Topic: Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition

Loads of new previews just dropped. Tons of videos on youtube. I'll just link this exploration of the Shoulder area from gamexplain. This is the new expansion, and looks awesome:

@NintendoByNature

It'll probably be fine. These games sell significantly less than the more mainline Nintendo stuff. They were capable of selling something like 6 million retail copies of Animal Crossing (another 6 million digital).

This game will probably sell more like 1- 1.5 million, so I assume they'll be able to handle that demand.

@Dezzy good to hear. I Might roll the dice on the Wal-Mart copy for 10 bucks off. Thank you.

I really hope the sidequest marker thing is something you can toggle. I absolutely hate overly handholdy side quest tracking in JRPGs, because it turns tasks from an actual gameplay mechanic to literal errands. I'd ideally like to find secrets on my own, and have the quests be part of reward I get for findiing them

Though it would be nice in the dungeons. XC had godawful dungeons, so the less time I spend in those the better.

Possibly my favourite thing that XC1 does SOOO MUCH better than XC2, I'm glad it's still the same in this.

Screen congestion. XC2 just throws all of these shop/location labels on the screen with no regard for how distracting and unhelpful it is. It gave me a headache in some places. XC1 is way more subtle and intelligently done, and usually just has one label on screen at any given moment.

Video of handheld mode. Doesn't look bad so far, but Xenoblade 2 didn't look awful either until you arrived in Gormott, so we'll see.

EDIT:

One of the GameXplain guys is saying handheld performance is still quite rough.

Ugh.

Also getting sick of people hand-waving this away by saying "this is the sort of game I want to play on a TV, so it doesn't matter." It's a hybrid console. Games should look good and perform well in both modes. There's no excuse for Monolith Soft's apparent unwillingness to optimize for undocked play. Also sucks for Lite users.

@Ralizah I'll say meh. It sounds like handheld mode is perfectly fine outside of a few heavy sections like the opening according to their description. If it's blurry for less than an hour out of a hundred that's good enough for me. I guess we'll see how accurate that is though.

@Ralizah

I said way back in 2017 that this would happen. Most developers just don't have the time to be optimizing for 2 different setups, so they're gonna end up just picking one and focusing on that.

I think games like Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey were mostly outliers, where they really went all-out in optimizing them for the sake of proving what the hardware could do (obviously less demanding games like Smash Bros or Yoshi are less likely to have issues by nature of their less demanding graphics)

I played through 2 entirely in handheld mode and I thought it played fine for the most part. Far from unplayable. I'm sure their experience with that game has helped them make this one bit better when it comes to handheld performance. Or at least I hope so. Either way, I'll be playing it in handheld mode as that's my preferred way of playing any game on Switch.

@Ralizah

IMO the Switch doesn't need to do everything perfectly simultaneously, but rather allow flexibility. If a game is better with motion controls, obviously it's not going to be ideal in handheld mode. But if a game is best digested in short bits, it's better for handheld play.

If it means I'm getting more games that do different things well, I'm okay with both handheld and console experiences not being the same.

@link3710 If it really is limited to demanding story sequences, I won't be too bothered. Even Xenoblade 2 looks a bit fuzzy on the TV when you're surrounded by enemies in battle and go into some chain attack with lots of effects popping off at once.

Gaur Plain will be the real test of how much better optimized this game is for handheld play, I think.

@Dezzy Actually, the vast majority of developers have done a great job of making sure their games look serviceable in both modes. There are some exceptions (The Witcher 3 and DOOM 64 don't look great on TVs), but only so much can be done with demanding PS4 conversions. The same is simply not true of exclusives built with only one system in mind. There's no excuse for any first-party release to look terrible in handheld mode.

But things hold up across the Switch catalog fairly well, which is why notable exceptions stand out all the more.

It's funny you mention Yoshi games as an example of visually undemanding software, considering the most recent one is apparently so demanding that it can't even hit 720p in docked mode.

@iKhan There should be a consistent standard of quality for games on the system. Especially first-party exclusives. I'm fine with the Switch hosting experiences that can't translate perfectly across modes (Ring Fit Adventure is a GREAT example of this), but there should be a good reason for it.

Xenoblade is actually a perfect example of a game enhanced by portability, IMO, since it has so much downtime in big, open environments, grinding, and tons of MMO-esque side-quests that involve collecting a certain number of items, or killing a certain number of monsters.

Yeah I should've been more specific. I meant developers of high end games. In other words games that have wide open 3D environments and fairly advanced graphics.

Of all the games in that category, very very few run perfectly on both handheld and docked.

