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Zekkyou on 27 October 2017
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bigtakilla said:
Zekkyou said:

I think we might be talking about slightly different things. I'm talking about in-game tech relative to overall performance profile (image quality + frame-rate), which is where Nintendo tend to be fairly conservative. Hitting perfect locks is almost impossible without a degree of technical conservatism after all (you have to 'waste' a lot of resources to guarantee it never falls below your target no matter the scene complexity). Looking at your other comments i think you were referring purely to 60fps?

But technical conservatism is relative to the hardware at play. Nintendo used to know well what the limits to the hardware is relative to the game developed and obtain 60fps. I'm saying now their development paradigm seems to be more in line with other AAA devs. For whatever reason Nintendo is now saying "close enough" instead of refining to perfection.

Of course, but i think that goes without saying. If i wasn't talking relative to the Switch's hardware i'd have little positive to say about SMO's in-game tech :p Artistically it's excellent in any context, but its core technology is obviously quite sub-standard. 90% of PS4 games have lacking tech and they've got orders of magnitude more wiggle room.

What i'm talking about is the capacity with which they push their in-game tech, which is where Nintendo have historically been quite conservative (yes, relative to hardware and performance). They're frequently willing to trade large chunks of their render budget for relatively minor things, like pushing a 95%+ 60fps title to 100%. You can describe that as ambitious performance targets (and i'd agree to an extent), but that comes with an unavoidable cost. With SMO, they've taken a slightly different rout. They're allowing minor frame-rate variables, have a fairly large dynamic resolution range, distance based animation targets, and are making use of a variety of other image quality scaling methods (these all on-top of standard stuff like LoD fields).

If it was just the small frame-rate variability i'd agree it was sloppy for them, but together these all serve to smoothen out the resource curve between technically intense scenes and standard ones, which in turn allows for more technical ambition. The end result is something a decently sized step over MK8, Splatoon 2, and ARMS. Zelda is the only major exception, though how they compare relative to performance is more difficult to judge.

I don't like all the decisions they've made (i personally value image quality over in-game technical ambition, in the same way you likley favour frame-rate over it), but i appreciate the effort. They could easily have just used the same tech they used for MK8 and ARMS, but they opted to try and work slightly outside of their standard development style. The results aren't perfect, but i'm a fan of the attempt.