| Jumpin said: Curl does make a valid point, there is room for improvement in Xenoblade Chronicles X, including the stuff around the Skell license. There were a lot of polish issues with the game, but the game did so much right that I found many of those issues easily forgivable... but HOPE they fix them the next time they do an open world Xeno-game. Breath of the Wild is significantly more polished (there are some framerate issues in about 0.01% of the game, unfortunately at one spot you're probably going to go more than few times, but be easily fixed with some scaled up Switch hardware). There are reasons: Breath of the Wild had a SIGNIFICANTLY bigger dev team and budget than XCX. Breath of the Wild also had the benefit of XCX pioneering a lot of design work around Nintendo's version of go everywhere open world; you can see the DNA of XCX in BotW. I do agree with Curl on the criticism that XCX doesn't make it easy to get some of that low-end material, while BotW makes it very simple; and when you get to those quests where you need like 30-40 of a low-end item, you'll probably have 800. While in XCX you might have to go bug smashing for 45-60 minutes. In that way, XCX REEKS of a lack of appropriate game-test support on the issue. To be fair, Breath of the Wild IS exceptional in this area, no game of this type of scale comes close to getting it THAT smooth. A lot of it had to do with the fact that BotW was heavily QA'd, they halted production for the entire dev team to go and play the game through - hundreds of people at once. I would guess XCX only had designers, a QA team, and production staff played XCX (add that's normal) and signed off on stuff to make deadlines or because of bare adequacy: Breath of the Wild's team had the flexibility to push deadlines back and demand for all-around greatness. If Nintendo gave XCX2 the same development process as Breath of the Wild and allowed them more flexibility with deadlines, it would be (IMO) the undisputed best game ever made by Nintendo.
On the "more systems" thing. That's mostly a genre thing. While both use similar open-world progression: Xenoblade is in the RPG genre while Zelda is an action-adventure. Xeno games have been on the system heavy side right from Xenogears; and, in fact, the most system-slim game in the franchise, Xenosaga Episode 2, is generally considered the weakest. But the core difference is that RPG mechanics generally "simulate" actions rather than have players directly execute them. While Xenoblade added action elements into the battle system, the game remains deeply entrenched in RPG mechanics and systems; and while Breath of the Wild adds in more simulation elements, the game remains an action/adventure game at its core. |
I would agree with most of what you said, but I think polish isn't the right word for the game as a whole, it's more experience of making games on that scale and having it complement the mechanics of the game. There are areas in the game that can be streamlined or improved for sure, but what works does so in miraculous fashion. There is nothing I would say that detracts from the game as a whole.
And I would agree that more systems are due to a difference in genre and approach, which is why I find it irrelevant when people say one should be more like the other. One is not even supposed to be like the other on any scale.
Last edited by bigtakilla - on 16 November 2018
