for you to provide a brief summary or review of stuff in the game ; or be willing to answer questions about it?

I'm sticking to just technical analysis, for this and other games i cover, sorry :(

Sorry to break it to you, but both the kyoto and tokyo offices collaborate on EAD projects, the only difference is that the kyoto office does so directly while the tokyo office does so remotely using internal svn.

Read bolded.

IF the quality remained like that in the video linked throughout, there wouldnt be an issue, it doesn't, though.

Tachikoma said: Conegamer said: Ugh I am so jealous of you Tachi Still, very much looking forward to your write-up. Should be very interesting indeed! Would it also be possible for you to provide a brief summary or review of stuff in the game ; or be willing to answer questions about it? I'm sticking to just technical analysis, for this and other games i cover, sorry :( Samus Aran said: That isn't half of the studio and you know very well that these two studios are seperated. One is in Tokyo and the other is in Kyoto. The latter one was created to help co-develop games with Nintendo EAD. Sorry to break it to you, but both the kyoto and tokyo offices collaborate on EAD projects, the only difference is that the kyoto office does so directly while the tokyo office does so remotely using internal svn. Samus Aran said: Anyway, besides the first area, this game looks gorgeous to me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06ZMXPK8M-g I really don't see what's so horrible about it. You're dealing with a console that isn't much more powerful than a PS3. Read bolded. Tachikoma said: played it for a while last night, suffers immensely from what i like to call "keypoint focus" where following set paths or going where the game would like you to go maintains a certain level of detail, but straying from that to explore yields some downright atrocious quality areas. Pop-in of textures is still an issue even fully installed to memory, too. looking to write up a full post thursday or friday. IF the quality remained like that in the video linked throughout, there wouldnt be an issue, it doesn't, though.

The Tokyo office has not been credited with any EAD games, so any collaboration has been insignificant.

As for the bolded, I'll see that for myself. I've seen Japanese streams for this game and didn't see any major issues yet.

That is a very big (and very wrong) assumption.

They worked on SSBB and Skyward Sword, but none of those games are HD. Nor do I consider SSBB an EAD game.

Well, I don't know who is to blame here, hardware or dev. I mean texture streaming issues is a dev problem but copying meshes to reduce load is perhaps due to the hardware. I also don't think game looks bad in any way but mostly due to art design and not because of technical details.
And after all, it's a WiiU game and nobody should expect groundbreaking visuals (technically speaking) from it.
I hope there will be a proper port/remake to a beefier system.

@Bold: Highly unlikely, unless you mean a Nintendo console one or two gens from now.

You reference the quality of the game yet focus on solely the technical aspect. Now I would find more merit in the critical view if it encompassed the whole product. I can't say the title looks subpar in anyway considering the sheer magnitude of the title. If we were talking about a smaller scale game, much small in fact considering the size of XCX, then these grievances would have a legitimate foothold. 

Being the first foray into HD is a legitimate reason if the polish merely doesn't shine as bright as studios with multiple titles under their belt. A perfect example is the early games for the Wii U and the without question impressive progress made on their second wave of titles. Focusing on something as trivial as lack of light emanating from a neon source when the overall package is stunning is complaining a few hair are out of place on the Mono Lisa (obviously XCX isn't the Mono Lisa but the point remains legit).

I am going to still read your breakdown and I do hope having such a critical eye doesn't stop you from enjoying games.

The move to HD isn't and shouldn't be such a huge leap and milestone, all models and textures are normally created much higher resolution/complexity than theyre eventually used in games, this has always been the case, the studio has textures and models for all game assets that are higher quality than what it shipped with, the "move to hd" excuse is tired and pointless.

Their engine however, is dated and doesn't push the hardware much at all, during my time assisting via EAD I was put on the team developing shader handling for the engine and I had to rewrite large portions of existing code to add in relatively standard shader logic that was missing, which i did, and documented in detail with commented codebases and full dsupport for their latest engine build, from what I can see from the final product, they did not utilize that addition to the engine and a lot of the render pipeline features that were in place in earlier builds have been nixed for a quick fix on framerates, along with geometry complexity, as apposed to further developing the engine and optimizing it to better use the hardware available.

It is not a matter of "not being used to hd" it's a matter of "not investing enough time or effort to properly use the hardware" which is especially notable when you have an entire team at Nintendo EAD tasked with assisting for that very reason.

As such, technically it is relatively poor quality, and it shows in many areas of the game that are off the beaten track, where geometry and texture data is cut back to maintain framerates elsewhere when in eyeshot.

You say "focusing on something as trivial as lack of light", like its actually trivial, completely ignoring what that subtle change means for the rest of the game, completely ignoring the technical compromise in play.

This is a technical analysis thread, i pick apart the technical aspects of the game, as a games developer, one that has worked partially on this very game through EAD, i give my view on the technological aspects and my opinions based on my knowledge of the hardware and how they have chosen to utilize it (or not utilize it), if that offends you then so be it, just understand that I don't sugar coat shit.

So once again, I will say, this is a technical analysis, not a review, so "focusing on trivial things" rather than "the overall package" is entirely the point, if I approached in any other way it would be a pretty shitty analysis.