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curl-6 on 05 January 2018
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Nuvendil said:
curl-6 said:

Yeah I will say the cloud simulation is freaking awesome. Forgot about that for a sec.

Oblivion is a good comparison point actually cos it has that same sense of having one foot in the current gen and one in the previous, so to speak. Like, some stuff like materials, reflections, and foliage got upgraded but other stuff looks like legacy Wii U code left over from X. Similar to what we saw in a lot of early PS3/360 and PS4/Xbone games where they were kinda a mix of old and new tech.

By contrast, a game like say Mario Odyssey very much feels like a full-blooded Switch game, head and shoulders above its Wii U predecessor.

Well in XC2's defense, it has to contend with more technical complications under the hood than Mario Odyssey.  It's not by coincidence that platformers, shooters, racers, etc are the launch titles to flex a system's muscles.  Fewer moving parts under the hood means more time can be devoted to the technical polish you can see.  

And yeah, Oblivion is a good comparison as well in the sense that you can clearly see the developers are coming to grips with certain techniques and capabilities previously unavailable.  I know I keep harping on it, but I think the foliage system changes were the cornerstone of a lot of the struggles.  It can't be overstated how much a leap in demand it was to go from billboard grass to grass made with multi-plane meshes.  Or going from having few if any proper trees with numerous leaf planes to shooting realistic(ish) trees with dense leaf planes.  And the shadow improvements also seem to have taken their toll.  Honestly, because of how the development worked out timeline wise, we get a cool window into all this with the trailers.  You can see how they struggled to come to grips with how to optimize some of these things by looking at the various videos.  

Also worth pointing out this is the first time they've had a launch window/launch year game, so that's probably part of it.  Usually Monolith Soft works later in the system's lifespan.  

Anyway, I do think the upgrades and new systems found in this iteration of the engine are very promising.  Once they iron out the wrinkles, they should have a hell of an open world engine.  I'm excited to see what they do with it later in the Switch's lifespan.

I meant it more in the sense that Odyssey presents a very marked graphical improvement over 3D World in almost all areas, whereas XBC2 by contrast feels like a smaller step up from Wii U to Switch, with some areas improving and others not so much.

And yeah, I suspect much of it boils down to Monolith not being as familiar with the hardware as they were when working on X, as a result of releasing early in the system's life. What's more, I got the impression the game was maybe a bit rushed in the final stages, as it was looking pretty rough at E3.

I'm also very keen to see what their second Switch effort looks like, now that they'll have time to master the hardware.

Last edited by curl-6 - on 05 January 2018