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Otter on 07 April 2025
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Leynos said:
Otter said:

Whoops my comment didn't properly post, there was more after... None the less Xenoblade  is closer to a 360 era game in texture & animation, so it's fitting within the norms of that era (12GB). It's still not fully voiced for every line of dialogue either. I think the only game that needed much more of that era FFXIII with all its pre-rendered video clips.

Recall how horribly compressed all the pre-rendered videos in TOTK were? That's the cost of it staying under 32GB.  One thing Nintendo does in general benefit from though is relying less on FMV (instead mostly using real time cutscenes) & less on performance capture which is also very data intensive. 

Now Nintendo is taking a jump though,  texture quality, animation & FMV quality will all likely double and reflect what we saw happen on PS4/X1 for story & performance driven games (Zelda/Xenoblade) . PS4/X1 developers had cheaper  bluerays and made use of available 50GB, Nintendo however will probably shy away from 64GB carts until the aforementioned franchises rear their heads. 

Xenoblade 3 and X would not run on a 360. X took the full 1GB on Wii U to run. 3 uses about everything Switch has to run and still needed software upscaling. X was 23GB on Wii U and optimized to look better with more content on Switch, down to 13 GB. Again, it's just good optimization.

No one said it would run on 360, I said the asset quality is closer to 360... This is not dunking on Nintendo/Monolith, just stating on how it relates to file size expectations. Definitely more than "just good optimisation" and useful when informing expectation on game sizes, as something like DK doesn't look like it should balloon in size just because it's on Switch 2. I'd expect and look out for that for future big RPGs like Zelda/Xenoblade




And it's great that Monolith shrunk the game on Switch, probably the OG game was optimised around the 25GB Wii U disc and the cost difference of the 16GB vs 32GB Switch cards incentivised them to cut down on that. The pre-rendered cutscenes are more compressed on Switch, something that's not a big deal though as there are not many.