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Forums - Nintendo - Xenoblade Chronicles X - Nintendo Direct Footage 11.5.2014

outlawauron on 08 November 2014
megafenix said:

he is being sarcastic but with a good reason, it doesnt take much effort for your eyes to tell that the second image has more detailed graphical assets like the water refractions, the landscapes look more detaield and also the mountains look more rocky; in other words, we can see that the game has been graphically updated rather than being downgraded

I suppose the water has reflections and that's a plus, but everything else in the 2nd image looks worse imo. Could be a product of different lighting and location though.



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the_dengle on 08 November 2014
RolStoppable said:
the_dengle said:

(...)

It has less to do with Monolith and with the Wii U combined than it has to do with the design philophies behind Xenoblade. The developers aimed for achieving a good look with relatively few polygons in their characters so that they would have more resources available for the environment.

Let me chime in here to say that Monolith was lazy. It's perfectly possible to achieve both things at the same time with a simple technique called level of detail that already came to use during the fifth generation. What it means is that there isn't just a single model for every character, but two or more, and depending on the situation they get swapped on the fly. So if a character gets farther away from the camera, a less resource-intensive model is used, and that works the other way around too. It's just that Monolith couldn't be bothered to create higher quality models, not even for the cutscenes where the designers have complete control over the camera angles that are used.

Or perhaps it wasn't considered important enough to go through the trouble, given that all cutscenes show the characters with their current equipment; it probably would have taken too much time to get everything up to the same standard.

Actually, just the other day I read that characters DO have a more detailed model used for cutscenes in Xenoblade. Supposedly the cutscene models have about 1000 more polygons in the faces. The extra polys going to the faces would make sense with your suggestion that the equipment played a factor, as the faces are the part of the model that would be least affected by equipment changes.

I suppose I wouldn't rule out the possibility that Monolith is just lazy though.



the_dengle on 08 November 2014
outlawauron said:
megafenix said:

he is being sarcastic but with a good reason, it doesnt take much effort for your eyes to tell that the second image has more detailed graphical assets like the water refractions, the landscapes look more detaield and also the mountains look more rocky; in other words, we can see that the game has been graphically updated rather than being downgraded

I suppose the water has reflections and that's a plus, but everything else in the 2nd image looks worse imo. Could be a product of different lighting and location though.

I don't see how. First pic is obviously from early in development with its sparsity of detail. Objects in the background are hard to compare, but the foreground doesn't even look finished in the first pic. If it was downgraded, the opposite should be true: the earlier footage should show some high graphical standard that the final product is unable to meet, resulting in the finished game looking unfinished by comparison.



Soundwave on 08 November 2014

Game looks great.



the_dengle on 08 November 2014
RolStoppable said:
the_dengle said:

Actually, just the other day I read that characters DO have a more detailed model used for cutscenes in Xenoblade. Supposedly the cutscene models have about 1000 more polygons in the faces.

I suppose I wouldn't rule out the possibility that Monolith is just lazy though.

Right, I should have said "couldn't be bothered to create higher quality models than the best ones they put into the game", because LoD is so common practice that it's basically unthinkable that a modern game doesn't use it.

I'm pretty sure Xenoblade has loads of Level of Detail going on, just not so much in the character models as in the environment.



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curl-6 on 08 November 2014

Monolith isn't lazy, they just want to finish the game this generation.
It's already crazy ambitious for their first HD game, hence why it'll be arriving 5 years after their previous game, the original Xenoblade.



Nuvendil on 08 November 2014
RolStoppable said:
the_dengle said:

Actually, just the other day I read that characters DO have a more detailed model used for cutscenes in Xenoblade. Supposedly the cutscene models have about 1000 more polygons in the faces.

I suppose I wouldn't rule out the possibility that Monolith is just lazy though.

Right, I should have said "couldn't be bothered to create higher quality models than the best ones they put into the game", because LoD is so common practice that it's basically unthinkable that a modern game doesn't use it.


They are using LoD, you can even spot the switch between levels in the distance at some points in the Treehouse stream where lower poly models for the structures in NLA are swapped for the high poly ones. This game would be unplayable on a PS4 if everything was rendered full steam full detail all the time. What Monolith has done, as with the first game, is sacrifice upclose details for higher quality distant models. They are more concerned with large scale than small scale, simple as that. 



TheWPCTraveler on 08 November 2014
TheLegendaryWolf said:

Other developers used little to no effort on Wii U ports.

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Materia-Blade on 08 November 2014
curl-6 said:
Monolith isn't lazy, they just want to finish the game this generation.
It's already crazy ambitious for their first HD game, hence why it'll be arriving 5 years after their previous game, the original Xenoblade.

I'd say 4-4.5 years. it is coming early 2015 and they probably didn't start it imedeately after xenoblade chronicles on wii (2010).



Materia-Blade on 08 November 2014
the_dengle said:
Materia-Blade said:

I dont think most of the assets is of limited quality. I'd say it's the minority, like any other game. oh, and low polygon should only reffer to N64-PS2 level models, that's why i corrected that part. the characters in XCX are LOWER polygon than the wii u can normally handle (but still great), just like the first xeno on wii. I'm thinking that has more to do with monolith expirience and style than wii u hardware itself.

And that's why I say "high"/"low" depends on who you ask in this case. N64 models were low-poly 10 years ago. Nowadays models that were high-poly 10 years ago are low poly.

Xenoblade X was not made 15 or 10 or 5 years ago, it is being released in 2015 and it should be compared to its peers, not its ancestors. Skyward Sword character models far exceeded those in Xenoblade (even in Twilight Princess, a GameCube game, Link had a more detailed model than any Xenoblade party member), and I fully expect Zelda to blow Xenoblade out of the water yet again in this regard on Wii U. And Zelda will probably be in the mid-range of typical AA and AAA 8th-gen games. It's not a criticism of Xenoblade, it's a reflection of the dev team's priorities and it's fine.

It has less to do with Monolith and with the Wii U combined than it has to do with the design philophies behind Xenoblade. The developers aimed for achieving a good look with relatively few polygons in their characters so that they would have more resources available for the environment.

I kinda agree. I just don't think the character models are big enough to hinder the landscape much. so the lower than average quality for the characters could be just lack of experience from monolith.