Topic: Super Mario Odyssey

Ocarina hyrule field looked so much better than Twilight Princess hyrule field imo.

TWO WEEKS!!!!

@Ralizah If you actually compare Ocarina of Time's Hyrule Field to the other games of the time it comes out pretty well. Metal Gear Solid and Doom were all hallways and interiors, Final Fantasy 7 didn't even have everything proportional let alone collision, and Sonic Adventure was Sonic Adventure.

@Dezzy I mean that's also whack. Twilight Princess is probably the best Hyrule Field to date, you could look over the hills and see all of the dungeons and regions represented in the skybox, just like you could with Death Mountain and sort of Castle Town in Ocarina. They even made Hyrule Castle glow blue through the curtain Twilight so it would be recognizable. I love that attention to continuity in level-based games.

@Snaplocket Well I say out of all the textures (besides blurry), the flat grass texture definitely stands out the most. Like, that's not grass! Yeah, maybe in-game I notice it; it otherwise doesn't effect my enjoyment of the game, but outside of the game it can be a fun thing to discuss!

I do think it's strange that after BOTW we're stuck with flat grass textures again...you'd think they'd implement a grass shader or something, but perhaps that would cut too much into performance?

@Snaplocket Those games only had a few bad textures and were 480p, it's not really the same as a game like pikmin where the game's camera is facing the ground which consists of one or two ugly textures...

@Ryu_Niiyama Yep. At least it was better than Pikmin 1 and 2. Several different ground textures, and all the foliage helped to mask the lower rez grass maps.

Mario Odyssey does a combination of both, and it looks absolutely fine by the way (before people start thinking I was criticising the game). You probably don't get to see the textures up close like in that screenshot very often, their resolution is definitely higher than the ground textures in Pikmin 3, and the individual rendered grass blades give it some depth as well.

Water looks fine I think? I mean, it's still gorgeous in Sunshine, so I don't think Odyssey will disappoint at all. The only thing I remember about the New Donk City graphics is the lack of AA and the right angles of the buildings. That was a bit jarring, especially in stills. The other levels look great so far though.

New Donk City is also one of the densest environments Nintendo has ever made. All those trash cans and fire hydrants, cars, pedestrians, street and traffic lights. It's like Persona 5 but you can jump on people and get inside their heads OH WAIT.

I don't get all the texture obsession. Mario and Zelda aren't even first-person games so you can't even look that closely at the textures while playing the game. Ocarina of Time/Super Mario 64 still looks good, it never stopped looking good because it's art. There's just also a dynamic with games that newer and more technologically advanced art looks better. But there are still many, many games released today that don't look as beautiful as Ocarina/64 because they don't have either the variety of assets, the consistency with which those assets were created and how they all fit together to compose a world, or both.

...But it looks like Odyssey will have that because it's a big, diverse, beautiful game.

Yes Breath of the Wild has nice grass. Are we seriously going to complain about how Mario Odyssey looks? It looks as good if not better than MK8, one of the prettiest games ever made. This is what people mean when they talk about 'gamer entitlement.'

@Haru17 I think it just doesn't look great in that screenshot, the game looks amazing in motion though. I was really impressed with MK8 and 3D World and this has even surpassed those.

And who knows, maybe Mario is fighting shadows in palaces when he captures an enemy? We'll never know...

@Haru17 WARNING MINI-RANT And this is why people misuse and misunderstand 'gamer entitlement'. Who's complaining? I don't see anyone complaining. I see people discussing a game that they will probably all buy and enjoy. This is seriously one of the worst things about the internet. Just because you posted an opinion on the internet doesn't mean you're actually getting out the pitchforks and torches. We're just having a discussion, the way, I dunno, normal people do? We're just stuck typing words out over TCP so we must be conniving little entitled gamers... Seriously, how many people are out there talking about the traffic on 88 or how they hate their boss, and we're here talking about something actually interesting. Oh, but nobody gets up in arms about them!

@MasterWario You have take Haru's posts with a pinch of salt when he pulls out fancy words like entitlement

@Haru17 I'm not buying Odyssey because of the grass.

@Octane Water is something I think Nintendo does very well so I tend to pay attention to it in games. I'm loving the level and baddie variety that has been shown so far. Possess everything!

@Ryu_Niiyama I'll agree with you, water is something that Nintendo is great at portraying in their games. Sunshine and Skyward sword come to mind but I'd still say that Pikmin 3 has the best water.
However that wouldn't fit the Mario art style and is probably harder to replicate on larger bodies of water. The dynamic waves are impressive though.

I'd like to try to capture one of those underwater bullet bills from the Galaxy games, that could make for a fun race minigame!

@Ryu_Niiyama Yeah, Sunshine's water effects blew my mind fifteen years ago. It still looks good to this day. It's quite impressive what they managed to do with the GameCube's hardware.

Too Much Water Talky
This gonna be my GOTY 2017 for sure most likely. #NoMyZeldaBreathofTheMild!

@Octane I agree. The water looked great. Sure it's aged a little, but at the time it looked fantastic. That's always going to be the way as technology improves. That the old doesn't look quite as good as the new. Back then, playing it, I couldn't imagine it looking any better.

Sorry, but no, they're HIDEOUSLY ugly games. That's true for most games from that gen, but there's a clear progression from something like Super Mario 64 to something like Conker's Bad Fur Day, where the character models are still excessively polygonal but don't quite look like ripped bits of construction paper brought to life.

Also, RE: Hyrule Field in OoT, I'm not saying the existence of such a large, proportional 3D environment wasn't impressive at the time, but compared to the "hallways and interiors" of other games you mentioned, it feels very boring and lifeless. Same with what I played of TP, actually. BotW's environments are stunning and continually engaging, though, which is a first for the series (as well they should be, considering 90% of that game is spent tromping around the forests and mountains of Hyrule).

I agree that Odyssey's lack of detailed grass textures don't matter too much. Platformers are about kinetic action, movement, and environmental interaction, and Odyssey looks to excel with regard to these things. Anybody who is zooming in on flat grass textures in a Mario game is missing the point.

Even though it's not really a main focus of any game that I've played the water levels are usually my favourite, at least in 3D games (Classic Sonic scarred my young mind )

When I was younger I always remember loving the various water environments from my childhood Wii games. Beach Bowl Galaxy from SMG was to me the best thing ever! I used to always go back that level and just swim around with shells and try and climb the waterfall. The bonus star with ice mario pretty much blew my mind when I was 8 or 9

The Ryoshima Coast section from Okami also has some really interesting water sections as well (they had a whole palace underwater!). Skyward Sword's sand sea and flooded Faron Woods also stand out to me.

Anyway I've gone on some weird watery swim through memory lane, what I really mean to say is that I'm very excited to spend too much time in the Seaside Kingdom and I'm sure I'll enjoy the other water areas that haven't been officially announced

@Octane Yeah, F-Zero GX especially comes to mind regarding how impressive GC games looked.

REmake was insanely good looking on the Gamecube. Those high-quality pre-rendered backgrounds were delicious.