Xbox |OT|

[shikamaru317]

Angelus said:

shikamaru317 said:

Doesn't seem like the new Redfall gameplay won over any more doubters than the E3 gameplay did last year, like/dislike ratio is just as bad if not worse. Seeing 2.2k likes/1.5k dislikes on the main Bethesda Youtube channel, 413 likes and 228 dislikes on Gamespot reposting, 1.2k likes and 482 dislikes on IGN.

I suspect it is the production value throwing most people off as the gameplay seems good (I was a bit skeptical of the game before but they won me over today with the new Gameplay footage). It just doesn't look like a AAA Xbox Series/PC only exclusive should look. In some ways it looks worse than the now 6 year old Dishonored 2, which had to be able to run on base Xbox One. For instance look at the differences in interior quality here:

The hardwood flooring looks worse than in Dishonored 2, the lantern texture sucks compared to similar pieces of environmental clutter on the desk in Dishonored 2, the clothing textures on the man look very outdated, even the lighting seems worse.

I suspect that after Dishonored 2 underperformed in sales, Bethesda pulled alot of their budget, which is why neither Deathloop nor Redfall looked as good graphically as Dishonored 2. It's a real shame. Hopefully Xbox will give them back a proper AAA budget for their next 2 games from Arkane Lyon and Arkane Austin.

You're getting a bit silly now. One of these games has individual, dense, but ultimately small scale levels that you load into one at a time. The other, is an open world game, and while it's probably still smaller than most open worlds these days, it's still by far the biggest that Arkane has ever done. Given the care that they usually put into their level design, assuming they've done the same here, that's A LOT of work. Everything doesn't always have to push the graphics envelope to new heights. The game looks good.

Yes, one is smaller denser levels and the other is open world, but there is also a whole generation tech difference between the two, Dishonored 2 only needed to run on the 1.3 tflop, Jaguar CPU Xbox One, while Redfall only needs to be able to run on the 4 tflop, Zen 2 CPU Xbox Series S. It's never a good look when a studio's 6 years older game looks better graphically than their new game does. If a pretty Xbox fan like me is noticing and calling out these things, you can imagine the field day that the Sony ponies are having with this right now, especially since they have open world games that look like Horizon: Forbidden West to compare it too. It doesn't help matters that Xbox has long had a reputation for not pushing graphics as hard on their exclusives as Sony does on theirs (for instance State of Decay 2 vs Days Gone, or Halo Infinite vs TLOU 2). That is a reputation Xbox is going to need to start working to get past in the future imo, Sony will always have more wow factor on their AAA reveals as long as they continue to have better graphics on them, and wow factor is important for building up a larger fanbase.

I do fully acknowledge that Forza Motorsport smokes Gran Turismo 7 on graphics though, good job on Turn 10 there. Heck, even Forza Motorsport 7, which released 4 years before GT7, looks better on PC ultra settings than GT7 looks on PS5, in spite of the PC requirements needed to hit ultra settings being lower than PS5's specs I believe. Turn 10 are graphics gods for Xbox, as are The Coalition and Ninja Theory. I just wish some of Xbox's other AAA studios would start making graphics as big of a focus as those 3 do.

Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 26 January 2023