Demo Graphics Downgrade

So, looking a the two screen shots here are the technical differences I can make out... I stress that I might be wrong on some points, but as far as I can tell...

Effects that the 2017 version has, that the demo doesn't:

1. Global illumination.
    Different sections of area seem to have different "baked-in" lighting properties, allowing for the light and shadow contrast.
    Contrast this with the demo build, where the lighting is basically uniform. Big difference.
    This might also have something to do with the purple-ish  hue reflected on the roof - not sure.

3. Ambient occlusion.
    Notice how the little twirls on the columns and such appear to have much more detailed shadows.

4. Specular mapping.

    Disregard their colors, and notice the little shimmers on the columns.

5. Texture detail/Tessallation/Displacement mapping.
     This one I'm not too sure of, but look at the bricks that make up the ceiling. Notice how they're much more detailed and kind of "pop-out" in the 2017 version. 

Missing from both versions: signs of the procedural generation technology that was allegedly one of the reasons why they switched developers.

Having looked at it carefully, I'm a little bit more hopeful, now. If they add these as settings for the PC version, the final release might look as good as the 2017 prototype. The question is if they took all of these features into account when ordering the assets... we need some answers, from the devs, though, Question , Angel-Corlux

I'm truly sorry if I came off as rude, and I apologize.

I just didn't want to side-track the conversation with back and forth on this.

So, I'll explain how I disagree. I dunno, maybe you won't even come off as disagreeing per-se; you be the judge.

   1. Optimizing geometry is pretty par for the course in 3d game development. No matter how high spec a system you run the game on, you don't want  unnecessary geometry that wouldn't be visible to the player. This could also mean swapping out more detailed models when we see characters up close vs during normal gameplay.

Yes, optimizing geometry is common. With modern technology, though, they should be able to manage varying level of detail with tessellation instead of model swapping. The effect should be the same, though: there's no reason for the close-up models on the PC to look like they look now versus how they looked before. These are not polygons you're not going to see, after all - they're close-ups. So the geometry looks a bit over-optimized: a model for a lower-end PC or last gen hardware.

So I disagree that his has any bearing on our criticism of the graphics: they're going way below the original minimum hardware requirement for PCs. It's not simple optimization, since they downgraded the close-up models, as well.

2. The only reason to downgrade textures would be to make the game work on lower powered platforms. Texture resolution should stay high, or have the option for different resolutions.

So, the idea is you have  high-end textures for the more powerful platform, and lower resolution textures of the same image for the lower end platforms. So what you do is you drop the polygon count on the models so that the texture mapping is the same, and so you just need to swap textures. But if they're giving us these textures on the PC version, it begs the question: did they create all of the assets in higher-resolution textures? If so, why aren't they in the demo?

The disagreement here, though, ties more in with the next statement...

3. Lighting is more of an artistic choice than performance-heavy in most cases nowadays. Unless you're trying to do something crazy like dynamic shadows for every light source, etc. I see no reason the game can't look like the 2016 screenshot while retaining its current graphical performance.

So, I don't see changes in the lighting here being a result of artistic choice - the game's missing post-processing that was there in the 2017 prototype. They can't make it look like that without enabling features that are disabled. Enabling these features will make it drop in performance on lower-end hardware; so, can it meet the graphical performance of the 2016 screenshot? depending on how you implement the lighting, yes, on the recommended hardware specs. It might not look as good in motion, but screenshot level fidelity is possible. What's not possible is having the game run as fast as it will with the current load, which is a lot lighter than anticipated.

So what I'm trying to say is that lighting and post-processing effects are GPU intensive. A modern GPU won't struggle with them, that's true; but the game seems have graphics such that even the last generation (in hardware terms) Switch won't struggle, and I doubt you could meet the quality of the 2017 prototype on it, let alone the 2016 screenshot, at least not without some serious (and time-consuming, and therefore costly) trickery.



Could be. Too small for me to tell, but here I defer to you.

giwagiwa the thing is, like you mention there's no reason to downgrade unless you want the game to run better on weaker systems, but if that's the case, why wouldn't they downgrade the Galleon as well? It looks like it does in the old screenshots, it's just the castle which looks inferior. Wouldn't a downgrade for weaker systems affect the entire game instead of just parts of it?

It's really vita at this point. The switch can easily push graphic comparable to this demo in handheld mode.

Yeah it looks much better in that first pic.

Regardless of decisions, players and fans alike will be very disappointed if the final games goes with these graphics, and a backlash will follow, specially after so much delays.

These types of releases that aims every console ever always goes wrong behind doors. Switch is more than capable of handling graphics (see Doom and Wolfstein), but they take time. A Vita release is troublesome, because we are talking about a handheld that is really old.

I honestly hope for the best, but these demos aren't looking great. Curse of the Moon rose the expectations even more because, although fairly small, is an amazing game and a fresh Igavania experience.

No matter how well we can justify these current graphics, we are talking about a product and as such, it will be treated like it.

I can't believe the official team/staff haven't addressed this yet.