Barely...

Honestly, I dont see where the game looks bad or mediocre.There is one thing that is not liking the charachter design, another is thinking that applies to the rest of the game.Personally I think the game looks incredible.Of course its not the most beautiful game out there, not even close, but there was always a lot of charm to XC games, and this has in spades.

They are of different artstyles but XC2 certainly holds it's own against DQXI as a good looking game especially considering the power difference. I personally wouldn't take anyone calling it bad or medicore in comparison seriously. But anyways it is the gameplay that is the most important factor to me typically.

I don't know much about the grass but i think it's the same as XC2, there's no interactivity when you touch or step on it.

The reason why there a few comparison made for XC2 is because of Nintendo and Monolith never provided any direct feed screenshot, the only place to get acceptable quality image is at Xenoblade 2 twitter account with heavily compressed shot. Lot of images for XC2 came from youtube capture which is worse compared to system capture.

I wouldn't go quite that far but it definitely holds up way better than one may have thought.  

DQXI uses the same grass system as XC2, it's just more dense with smaller but more numerous grass meshes.  Trees are a bit better but the game also is a bit more stylized so they get away with a less realistic overall tree form that lets them be conservative on leaf planes, thuse lowering polygonal density.  Where DQXI will definitely win is image quality cause frankly, it's Unreal Engine 4.  So it has access to its excellent image quality tools.  Also I think DQXI is using physically based rendering, don't know if XC2 is.  There's also a bit of a lighting edge.

There are other advantages, most notably polygonal complexity of character models.  XC2's are fine but DQXI's are better.  Which makes sense given the power of the system and also the fact DQXI is played in a close up 3rd person camera and XC2 is played in a pulled back camera.  

Still, a better showing vs DQXI than it at first seemed.

Also, that first screenshot looks SO much better than E3.

I said not direct ports from PS3 (all Tales of games on PS4 are also on PS3) like Persona 5. Ys VIII and Digimon are all also on PS Vita. Of course those games are gonna look bad in comparison. They are just ported from a last-gen console/handheld to PS4 with a higher resolution and framerate.

The WAY better looking are FFXV, DQXI and KH3 because they are made from the ground up for next gen consoles. Those games have better or equal performance compared to XC2 while looking much better. 

Yeah I didn't actually think it looked better : P 

But yeah the image quality on DQ11 is insaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaane. I was gonna say the same with the character quality but i .... didn't know how to put my finger on the right wording? The enemies in DQ11 almost look real

You also need to take the world size into the consideration here, Tetsuya Takahashi also said the world is bigger than XCX that dwarfed entire SQE games combined.

KH and DQ = open area

XC2 = open world and more demanding for Hardware

Look how small FF XV with unexplored areas and regions compared to XCX 400km2 without any invisible wall within the world

vs One area from XCX fully explorable 

Kind of a deceptive comparison.  First, XC2 appears to be open area.  The areas are huge and combined create a bigger world than X probably, but they are not seemless I don't think.

Second, XCX's listed world size is the entire heightmap, a good part of which is under water.  

Lastly, a game being open world vs open area doesn't necessarily increase demand as much as one would think.  It's really all about how the engine handles streaming in details and loading new areas of the map as you traverse it.  An engine that handles all that really well won't be too much more taxed by open world vs open area.  

Well thx to the Monolith Soft engine because XCX never suffered similar fate as FF XV of being psuedo open world with ton of invisible walls within the world.

I'll just be here hoping the gameplay is good while all y'all count polygons...