Snake Pass is a PS4, Xbone, and PC game that came the Switch. In good form. And the Dragon Quest Heroes ports are just atrocious in every sense and representative of nothing other than their developers laziness or incompetence cause...I mean, f***.
As for big games on Switch, do bear in mind Super Mario Odyssey is targetting 60fps with a goal to have it locked AND the game isn't done yet. As Splatoon did, it mind see noticeable visual enhancements by launch. In fact, some of your screens date back to the FIRST Odyssey trailer which looks noticeably inferior to gameplay recently shown. And let's not forget Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is no slouch, even though it is also clearly unfinished and our only footage is from a compressed-out-the-ass stream. So just saying, we don't have a clear picture of EXACTLY what it can do and your comparison is not ideal. And of course let's not forget Sonic Forces, which is a PS4 and Xbone game coming to Switch that looks great on PS4 and looks dang similar on the Switch just at a reduced framerate and resolution.
As for Kingdom Hearts, even at passing glance I can see numerous ways this could be scaled back without as heavy a compromise or as much work as you suggest. Character models are smooth but also highly stylized (as one would expect) in a way that keeps polygon counts lower than in something like Horizon or Final Fantasy XV. This means 1) they may not need adjustment and 2) if they do, it's a simpler process. More fine detail complexity on the polygonal level means more headaches going down to lower polycounts as you fight to preserve detail. These models don't face that issue to nearly the same degree. Textures are not extraordinarily complex by virtue of the game's setting and design, despite the fact that yes, they are sharp and no doubt high res. Texture resolution scaling is really straight forward work. I can't be sure, but I *think* UE4 can even do it automatically, though I would have to check that. A lot of lighting effects can be straight toggled, especially if they are from UE4's built in set (seriously, it's the flip of a switch), and a ton can be easily scaled back. Shadows are also extremely easy to adjust in quality. Grass here is handled literally EXACTLY like in Snake Pass (actually almost every UE4 game), Skyrim, Fallout, Horizon, pretty much every open world game since Oblivion (barring Breath of the Wild, and Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and X) and can have density and draw distance easily scaled. And even if they have placed it "by hand", it's still literally a 1 day fix per level that needs any change at all and that's if just one guy works on it. There are so few things, like the particle effects, that I see that are not straight forward and easy fixes. It would just require putting in work. Now maybe there's some stuff they haven't shown that requires a bunch of resources like complex AI (highly doubt that) or high end physics simulation, but I wouldn't count on it.
All I'm saying is that if what all we've seen is representative, it can definitely be done. Not saying the Toy Story segment doesn't look good, it looks great, but that's always a bit deceptive. Look at, for example Ribbon Road in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. It looks crazy good...but a lot of that is because of the visual design of not just the game but that specific track. Toys and interiors have smooth surfaces and geometric shapes and when crossed with a cartoony aesthetic you can really push the details towards that "Pixar" level in real world appearance even if on close inspection there's still a very, very wide gap.
So yeah, I stand by what I said, it could be done. Not a doubt in my mind. It's just a question of WILL they. Square Enix has been back and forth on the Switch. It's getting DQXI and Lost Sphere and of course Dragon Quest X and it already got Dragon Quest Heroes (for what it's freaking worth) and I Am Setsuna but hasn't really talked about bringing anything Final Fantasy related, no word on Kingdom Hearts content, etc. We'll just have to see.
I'm aware of Snake Pass, but I excluded it from the conversation because it's a relatively low budget and undemanding indie title. The grass/foilage in Snake Pass looks like it's handled the same to you as in KH3?
I disagree. There is nothing impressive about Snake Pass's foilage, while I did react to the grass in the KH3 footage, and if you don't want to take my opinion into consideration, I can at least point you to some reactions where people specifically reacted to how impressive the grass looks in this footage:
I don't imagine anyone reacted that way to the grass in Snake Pass. I did forget about Sonic Forces though. That would be a point of reference. We'll have to see how it holds up once its released though.
Mario is going for 60f, and that's part of of my point, that we lack proper games on Switch to compare with right now, as in the case of Martio they're putting emphasis in different directions. And of course Mario isn't finished, but at most the footage I used is 10 months away from release. Since SE didn't write "early" 2018 I don't expect KH3 to come out in the first quarter of 2018. Meaning it's probably at least a year away from completion, so I don't think the comparison is In KH3's favor in that regard.