The only 3 games I can think of that are genuinely impressive on both setups are Mario Odyssey, Breath of the Wild and Splatoon 2. (and it's not an accident that the one with the biggest open world runs at 30fps while the other 2 run at 60fps)

(apparently Astral Chain is quite impressive too, but I haven't played it yet)

@Dezzy Mario Odyssey, Splatoon 2, BotW, Astral Chain, Smash Ultimate, Animal Crossing, Luigi's Mansion 3, Fire Emblem, MK8D, and Mario Maker 2 all run extremely well in both modes. Although Mario Odyssey locks certain critical movements behind motion gestures that are difficult or impossible to pull off with anything other than split joycons, so it doesn't get a pass.

Mario + Rabbids, Octopath, and YCW run at somewhat lower resolutions, but still mostly look OK when undocked (unsure how they pulled that off with Yoshi, considering how low-res it is ALL the time). Most ambitious third-party games fall into this category, and it's fine. 540p games aren't pinsharp, but they aren't terrible looking, either.

Link's Awakening has some sort of framerate issue, but I think it also mostly looks and performs OK in both modes.

There are very few games that look terrible in handheld mode. A few do when docked, but, as I said, it's an unavoidable drawback. Most games look great when docked.

@Ralizah

Yeah but not all of those are in that category I said. Wide open 3D environments (meaning they have a controllable camera). Those are the games that are the hardest to optimize.
Obviously games like Mario Maker and Smash are gonna be near-perfect. They're 2D games. And Animal Crossing and Mario Kart are fixed perspective games.

Just imagine how huge the world of Xenoblade is, and how many different places and situations they have to test and optimize. It's just a much bigger job to manage it. It's not surprising they didn't want to do that twice over.

@Dezzy Nah. Other developers scale their games fine. Skyrim runs well. The Witcher 3 has a stable level of performance and looks pretty good in handheld mode (especially post-patch). BotW runs beautifully. I've heard Dragon's Dogma runs well. Why should Monolith be given a pass for not properly optimizing an EXCLUSIVE game for the platform?

@Ralizah It could be a case of trying to get everything onto a 16GB cart. Does handheld performance of XC2 compare similarly to TV performance of XCX if you haven't installed the texture packs?

@Ralizah

I can't comment on Skyrim, although that is a last gen game, which surely helps.
But Witcher 3 looks like someone's sneezed on the screen in docked mode! Lol I sold it because it was just too ugly to play docked. They obviously did exactly what I'm talking about. They just chose handheld to focus on, because they knew it would be the main selling point to distinguish it from the other console/PC versions.

Obviously it would be nice if this was a perfect-running game. But at the same time, I'm still hoping Monolithsoft release another original game this generation. Or port Xenoblade X. So anything that saves them a bit of time, I'm willing to tolerate as long as I can still play docked.

@Grumblevolcano Don't the downloadable packs for XCX mainly improve texture loading and whatnot? XC2 has an issue with slow texture loading either way, which isn't really a big deal to me. The problem is an overly aggressive sharpening filter combined with a wildly unstable adaptive resolution when undocked. It's amateur hour, frankly.

Good thing XC2 was such a good game in most respects.

@Dezzy The difference is that TW3's performance on Switch is a technical marvel to begin with. They're doing the best they can with underpowered hardware, since CDProjektRed probably never could have imagined this demanding game running on a handheld within a few years. They're not making decisions to "focus" on handheld mode, it's just that the game is pushing the system so hard that there's not a lot of wiggle room when it is docked. Performance is very stable, though. Especially when docked.

You can tell Xenoblade 2 isn't pushing the hardware when undocked because the battery life is quite long. That means it's not taking advantage of the system's boost mode, which is what allows games like BotW and SMO to run well undocked (along with smart optimizations, of course). I think most people would happily trade some battery life for the game not looking terrible in open areas.

They're designing Switch games without paying any sort of attention to performance when undocked, which, IMO, is unacceptable for an exclusive developed for a hybrid system. It wouldn't have been a big deal if the game received performance patches after launch, but Xenoblade 2 never received anything of the sort.

If X does get a Switch port, what will they add in the way of new content? The game's just crammed with side-quests (30x that of Xenoblade 1), and the world is already so big. But maybe they could add a sixth continent or something, though that feels like too much. Or maybe Monolith could add some new recruitable characters because in Japan's original release some of those were released as paid DLC.

@theJGG

Maybe they could reduce the number of sidequests, and make them more interesting. Maybe make the city more customisable. Like a sim city mini game. I personally think the battle system/equipment system is way more complicated than it needs to be in X. I also think the UI needs an overhaul. In battle it's quite difficult to see what an enemies doing. You end up with million different icons, for a million different buffs/debuffs which at a glance is bewildering

@Wargoose Text size is far too small. Overhauling the UI would allow people to fix that. But knowing Monolithsoft they'll make it customisable, or will eliminate most text during portable mode, or even restrict playing the game to docked mode. Docked mode gives the Switch more processing power, the Wii U and Switch are equal on that front, and Xenoblade X was pushing the Wii U so hard.