Tech Differences between Switch and 7th Gen (PS3/360) Games

[milk]

Finally someone has the same thought as me! I'm honestly so disappointed by the tech (not the overall visuals), it's almost mobile game level. The ps2 style shadow projection is really ugly when Ridley flew over the icey zone, where you could see shadows from different body parts overlap with each other. I didn't expect they don't even bother to use shadowmap.
Sure it could be for the sake of a flawless 60fps, but then all the other tech sacrifices make it feel not worthy it -- like how the resolution isn't even native but 900p with no AA.
It also kinda hurts the gameplay feeling -- the purely baked GI solution makes certain areas too dark; and the simple forward lighting system doesn't allow energy beams to light up the surrondings, which sometimes make it hard to navigate in dark hallways.

I don't mind Retro's choices for this game all that much. I think the end result does lool incredible more often than not. Probably, the performance they saved with dynamic lighting afforded them higher detail geometry and textures.

They were also uniquely positioned in that they were making a faithful (level design-wise) remaster of a game-cube game. It was bound to have very little dynamic lighting or level geometry anyway. I am glad a high budget game exists with a different laundry list of technical choices from the typical one. It makes it unique.

As for the shadows, I agree the dragon flyover scene is the most bothersome, along with some others. Bosses in particular are large enough and on-screen enough for one to start noticing how flat they look. They should have attempted something at least a bit more sophisticated if only for some key areas like this.

PS. Metroid Prime Switch also has very pleasing looking volumetric light scatering (also completely static ane pre-baked). Another visual feature that only became popular during the PS4bone generation, which is pretty costly when computed dynamically, but probably moderate when static, yet it makes a much larger visual impact than many of the other more complicated effects that PS360 games were enamoured with.

 

[GuardHei]

I don't mind Retro's choices for this game all that much. I think the end result does lool incredible more often than not. Probably, the performance they saved with dynamic lighting afforded them higher detail geometry and textures.

They were also uniquely positioned in that they were making a faithful (level design-wise) remaster of a game-cube game. It was bound to have very little dynamic lighting or level geometry anyway. I am glad a high budget game exists with a different laundry list of technical choices from the typical one. It makes it unique.

As for the shadows, I agree the dragon flyover scene is the most bothersome, along with some others. Bosses in particular are large enough and on-screen enough for one to start noticing how flat they look. They should have attempted something at least a bit more sophisticated if only for some key areas like this.

PS. Metroid Prime Switch also has very pleasing looking volumetric light scatering (also completely static ane pre-baked). Another visual feature that only became popular during the PS4bone generation, which is pretty costly when computed dynamically, but probably moderate when static, yet it makes a much larger visual impact than many of the other more complicated effects that PS360 games were enamoured with.

Like I said, I'm not criticizing the graphics overall. In fact when it works the diffuse materials really look gorgeous and run at a flawless 60fps. I was more focusing on people's reaction on how this game's "not possible to run on switch" when it has quite some visual flaws. I'm also slightly worried about MP4 as a lot of these prebaked techs prolly won't work if they go for more dynamic environments/larger rooms and etc.
Regarding the volumetric fx, I doubt whether they are true volumetrics. I actually closely examined these, and they do fade away when you get close/get into the zone, so it looks more like transparent effects rather than any raymarched/froxel-based godrays (also usually if you do raymarch you should be able to notice aliases/noises in movement due to inaccuracy which is not the case here). Though they might be doing tricks like TLOU2, where they pre-fitted a volumetric scattering LUT for certain volumetrics shapes (inlcuding box shapes), it is still quite expensive so probably not the case here.