I do agree that the textures and polygons in KH3 do not appear to be on the level of Horizon and FFXV though. (But I was more impressed with what I saw in this trailer than what I've seen from the previous ones.) From what I've seen from KH3 so far, I don't think the visual fidelity by itself is impossible to scale down to an acceptable level for Switch. Not convinced that it can either. But what comes to mind is that KH often has a lot of things going on at once on screen, and KH3 seems to take that only further with characters/enemies and particle effects. And we now have 5 man parties instead of 3 as well. Because it was designed with Xbox One in mind as the lowest common denominator, they may have created scenarios that are very challenging, or straight up impossible to translate to Switch. Random example (Sort of. I expect some epic massive battles like the 1000 Heartless battle from KH2), a fight against all 13 members of Order XIII simultaneously. For a game that's probably already targeting unlocked 30f on PS4, I could see how they can paint themselves into a corner with all these factors on top of each other for a game like Kingdom Hearts, if they design scenarios with Xbox One in mind. Scaling graphics is not going to help much in those situations.
Take Gran Turismo Sport for example. In VR mode, they cose to remove all opponent cars except one so that it can only be played in a 1 v 1 mode, on top of scaling the graphics down. It's not like they have problems scaling down graphics further for the same hardware on a proprietary engine. But that wasn't an acceptable solution. They had to remove assets. And it's not really the same game in that state.
So my issue here is that it is a visually impressive game, probably targetting 30f and didn't have Switch in mind during design. When we as of yet still don't even have a current gen (non-indie) PS4-Switch game on Switch, it's difficult for me to expect this on Switch.
Actually, Snake Pass ain't a technical showcase but it isn't small potatoes either, as Digital Foundry pointed out. It's a very different kind of set of challenges vs KH3, but noteworthy none the less. The one challenge the two do share is probably polygonal density of scenes. Snake Pass - which actually isn't a high effort port, they seem tl have mostly just adjusted some settings in UE4 and called it a day - does have some decently busy levels and scenery and while the Switch version isn't perfect it holds its own.
As for the grass, I wasn't saying quality is equal. The grass SOLUTIONS are the same. And upon closer inspection of the footage...yes, I am positive the solution is the exact same. I've seen it about a million times. It's just higher res textures with more grass meshes and more accurate reactions to wind. All of which is easily adjusted. Shoot, look at Snake Pass. Ps4 and Switch versions have very different densities (Switch has the superior density for...some reason). The difference with Snake Pass is their grass meshes are oblong making the indiviual meshes a bit easier to spot and the look of the grass is inherently more cartoony, which naturally looks less impressive than real grass because 1) it's less real looking (duh) and 2) results in fewer blades of grass. However, since blades are just textured on, number of blades means absolutely nothing with regards to performance. But yes, this is the folliage system built into UE4. And honestly, this shouldn't be a shock. The only games that take a different route to my knowledge are Xenoblade games (which used bilboards) - which have switched actually to the meshe based system with 2 - and Breath of the Wild which uses individual, independently reactive blades that I still don't know how they got to work.
Also, I would say the Mario comparison is more infavor of KH3. Cold truth is that SE has a habbit of having to scale back their visuals a bit near release for their big games. It's just how they do things within their development pipeline, they start high and adjust down. In most cases barring a small number, Nintendo tends to start conservative and move up. It's not really a shot at SE, that's just how they do it. The differences won't be night and day, but together I think it pushes things in favor of KH3. Just pointing that out.
As for impossible scenarios, that's possible I suppose though as you pointed out, highly insane scenarios were pulled off just fine in KH games and others last gen and even earlier so I'm unconvinced of that. The particle effects is in my mind a much more immediately obvious challenge as they seem to have a fetish for the things and use them all the dang time.
And the GT comparison is really a poor one, the issues are radically different as VR is in itself more demanding, requires a higher framerate, can only downgrade visuals so much before it becomes horendous, requires a high resolution, and of course the VR itself is a resource hog. Just not the same thing.
So as I said, if what we have seen so far is generally representative, I am confident a good version could be had on the Switch if they want to do it.
