Just to be clear, I’m talking specifically about its environments.
It uses the most basic of height maps with no tri-planer mapping, no alpha blending, no projectors, no detail mapping, not even a roughness map! Texture and normals, that’s it!
The water looks like someone googles “how to make water” and ended up using a simple shader passing two noise filters.
Paths are just painted on the terrain and it looks like there’s no tool to flatten the terrain.
And it just goes on and on and on why it looks so terrible.
But the real kicker is it’s not even open world!
Why?
How does this happen?
I can not wrap my head around this.
Why would they not just borrow the tools developed for Breath of the Wild?
The important thing is t hat they do not aim for photorealism at all. Cartoon look does not exactly need PBR materials or normal maps or detail maps. Those can actually break semi-cartoon look. So they’re not using it.
Here’s similar style:
This is Tales of Berseria, 2016. Not a single bumpmapped material in sight. And it works.
Their title simply does not need any of it, that’s why and how.
I love how you assume one teams technology can just “slot into” another teams tech stack. BOTW is made by an entirely different team, using different tools, skills etc.
Just because 1 switch title has X tech in their engine doesnt mean every game will have it. Its much more complicated than that. Thats before you get into just how specific BOTWs tech stack and art style is. It may not even have been usable for their purposes, due to certain restrictions imposed by said tech stack.
AFAIK it doesnt matter anyway as arceus is widely regarded as one of the better pokemon games recently with many reviewers and players pointing to it as a source of how to do a modern pokemon game right, compared with other offerings recently coming or came out.
I find it hard to believe that the team behind Breath of the Wild’s environment tools could not lend a hand to the Pokémon team.
And I know it’s regarded as a better title, The game play looks fine. But I’m not the only person mentioning how bad the environment looks. Lots of people have mentioned it.
Come on, that’s like the most flattering pic of the game. I’m seeing loads of screen shots of water that looks like melted plastic, cliffs that are stretched out and look ridiculously bad, lighting that fights with the skybox, and lots of textures that blend horribly.
It’s not just me saying it looks bad, too. It’s a pretty common complaint.
well i guess my take-away would be that maybe it doesn’t really matter all that much? Game sold $500 million. How many people bought it, versus how many saying it looks bad? And the ones who say it look bad… bought it.
“Lend a hand” that phrase alone really does show how naive you are thinking about this. No they absolutely could not just “lend a hand”, its a big endeavour to onboard an external team both financially and in terms of a time investment, especially if they have no experience with your toolset and use another engine.
Do you have any idea how much of the BOTW team it would have taken, to make Arceus have similar tech based on engine differences?
You are basically saying “why didnt nintendo use 2 entire teams instead of 1?” Which the obvious answer is that makes no sense from a business perspective.
The implication is that, if kids didn’t have video games, they’d be perfectly happy playing with sticks and rocks outside too. In other words, they are easily satisfied. So why do more work than is needed to make them happy?
Maybe 1 in 10,000 customers even has the notion that mountain textures and trails in some other game looked nicer. Everybody else is just enjoying the game, because gameplay is tuned such that they keep having fun, and don’t hit roadblocks to that.
Graphics and all of that does incur a cost, so you have to be able to justify it. If this team can make sales without incurring as much cost on graphics, doesn’t that indicate something? If they do as well as Zelda team but with less money, haven’t they exceeded the Zelda teams performance?
This game simply doesn’t really need it and it doesn’t really matter that much.
I would also recommend to try playing CDDA, Dwarf Fortress Classic, Rogue, NetHack, DoomRL. In videogames, pretty graphics are optional and often are not even necessary.
There’s also Shin Megampi Tensei: Nocturne and Persona 4 which uses lower level of detail compared to mordern titles, but that’s enough to convey the game world.
We also had Inside as an example. It is definitely pretty, but there’s no bumpmapping, it barely uses textures, and faces do not have facial features.
.
Kids are much easier to please and do not investigate every grass stalk with a magnifying glass.
That’s revenue or profit, not budget. Also IIRC it looked even worse.
I guess if the metrics you care about are not commercial success, then you can just come up with any sort of conclusions that you want.
If you are trying to make more money than you spent, and pay for bills, and employees, etc, then don’t you think you should be asking questions about the pokemon team with the assumption that they have something to teach you? Not you teaching them?
I mean, they have roaring success, yet clearly they have different priorities than you do. Do you have success like them? No. Do the games that you think look better have success like they do? No… So it seems like an attitude of “these guys are morons, why didnt they do better” is about as bass-ackwards as you could have.
They won the game, and you are essentially saying that they played it wrong. You then point to other people you think played correctly - but they didn’t win the game!
So are you actually a game developer, or just a game critic? Because critics don’t understand or care about the actual business side of things (e.g. people have to make a living, so they do what they must do, not what they want to do).
I think any game developer, upon seeing success like this, and especially if it is counter-intuitive to what you thought was important, would be asking questions like, “what do these guys know that I don’t know?”
Does Windbound have 242 different monster models in it?
The difficulty in creating games like Pokemon and Shin Megami Tensei lies in their huge monster roster. While there are some recolors, the number of creatures you’d need to model, animate and voice is very large. This sort of game benefits from simpler visuals. Actually, if we look through Shin Megami Tensei series, graphical upgrade caused them to split later PS2 games, as apparently the cost of repainting everything became too large. Nocturne (earlier title) had 185 demons, while Kuzonoha (later title) had something like 70+ in the game one, and added another 70 in the game two.
Also, while I’ve never played pokemon games, IIRC the appeal lies in monster mechanics, meaning grinding, evolution, capture and so on. And not in the world being pretty. It is not breath of the wild roamer game.
If a company were developing a game that they knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that just about everyone in the target audience would buy why would they invest a ton of resources into that game? Pokemon games are to Nintendo what the sports games are to EA. A quick cashgrab every couple of years that its fans always buy.
I get the whole “they’re success so they’re right and you’re wrong” argument, but come on. Stop bending over backwards to pretend like Aceus didn’t do the absolute bare minimal for environmental art.
It’s a AAA game and their world looks like it’s from the early 2000’s.
I get that there’s a lot behind all these models and everything else.
And I get that I’m not on their level.
That shouldn’t be a free pass for an aspect of the game that multiple people have commented on.
Im not saying it should have a huge budget for environment design, I’m saying it should have a budget, period.
Also, Windbound did great considering their budget.
You don’t understand how business works at all. Or even just general principles of work.
There is no reward in anything in life except for maybe academics for doing more than was needed to accomplish the goal.
If you and me are both trying to push a boulder up a hill, and you voluntarily add more weight to your boulder… nobody cares, and then when we do it a second time, guess who has advantage?
The insult is that what you call “bare minimum” is dramatically more than you apparently can even understand. Who are you to quantify the effort involved when you aren’t throwing punches in the same ring?
