Digital Foundry takes a closer look at Breath of the Wild

[Nuvendil]

bigtakilla said:

Nuvendil said:

And that install only erased a handful of problems and helped with pop in.  Didn't improve the crude AA, add anisotropic filtering, fix the absolutely awful problems with pop in in the city, enhance the polygon counts of various models both architectural and fauna related, improve the textures of the general landscape and city. etc.  I'm not knocking the game, I think it looks great aesthetically and is very well accomplished for the Wii U, but that's the problem, it runs up against hardware limits pretty hard.  Also, I would say Mario Kart 8 puts forth a very impressive presentation on an asset-to-asset basis, but the concessions made are abundantly clear when you look to background/surrounding details which vary from basically functional to extremely basic. 

And my point wasn't "Nintendo's games look bad," but rather that Nintendo clearly has the development chops and ambition to have far more detail in their games than they currently do, and that they have several games that are clearly running into Wii U hardware limitations that they obviously didn't anticipate giving them such troubles. 

Yeah, but sacrifices had to be made to make the game as big as they did, hence why some games have anti aliasing (LoZ Breath of the Wild for example) and some don't. It's pretty much my point. There is really no game we can go to and say "this is what Metroid on the Wii U would look like" and again, it is a sad thing.

The real fact of the matter is their is ALWAYS going to be hardware limitations. Even if the Wii U was as powerful as the PS4, there are going to be limitations, and it's nice to see how franchises take advantage of the hardware that is available vs what the franchise looks like in its next generation. The small niggling issues in Xenoblade Chronicles did not hamper my enjoyment of the game in the least. In fact I would go as far as to say I thoroughly enjoyed it dispite its shortcomings and am glad I got to play it now (and again prefer it) instead of having to wait until whenever it came out when the NX does arrive. That in turn increases my interest for the next installment when it does come out on NX, to see how that one stacks up.

Ultimately, what limitations would Metroid have on Wii U? Other than it would be 720p we'll never know for sure. How good would it have looked? We also will never know. Same as asking what limitations will it have on the NX (if it ever comes out)? We don't know. So you're asking for a solution for a problem you have no clue the game has (and other franchises like Fire Emblem, Kid Icarus, whatever IP we will never have the luxury of seeing on Wii U).

Not sure why you are stuck on Metroid, but I will say Metroid probably would have been the best case scenario for a core-gaming show piece because the gameworld is large and seamless yet also deals mostly in enclosed environments which does a great deal to ease the hardware burden. 

As for Fire Emblem, they've mishandled that game as far as technical stuff goes so badly it's sad.  Given the gameplay it SHOULD be one of if not THE most advanced showpiece on any given platform from a technical features perspective.  That it isn't is a testament to how little they invest in the series and it's disapointing.