Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

Can I say Astral Chain is an exceptional game! Platinum's best to date. It's oozing with atmosphere; it's very immersive, the legion mechanics are enjoyable, and to top it all off, it's very stylish.
What is with Japanese games being so stylish and fun? Unlike the dribble, we see every day on these consoles.

Because as I've said before, western publishers have limited themselves to making the same games in the same couple of genres that often look the same, and making less games in the first place. And those ones are often the ones with the biggest marketing budgets.

But to be fair, at this point that only accounts for like a dozen (maybe two dozen with the annual sports games). It feels like Nintendo released more games this year than EA, Activision and Bethesda combined tbh.

That’s what I was saying about Astral Chain after having played it.

Then I played Bayonetta 2 to check out how it looked on Switch Lite (looks amazing btw) and was like weeeell, maybe Bayonetta is still my favorite.

But it’s so good, I don’t think it’s really necessary to compare. It’s one of Platinum’s best, up there with all the other A game titles they produce. What more needs to be said.

My favorite looking is Wonderful 101, its more my style. But Bayonetta 2 and Astral Chain definitely are more impressive.

Platinum really doesn't have any misses when it comes to their own IPs. I am curious to see what enters the pipeline for them next. Between Astral Chain's release and them leaving Granblue Fantasy:Relink, they've got a lot of staff available. Babylon's Fall looks pretty close to completion (I'd expect it to be out late next year or early 2021 at the latest given it's probably getting a release date at E3 as it's not targeting PS5) and Bayonetta 3 was announced 6 months prior to that so it's entirely possible it's a summer title next year. They do tend to usually hit 3 year dev cycles after all. So I'd say it's fair to assume they have 1-3 projects we don't know about in development as well...

@JaxonH

I understand the concept of diminishing returns, but I'm just saying it's not clear how much it actually applies to video game graphics. The example of polygon counts that that Guerilla Games artist mentioned is an example where it absolutely does apply. No question, increased polygon counts from this point onwards won't be worth that much.

There are some issues like that where you will get diminishing returns. Those are issues where you have improvement along a predetermined scale that can be identified ahead of time. Other examples of that will be things like texture resolution, screen resolution, frame rate, etc etc.

But then you also have situations where there's just a complete revolution in how certain things are done, where a new technique is developed and it completely replaces everything that came before. Things like normal mapping, post processing, deferred rendering, are all in this category. Ray tracing will be too.
With these areas, you can't know ahead of time whether there will be diminishing returns because you simply don't know how developers will end up using them.

A good example in the last decade, that a lot of people have mostly ignored but it's incredibly obvious if you go back and compare, is the switch to using motion capture for pretty much all the animation in AAA games. In the PS2 era, almost no-one used motion capture. Now everyone does. It's lead to a massive improvement, especially in terms of facial expressions on characters (which it's almost impossible to do by hand)

Western publishers' only talent is making games look exceptionally realistic. Everything else is just mediocre to garbage.

Astral Chain is above Bayo 2(for me) just for the atmosphere and legion mechanics. Love that you can tag-team a guy with ease.

I'd put Astral Chain at the top though I wouldn't say I gave Wonderful 101 a fair chance. It wasn't until I played through Bayonetta fully last year that I realized that for each Platinum IP to start on easiest difficulties and work your way up to harder difficulties.

By that time though, the speed at which Wii U games were being ported to Switch meant it made sense to wait for a Switch version. Felt the same way about MPT though that Game Awards 2018 rumour seems to have gone the same way as Mother 3 localization.

I liked Astral Chain a lot. It definitely is very fun and had some great set pieces.

At the same time, once you get all the legions and have unlocked all the abilities, it almost becomes a bit too complex. There are so many options to attack the enemies and it all becomes a bit too cluttered for my taste. It does a good job at not throwing the kitchen sink at you all at once, but nonetheless I still felt sorta confused by it.

I also think I prefer DMC 3 to 5 because of the fewer options it gives you (obviously since it is an older game).

Still both awesome games that I’m happy I played though.

