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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Donkey Kong Odyssey?

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I'd definitely like to see DK get a AAA title on the Switch. I honestly hope Retro isn't working on it, though. They did Metroid, they did DK, now it's time for them to get a crack at their own IP (or at least a new one).



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SegataSanshiro said:

No one liked Donkey Kong 64 even Rare hated it. So we already got DK Odyssey. DK is a series best as 2D.

I really can't remember what the consensus was among reviewers, but seem to recall EGM giving it low scores. It was technically amazing for it's time/platform, and I felt the controls were actually tighter than those found in the Banjo games, but it's such an uninspired, color by numbers 3D platformer, I have to assume many of it's fans are those that look back on it fondly as a childhood experience that exposed them to the genre. Boring as fuck was my overall opinion. No offense to those that like it.

- Hm. Just looked it up. It scored remarkably high, with EGM being something of an outlier.

Last edited by COKTOE - on 02 January 2018

- "If you have the heart of a true winner, you can always get more pissed off than some other asshole."

...Eeeh how about no more donkey kong?



CaptainExplosion said:

 

This guy has the right idea:

<SNIP>

Not digitized sprites, but you know what I mean.

That is actually pretty cool.
Being a remake of one Donkey Kong Country 2's levels, it stays truer to the source material.

Still want it sprite-based though. :P

CaptainExplosion said:

I imagine that's what Rare would've done in 1996 with DKC3 if it were for N64.

Though now I'm curious as to the modern digitized 3D sprites idea. Yes it would be less strenuous on hardware, but won't it take a lot longer and/or not be something they could build upon as much as Donkey Kong Country Returns?

In Donkey Kong Country Returns they could do crazy level design like this:

<SNIP>

Or this:

<SNIP>

I imagined it'd be way harder to do that with digitized CGI graphics.

You can have fully destructible environments, levels that transform, tons of particles and so on with a 2D game/Sprite based game.
It just rarely happened on the SNES due to the limited hardware... Always made me wonder what Donkey Kong Country could have been if RARE also leveraged the SuperFX chip for extra effects.

But yes, it is more time consuming as you have to 3D render everything before hand, but it does come with the bonus of having superior image quality as you are not burdened by the slow hardwares limited rendering capabilities.

And the other bonus is battery life, which any mobile gamer can appreciate.

The first two games were pretty much almost perfect titles in their own right... And there are reasons for that, there wasn't any silly CGI sequences or over the top scene transitions, music was original and catchy, visuals were some of the most impressive at the time despite the outdated hardware, gameplay forced you to learn and had a certain flow to it.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--

CaptainExplosion said:

You make very valid points, but would there be a way of having the game be digitized sprite based without the process slowing down production?

Also, this is another modern digitized sprite game that might be an argument in favor of the style:

 

Well. Back in the 90's it was a much slower process as it could take days to do a decent render.
Fast forward to today, if you have a high-end workstation you could probably almost do it in real time.

Plus... Animations can be done super quickly, hand-drawn games you need to draw each frame of animation, there are pro's and con's to each approach.

Plus storage has increased dramatically, so you can retain all the frames in an animation.

Digital Foundry has a good breakdown of how RARE achieved what they did in Donkey Kong despite the limited hardware (Both the SNES and the SGI machines used to render the sprites.)



Thing to keep in mind is that Donkey Kong Country looks as good as it does despite running on a system with a 3.58mhz CPU, 256KB of total Ram (System, Sound and PPU) and the sprites had a limit of only a paltry 16 colours. I would love to see what they could achieve on a modern system.

Last edited by Pemalite - on 03 January 2018

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COKTOE said:
SegataSanshiro said:

No one liked Donkey Kong 64 even Rare hated it. So we already got DK Odyssey. DK is a series best as 2D.

I really can't remember what the consensus was among reviewers, but seem to recall EGM giving it low scores. It was technically amazing for it's time/platform, and I felt the controls were actually tighter than those found in the Banjo games, but it's such an uninspired, color by numbers 3D platformer, I have to assume many of it's fans are those that look back on it fondly as a childhood experience that exposed them to the genre. Boring as fuck was my overall opinion. No offense to those that like it.

- Hm. Just looked it up. It scored remarkably high, with EGM being something of an outlier.

Exactly. It was just a boring uninspiring game. I painfully played part way through the game and just had to quit it was so boring. I have zero interest in ever seeing another 3D DK game after that giant piece of bleh!



Wow, this is the first time I see so much hate towards DK 64. Pretty much everyone I met love the game, including myself xD

Anyway... I actually think DK 64 did a better job at creating large "open" worlds with many objectives to accomplish than Super Mario Odyssey. In Odyssey (with one or two exceptions) I felt tired of every world once I got the main moons. Sometimes even earlier. The fact that most of the Moons were so easy to get made collecting them an uphill experience. I thought many times that what I was doing was not worth it. Not important enough. Heck, many times I found them no different from Purple Coins.

In DK 64 however, almost all Golden Bananas were so satisfying to get. There was some filler too, of course, but most of them had some challenge to pass in order to get the thing. Everytime I got one it felt like a pretty big deal and it encouraged me to continue exploring. And THEN you had all the other "minor" collectibles like blueprints, normal bananas and such that contribute to fill the main quest.

That's the problem with Super Mario Odyssey's Kingdoms: the Moons, the main collectible of the game... in most occasions lacks weight, lacks importance. It's just another thing more to get. And that affects my curiosity to explore most of the Kingdoms.

I think that, if there's gonna be a new 3D Donkey Kong, it should do its own thing and play with his own strenghts. Because the franchise has many of those, it doesn't need to borrow aspects from other games... specially if those are worse than its own.



Just keep with the Country series.



I'd love a game in the style of Donkey Kong Gameboy, but I guess I'm the only one.