I know I’ll get downvoted to hell for this even though I’m literally posting the kind of stuff Unpopular Opinion is here for, but so be it.
I can’t even make out the faces most of the time in BotW. Just look at the screenshots for yourself. And it always bugged me just how featureless and uninteresting Link’s face looked, especially his eyes. Compare it to literally any other Link’s face (in-game for 3D, artwork for 2D).
In contrast, Pokémon XY had really good cel-shading for the Pokémon during battles. I was honestly impressed that a 3DS could have such a high polygon count and such clean, clear cel-shading lines and colors during its battles. For some odd reason, I have not seen such clean cel-shading before or since.
I would also like to say that Skyward Sword on the Wii had a much cleaner, more detailed, more beautiful look than Breath of the Wild did, and I will die with those words.
It just goes to show you that there is simply no replacement for good art direction— raw power and long draw distance aren’t enough.
I assume they had to make compromises to get something at the scale of these games onto the Switch. It’s the same reason I assume GTA graphics have always seemed behind the times.
That being said, I think the star of both games is the world as a whole, not any individual detail. I still have people walk by while I’m playing and say, “wow, that looks beautiful.” They’re not gamers who have seen what games on the newer consoles or the PC are like, but still.
Yee. I imagine if the Wii U didn’t flop, they would have had more time to work on their engine so that they could still render long-draw-distance viewscapes beautifully, while also not making everything so blurry and undefined. What they did with Skyward Sword was astounding for the Wii, and a lot of modern games don’t even look that pretty. Just because Nintendo had good artistic direction for that game.
What do you mean GTA looks behind the times? It still looks profoundly great after a decade.
GTA V looks decent, but Rockstar games have always had that Rockstar look, which tended to be pretty blocky when it came to the characters.
RDR2 is fucking beautiful, GTA4 looked great at the time, and GTA5 probably looks the worst of each respective time/release but it came out at the end of the 360 era so couldn’t be as graphically groundbreaking as their other games while growing the complexity of the world. But it still looks great, even today.
The characters in GTA5 and RDR2 saw a massive upgrade, everyone looks hyper realistic. Holy crap I want to play RDR2 again, so gorgeous.
I haven’t played RDR2 yet, but it looks like I’ll be getting it in about 2 weeks, so maybe that will change some of my opinions, we’ll see.