I believe this is announced last year. And their solution is heavily inspired by Lumen (screen space probes), but lacking the infinite bounce feature.
Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]
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I know people are raving about this, but visually, the game looks very soulless to me. Nice animations, but the art style in general is just so bland in my opinion. Games like SMB3 and SMW were straight up innovative in their visual styles. This is just derivative and safe. There are so many 2d games that straight up blow this out the water visually.
Flappy Pannus
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Ok, I've been playing SM2 for a few hours and I gotta say, performance mode is...kinda rough. It doesn't help that I'm used to DLSS for the other games and even for the PS5 versions (I played in non-RT performance) for the res, but performance mode here has a larger gap with Fidelity than I remember from SM:RM and MM, my guess is at least early on it it's probably closer to 1080p than 1440 in many of the scenes for starters. There's quite a bit of breakup and flickering for medium to distant objects as well even when standing still, resembling FSR2 at points.
The thread at ResetEra have noticed this aspect too - there's some bizarre lighting and just poor quality NPC rendering at times, it really stands out. What impressed me when playing SM:RM on the PS5 years ago was how consistent it was in its image quality, there was so little of 'crap texture outta nowhere' or poorly rendered object surrounded by high quality assets. Here, at least so far, SM2 doesn't seem to maintain that. Again, very early though.
Why so serious?
That beard almost looks like a lower-res mip not loading. In SM:RM, when characters got this close-up you could basically see every pore on their face, this is decidedly muddy by comparison:
I wonder if there's something going on with the LOD in performance, or there's lower quality assets used for it as well in some spots by design? Watch the trees here as you slide between performance and quality, this kind of resembles what Ratchet and Clank had on PC when using DLSS until they patched it. You're naturally going to lose clarity but the models for the trees actually seem to change, more than I would expect from a drop in resolution. The trees in particular look quite poor in performance overall, party perhaps just due to their design to look more 'thick', but it just comes across as lower fidelity compared to the previous games.
Another comparison overlooking the city, showing the difference in shadow & AO in perf v quality. Maybe it's by design sure, but again, those tree models:
Perf v quality
The thread at ResetEra have noticed this aspect too - there's some bizarre lighting and just poor quality NPC rendering at times, it really stands out. What impressed me when playing SM:RM on the PS5 years ago was how consistent it was in its image quality, there was so little of 'crap texture outta nowhere' or poorly rendered object surrounded by high quality assets. Here, at least so far, SM2 doesn't seem to maintain that. Again, very early though.
Why so serious?
That beard almost looks like a lower-res mip not loading. In SM:RM, when characters got this close-up you could basically see every pore on their face, this is decidedly muddy by comparison:
I wonder if there's something going on with the LOD in performance, or there's lower quality assets used for it as well in some spots by design? Watch the trees here as you slide between performance and quality, this kind of resembles what Ratchet and Clank had on PC when using DLSS until they patched it. You're naturally going to lose clarity but the models for the trees actually seem to change, more than I would expect from a drop in resolution. The trees in particular look quite poor in performance overall, party perhaps just due to their design to look more 'thick', but it just comes across as lower fidelity compared to the previous games.
Another comparison overlooking the city, showing the difference in shadow & AO in perf v quality. Maybe it's by design sure, but again, those tree models:
Perf v quality
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All 2D marios games have being looking bland and uninteresting to me since the Wii games. Sadly the magic from SMB3 and SMW is long gone.
I mean, this happens to all games. Look at Starfield and the latest Forza Motorsport comparisons and hot takes.
Anyhow, gamers (especially, console gamers) should expect lots of compromises when aiming for a high-framerate.
Absolutely. It's just weird, cuz this game is getting touted by so many outlets as being as impactful and important as those original games and while there's obviously a ton of gameplay ideas being thrown around, visually it's just super boring. And I dont know why people are so accepting of this. As if countless other amazing 2d games dont exist that have set the bar much higher. Had a similar issue with Mario Odyssey. It's like Nintendo is deathly afraid of actually messing with things here. Though I guess they're probably feeling justified given critical reception. As somebody who grew up remembering the 'wonder' of SMB3 and SMW when they came out though, this new game doesn't come close to feeling the same.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Obviously visuals are a very subjective thing. While the graphics aren't mind blowing, I do like the visuals on hand.
