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cycycychris said:
The budget is most seen in the huge re-use of assets in each world. Like I just got to the snow world Titan, and was like hell its the same tree everywhere. Most cut scenes are nothing but reused animations. When a new animation might be needed, they will often revert to a black screen and a stock asset sound effect to avoid the added cost. Major cut scenes of course go the extra mile to animate the whole thing. When you look close you can see the cost cuts to build such a big world and long experience in a narrow budget. I'm not trying to shit on it since I like it, since I really like the game |
A lot of what you list is fairly par for the course in many open worlds. X had the same resource re-use, though some areas masked it quite well. Pine forests in particular in games often have like 2 variants, maybe 3. Shoot, Breath of the Wild - one of Nintendo's biggest productions - has like a grand total of...10 trees? I'm pretty sure that's fairly accurate. The standard oak tree has only a few variants. Skyrim also has an ultimately fairly limited number of actual, unique trees. It's very common for two reasons: 1) building a ton of trees takes a lot of time and 2) file size. The latter of the two is quite important for Xenoblade 2.
And Xenoblade 2 still has a wide variety of assets cause it creates...8 distinct environments? Plus some other little areas. That in itself brings more unique assets to the table than a lot of games.
Animation is another very common area for a lot of open world games to step back. A few recent ones have really upped the animations but a lot still avoid having too many unique ones. With 2, I would honestly say the budget in animation is pretty darn healthy just balanced differently because the cutscenes that get serious - which happens pretty often - are very well animated and very elaborate. Best in the series, frankly. And the animation re-use is also bog standard for Xenoblade, with 1 and X doing the same. And to bring in another big example, Skyrim has not a single major cutscene with full, unique animation. There will be one or two unique ones, but 95% of all cutscene animation is standard game animation.
That said, 2 does likely have a smaller budget than a lot of your AAA boys but that's not new. That's just Nintendo. Xenoblade 1, X, Zelda Breath of the Wild, all three are in the same boat.
I think the polish issues are felt most from their lack of time with the hardware. They got some great use out of it in some ways, upping the graphical capabilities of the engine with great features. But it's clear that only having 1.5 years with the Switch limited their abilities to polish and optimize. But I do think rough edges is the best way to describe this. The game has a few areas that could use some refinement but is on the whole quite solid. Certainly more polished than 90% of the "AAA" stuff that comes out.
