Demo Graphics Downgrade

I mentioned this in another thread, but yeah, the graphical downgrade is kind of jarring. Off the top of my head, and I know nothing about programming of making 3d environments look nice, but if I had to guess, maybe it's because they're in the middle of 'renovating' the castle, so to speak? Like, maybe they changed its layout since the last time they showed it off in 2017, but in the process had to reset the lighting, so the castle we got now looks a little dull but when they're sprucing and optimizing everything in the final build, the good lighting/textures will come back and it'll look really cool. I mean, from what I've seen, the Galleon Minerva wasn't "downgraded"--it looks as good as the upgraded 2017 screenshots did. This tells me that the Minerva is more or less complete (what we see is what we'll get in the final game), but the castle is being worked on further. But I admit that may be a long shot...

Well shit. I thought the game looked good, but when compared to older examples it does appear to get worse and worse as time goes on. How disheartening.

I remember that first image, the cel-shading was done really well. I thought it looked pretty, colorful, and full of personality.

Compared to it, the new Miriam model looks generic and quite bland, if I'm being honest.

What happened?

actually, it looks more like some lighting effects are turned off for the castle, when you look at the galleon they have those lighting effects on and it looks great, so perhaps this is intentional so they can get feedback on which version of lighting we like more, brighter and more even rooms, or darker and more moody, or because the lighting in the castle were not quite ready yet so easier to turn it off than have rooms look super wierd

however theres a full game to look at and another approach is to give each area a very distinctive color palette and make keeping track of where you are and where you need to backtrack to after a new ability to get to new areas and items, remember if you light the entire game with orange yes it can give you some really pretty areas like the earlier shots of the entrance, but other areas may end up looking really clashy or downright ugly

so while i think they could do with maybe turning the brightness down a little bit and give the entrance more oomph to really up the wow factor of the starting couple areas, i dont think the gray is bad, it contrasts well with the gloomy ship and orangey reds of the town

My suspicion is that they invited Tomonobu Itagaki to come play test the pre-E3 build and he said it was too dark to see and they were too scared to tell him to take off his sunglasses so they just brightened everything.

In all seriousness... this just feels like design creep, which is a very real and very problematic thing in all creative projects.

You try to solve an issue in an area where it's too dark to distinguish something, but the effort it takes to fix that issue is costly, and it's cheaper/faster to just apply a blanket solution that affects everything, so you do that, and then you realize it causes this other issue where these textures don't look quite right, so you adjust those... but those are also used in this other area where now the lighting solution and the new textures don't play well together, so you change another global thing... and now you've got a washed out game but at least everything is functional... so you go with that for the time being until you can convince the people higher up they need to spend a lot more money to fix the last 5 fixes you implemented to address the original issue that would have just cost less overall to fix but you couldn't get the budget approved at the time.

Hopefully they will add some more contrast and color depth to the final build.

Like I said, what they did is obvious by looking at the screenshots: a downgrade in geometry (fewer polygons for the backgrounds and the characters), downgrade in texture resolution and detail, and a downgrade in lighting/post-processing.

gunlord500

So, you'll say, "but the galleon looks great" - yeah, that's because the geometry is pretty flat: you can make it look good just with good art direction. Very little post-processing needed.

If you want to do something like the castle, though, then you need better geometry, better textures and more complex lighting and post-processing.

It might seem like it's just the lighting - but what happens is that good lighting effects sometimes require more geometry and better textures. Now, I don't know jack about procedural generation, but if it generates geometry and textures, then it might have been toned-down/adjusted to work with less.

The reason why geometry and texturing has an effect on lighting is because the geometry and texture information is what's used to calculate what the lit pixels look like. So... anyway, just look at how everything looks flatter. Additional post-processing effects can also give the 3D more "volume" and depth, etc. So, post-processing is the sort of thing that can be enabled/disabled according to the hardware specs, but if the information needed to do it is not there in the first place (like textures and polygons), then you can't just upgrade it.

Anyway, I'm no expert on this, but get a seasoned modder or 3D artist here, and they can tell you exactly how it was downgraded (and where I might be mistaken).

And again, there are only two potential reasons to downgrade assets you've already made: to reduce the cost of mass production (better assets = more money, oh, shit, we can't do the whole game at this quality, we need to bring our original assets down to the quality of the assets we're going to order), or to facilitate development on a platform with lower specs than the lead platform (Switch/Vita/Lower spec-ed PCs).

I would say it's a lighting issue for the most part... you can make grey marble pop, but you have to adjust the lighting. 


This adjustment was made by only adjusting overall white/black contrast levels.

ooh that does look good, and keeps the theme, im really curious to see what they can do to the area in future updates

dareka

I don't know why people say concept art. Looks in-engine graphics to me. A lot of it looks like stuff that is STILL in the 2018 shot. Nowhere did it EVER say it's concept ART. It's in-engine graphics.