And people are perhaps accepting of it because for many of us game play >>>>>>>>>>> (infinitely greater than) graphics.
Regards,
SB
I agree about gameplay. But not only the artstyle is derivative. The world map too is boring. It reminds me Mario Party derivative board. Back then the world map of SMW (and even SMB3 to some extent) was part of the magic. There was some surprises and exploration in there.Obviously visuals are a very subjective thing. While the graphics aren't mind blowing, I do like the visuals on hand.
And people are perhaps accepting of it because for many of us game play >>>>>>>>>>> (infinitely greater than) graphics.
Regards,
SB
davis.anthony
Veteran
SM2 graphics aren't that mind blowing but, I find it impressive they still managed to improve them and find the extra compute resources to improve RT.
As we all know with RDNA2, the more you push RT the less compute you have left for graphics so for them to improve both is impressive.
As we all know with RDNA2, the more you push RT the less compute you have left for graphics so for them to improve both is impressive.
Errr... I may be the minority but i do love the visuals of Wonder. It has a clay like 2d look, and some nice particle effects. I guess the complaints are there because the levels are most assmebled by modular parts instead of a whole complete organic design? But then the way the game is designed is just modular, like a Lego set. It's like Super Mario 3D world, they chose to have that tile look to fascilitate the level design. At the same time, I don't think either SM3 or SMW exceeds in this regard either. Honestly these games also had very abstract visuals, and the only 2d Mario game that attempted to make a difference is Yoshi's Island.
Btw the world map in Wonder looks gorgeuous to me... with all that detailed grassland and such. I don't understand how that counts as bland. And I absolutely have no idea why people dislikes Odyssey's look (as much as I respect this opinion)
Btw the world map in Wonder looks gorgeuous to me... with all that detailed grassland and such. I don't understand how that counts as bland. And I absolutely have no idea why people dislikes Odyssey's look (as much as I respect this opinion)
davis.anthony
Veteran
The game in many cases does seem like such a massive step back over SM:MM and SM:R.
I would love to have seen some RT from the PC version used in the comparisons.
I would love to have seen some RT from the PC version used in the comparisons.
Flappy Pannus
Veteran
It can be. Part of it is the ray tracing denoising leading to a dithered look on many surfaces, otherwise it's probably just the lower resolution - IGTI in this game in performance mode seems to be struggling a bit. Perhaps comparing the same scenes to RT performance mode on the original or MM and pixel counting would have revealed the extent of this resolution disparity.
Those trees are definitely significantly different outside of the res difference though, especially as we now know Fidelity can drop to 1440p as well, think that should have drawn a bit more attention as their lower fidelity is one of the most noticeable differences when swinging through the city (there's a lot more of them than the previous games which may explain why they're of such lower quality). Frankly those, and the res differences are actually far more impactful to the overall presentation than the lack of transparent reflections imo.
Also noticing playing as Miles and in parts of Brooklyn, there's some noticeable extended periods of frametime drops when just swinging around in certain sections, more than just the occasional 1fps hitch you routinely see. Morales also had this at launch but it was eventually smoothed out with subsequent patches so we'll see I guess. Insomniac does have a history of providing some significant patch upgrades.*(edit: much better after a reboot, hope my PS5 isn't thermal throttling)
There are definitely some scenes with more dramatic lighting that paint the assets in a better light (literally) though, some of this is just artistic choices wrt to creating a more natural environment I think whereas SM/MM went for a more contrasty appearance. It does lead to a far more variable presentation than the originals though, and effects like the heavy use of film grain don't really work in bright daylight with flat lighting on some NPC's, it just doesn't fit and just looks like someone slapped a filmgrain reshade across a cartoony years-old game at points.
I haven't run into any major ones myself but I've barely put 3 hours into it, so who knows. Enemies getting stuck in geometry is a thing again apparently, that was an extremely annoying problem that still happens in the originals. I spent over 20minutes minutes clearing a particularly hard level several times in the SM:RM only to have Spiderman sit there waiting for the next scene transition that never came because an NPC clipped through the floor.
There are uh, ways around that.
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