Ljink96 said:
I'm not sure you understand where I'm coming from. Off screen footage doesn't even matter when analyzing what techniques are being used in the rendering engine. From what I can see, this is just a 3DS game. I've seen other off screen footage of games like Zelda Breath of the Wild, and could tell they were using a PBR engine. My eye is trained to analyze these kinds of things because I've been studying them for years. I'm making assumptions but they're damn good assumptions seeing that there are aspects of a PBR engine that are unmistakable even from far away. You have your dynamic lighting of course which take my word for it, this screen does NOT have, and then you have your meat and potatoes of PBR, which is Albedo (or Color), Metalness, Roughness, Normals, etc. That's why a game like Mario Odyssey looks the way it does. Of course it's their amazing and skilled art department, and then it's the standards of HD game development that also help make modern day games look the way they do. I would hope Gamefreak's modeling art department is better than me, but base off of this image, I would say at least in the modeling department...they aren't. This does not show off how you do or create HD games on a device like Switch. Those rocks are at best, a hexagonal or octogonal primitive that's been cut in half, unwrapped and textured, nothing more and would take me at most 30 minutes to replicate. This is not the quality I would expect from them, especially with tools like Unreal Engine 4 are their fingertips. But yes, I agree that the series has an art style to maintain. But you're mixing art style with modern standards. I don't care about the art style, that's great. But Wind Waker HD on Wii U at least looked like this:
vs
That's what I mean by more dynamic lighting or even just bloom, you can see the difference between the two almost instantly, the same can't be said about this Switch "leak". And I never said AAA games are all about lighting and modeling, but it's a decent chunk of it. Art and modeling along with animation are essentially 3 of the 5 pillars (coding and audio being the other 2) so they're important. But look, I was satisfied with how Pokemon looked on Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, DS, and 3DS because they took advantage of what the hardware had to offer. They looked like games on their respective devices. However, this leaked image, does NOT look representative of what Switch is capable of and it's quite underwhelming. I'm not a graphics whore, my favorite games are games that do stylistic approaches, but I'm going to call out incompetency when I see it. The tools, training, and engines that are available today are more than enough to develop something that doesn't look like a 3DS game on the most powerful mobile chipset on the market. That's the issue I have with this screenshot. That being said, I still retain the idea that this was just a tech demo for Pokemon Stars just to get a feel for the hardware. |
You're arguing a point of view which seems to be a bit inflated on expectations tbh Wind Waker HD is not Wind Waker on GC which make that argument a bit null and void because in regards to WW people wanted something like the tech demo which WW was not aiming for that's the point, on a technical stand point the game was not on the same level as something like Prime which was out at the time ore even the likes of RE4 and such, the game still ended up fine as it executed what it was going for that's the point what exactly would what you're complaining about add to the Pokemon experience for one thing as it's never been a series that relied on such things.
Even on GBA, DS and 3DS the games weren't on the same standing as many other games they were all modest attempts at best when it came to pushing the hardware here is MHS on 3DS a game that arrived in the same period as S/M.
This is a step above of the Pokemon games and was on the same platform release during the same period.