Sure, you can cherry pick the rubbish like FIFA, Anthem and Fallout 76; but it it only shows you don't play a lot of games outside of those

I mean, just this year alone we had Control, Jedi: Fallen Order, Dreams, The Outer Worlds, to name a few. And there's probably a bunch of great games I'm not even aware of. Good games are released every year, from every region, you just need to know where to look, and ignore the obvious money grabs.

@Dezzy
Oh I think its crystal clear. He was talking about more than just polygons, even if that was the subject of the OP's post. I mean he said it straight up, the difference between each generation is less and less and eventually the focus will have to shift to features. They can have the biggest disruptor they want, it will still have less and less perceived visual fidelity. Everyone can see the perceived improvements are less and less. Hence the Hellblade pic comparison.

It applies to video games more than anything I've seen. You can get technical and say oh they're making all these improvements, mocap, and ya, they are. And yes, its certainly improving. And yet even so, the perceived improvements are still less, and less, and less, and have been for some time.

I refer you to the Hellblade pic comparison. It's really does say it all. Have never been able to see such a small difference across 3 generations of power. And it's only going to get smaller and more nitpicky. When I can look at the new gen graphics and can't tell the difference from a photo, believe me, they don't have much wiggle room in perceived difference left.

It's just an inherent truth that the hard limit of realism exists, and any time a limit exists, so does diminishing returns.

@JaxonH That Hellblade comparison... I've not played the game yet, but I'm guessing that is a cutscene shot, not an in-game shot?

To me this is baloney. The main reason for the resolution race has been to sell bigger display tech. Turning the same 720p graphics into an 8k image doesn't make it much more real looking, it just cleanup some edges and makes it more tolerable on a 60" screen.

But I can record some video with my 1080p camera and display it on a 1080p screen and I'm pretty sure it will look more realistic looking than any video game on any 8k tech out there.

The key to improving video game graphics is not resolution, it's about speeding up the production time/cost and memory requirements of life-like textures, animations and other visual FX. Current 3D graphics development is so intensive that only the biggest AAA developers can shoulder the production costs. When the software used to create games becomes more intelligent and provides developers with significant short-cuts to current processes, then we could still see significant improvements to in-game graphics, but it needs the industry to stop chasing 8k/16k/32k resolutions and instead put improved computing power towards running more intelligent software.

The visual improvement seen between Toy Story 1 and Toy Story 4 is not down to resolution, it's down to the increasingly sophisticated animation software, alongside more powerful hardware that enables Pixar to design and render the animation over cost-effective timescales.

@gcunit
No that's in game!

Well, it's probably from a cutscene, but they are pretty much always rendered real time nowadays, so it doesn't make a difference.

I have a feeling Toy Story 5 will be at cinema 5 or 6 years later on 2025.
The ending of Toy Story 4 was quite disappointing, like hanging ending.

So Bravely Default II is listed in the coming soon section of the US eShop with Nintendo listed as the publisher.

Not surprising, but funny considering the amount of people on the Switch subreddit saying it was a Square Enix announcement rather than a Nintendo one.

@IceClimbers The other Bravely games are Nintendo published so surely Bravely Default II being Nintendo published was obvious?

@IceClimbers It's not a Nintendo announcement. None of Nintendo's studios are developing it, and it's probably not being funded by Nintendo. It just happens to be a Switch-exclusive game, and Nintendo publishes several of S-E's games in the West.

@Dezzy Was mo-cap really that unusual before recently? I know most N64 games with humans used mo-cap after all (Both Legend of Zeldas, Goldeneye, Turok, Tony Hawk, basically every sports title on the system etc). You can check the credits for mo-cap, there's probably more, I was just pulling from interviews I've read. I'm under the impression that they were just able to implement more points of movement with more powerful hardware, not that the technique changed.

Also, @SKTTR, 4k is 4x the size of 1080p, not 2x. You're doubling both edges.

@Ralizah The weird thing is, Square Enix haven’t seem to acknowledge its existence on social media which is odd for a game that they’re developing and was announced at The Game Awards