New Xenoblade 2 gameplay

[Nuvendil]

curl-6 said:

Nuvendil said:

Aesthetically or technically?  Cause one of those is your opinion, the other is an objectively false statement :P

There are numerous technical improvements over XCX visible here.  Water effects are improved, texture resolution is the same or better, especially in the city, lighting is a big step up, grass is using a more modern and demanding mesh based system rather than billboards and they've got the draw distance up to scratch now, shadow quality seems improved and draw distance issues resolved, the LOD quality is at least as high but possibly higher in this video, the large foliage like trees are q big step up compared to XCX (XCX skirted this issue in Noctilum by having mostly giant fungi and ferns, not trees).  And on a less technical note, the color palette is much broader and more distinct.  In short, I can see no areas yet that are technical steps back and several that are technical steps forward.  This could change after seeing quality direct feed footage, but with this video being the best we've got of the latest build, it's looking like a clear step up.

While I have no doubt it's technically more demanding simply by virtue of running on stronger hardware, the water doesn't look any better to me, and the grass still looks like sprites. Granted it is hard to say much for sure to say based on compressed streams further muddied by youtube and a less than full screen window, but with the more powerful GPU and larger RAM available to the Switch, I'd expect considerably more detail, but so far I'm just not seeing that.

Check the video at 35:40 and the closeup at 41:42.  Also check the E3 stream at 11:30.  The grass is made up of multiple bisecting planes like in Skyrim, Fallout 4, Witcher 3, Final Fantasy XV, and so on.  In the E3 build they had some billboards mixed in but those seem to have been dropped.  

The water is harder to see with the stream quality but I'm 90% sure it's more accurate.  XCX used pretty basic cube-maps.  

And that change in grass techniques is a pretty drastic leap in demand for the hardware.  And the trees being of the poly count they are is also a significant improvement over what you see with, say, the trees in Primordia which are quite basic.

Right now, improvements beyond polycounts and lighting are hard to judge cause the videos are a bit muddy.  The architecture of the city seen here though definitely has more texture detail than NLA.  We'll have to see how it all comes together, but I'm very optimistic about the games technical prowess.