Wyrdness said:
The Pokemon screen is an off screen low quality shot so tbh you're jumping the gun somewhat because you can't exactly see everything in play to be making assumptions on lighting and such. I'm sure GF is better than any of us but you're not taking into account series approach and art direction to me the screen looks something similar to the approach taken with WW where it's not aiming for any of what you're looking for AAA games are not just about lighting and geometry. Pokemon games were never really about graphics so if that's what you were looking forward to I doubt you were going to be satisfied as even on previous platforms they've always gone for modest graphics and focused more on the content. |
I'm not sure you understand where I'm coming from. Off screen footage doesn't even matter when analyzing what techniques are being used in the rendering engine. From what I can see, this is just a 3DS game. I've seen other off screen footage of games like Zelda Breath of the Wild, and could tell they were using a PBR engine. My eye is trained to analyze these kinds of things because I've been studying them for years. I'm making assumptions but they're damn good assumptions seeing that there are aspects of a PBR engine that are unmistakable even from far away. You have your dynamic lighting of course which take my word for it, this screen does NOT have, and then you have your meat and potatoes of PBR, which is Albedo (or Color), Metalness, Roughness, Normals, etc. That's why a game like Mario Odyssey looks the way it does. Of course it's their amazing and skilled art department, and then it's the standards of HD game development that also help make modern day games look the way they do.
I would hope Gamefreak's modeling art department is better than me, but base off of this image, I would say at least in the modeling department...they aren't. This does not show off how you do or create HD games on a device like Switch. Those rocks are at best, a hexagonal or octogonal primitive that's been cut in half, unwrapped and textured, nothing more and would take me at most 30 minutes to replicate. This is not the quality I would expect from them, especially with tools like Unreal Engine 4 are their fingertips.
But yes, I agree that the series has an art style to maintain. But you're mixing art style with modern standards. I don't care about the art style, that's great. But Wind Waker HD on Wii U at least looked like this:
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That's what I mean by more dynamic lighting or even just bloom, you can see the difference between the two almost instantly, the same can't be said about this Switch "leak". And I never said AAA games are all about lighting and modeling, but it's a decent chunk of it. Art and modeling along with animation are essentially 3 of the 5 pillars (coding and audio being the other 2) so they're important.
But look, I was satisfied with how Pokemon looked on Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, DS, and 3DS because they took advantage of what the hardware had to offer. They looked like games on their respective devices. However, this leaked image, does NOT look representative of what Switch is capable of and it's quite underwhelming. I'm not a graphics whore, my favorite games are games that do stylistic approaches, but I'm going to call out incompetency when I see it. The tools, training, and engines that are available today are more than enough to develop something that doesn't look like a 3DS game on the most powerful mobile chipset on the market. That's the issue I have with this screenshot. That being said, I still retain the idea that this was just a tech demo for Pokemon Stars just to get a feel for the hardware.
