I love this thread.

Don't tell me half of you guys are serious about boycotting the game because they possibly decided to downgrade the trailer graphics vs adding in more quality to the scenery of the lands you will actually be exploring. Again, Xenoblade was never really a "close-up" game, although I agree they could have done a tad bit better with the models but I understand they want to stick with the "Anime" feel.

When I first watched it, I thought the 2015 looked better. I had to look really closely the second time to see what most of you were talking about. I guess you can call it a downgrade, but if it was done for the sake of the framerate, then I'm happy they did it.

There's definitely a downgrade on the ground textures, but the rest can literally be attributed to a different time of day(Lights are a bit brighter, fog is gone)

Not even going to buy this now. Embarrassing.

If there's really a downgrade, and they made it for frame rate, I would gladly happy as well.

Someone mentioned that it could the time of the day, and it could really be. Still, not sure. 

It doesn't look too bad imo. Most of it just seems to be from a different setting! Like the 2015 version has lights in the mech suit while the original doesn't and that seems to be the difference in most things... Different outfit, different mech, different lighting so idk if it is that much of a downgrade but rather looks like that the original version is a lot darker which just might hide the issues and a lot of the things just might be that it's a different "setting" (like the mech/outfit) altogether

This one is a pretty drastic example of the difference between time of day.

I noticed the issues, but I also noticed that they had some texture pop in and I think that's the major culprit here. Because I have noticed inconsistencies from time to time, some things looking better in one vid than the other but then it being reversed for other things. And the ground texture, which is messed up in the first opening clip of the recent direct, is fine later on in that same instance it seems and then looks odd again from another angle. The alien army sequence actually has major inconsistencies WITHIN itself. When first marching in, there's no grass loaded, then in another clip there is, then in antoher there isn't. Inconsistencies like this I think do come back to textures popping in and the delay in that. You even see this at the start when it cuts to that angle looking over his shoulder: the gun and shoulder texture start out really blurry and then load in and look comparable to the original trailer look. And lighting does play a roll in this. Overall, I think the visuals are largely unchanged and loading and popin issues are causing inconsistencies.  On that note, I think that these are the exact kind of issues that the downlaodable packs will address most noticeably. 

Yeah I noticed that. At first I was like, ouch, major downgrade, then the full resolution texture popped in. I guess this is where those hard drive installs come in.

Yeah, just edited that into my post before you responded :P .  I would also recommend using the faster 32gigs onboard the system rather tahn an external.