Why did games like Zelda and Mario have top tier graphics and visuals for its time compared to other games that had shittier graphics? Does it boil down to the skill of the dev and art team or are there other factors involved?
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leveraging higher end technology but frankly the art design of nintendo games has always been their weakest trait. Many times more advanced effects or one-off details are culled for performance economy reasons to the detriment of the visuals of the game.
Anyway, the end result is the games run on more advanced hardware (although the N64 for example has a massive amount of limitations that hold it back) but artistically the games do not do much to impress. FF7, 8 and 9 have more detailed and carefully considered towns than the entire game of Zelda. Scan the few areas in Alexandria in the opening of FF9 some time, it's actually a little insane how much is going on.
I was moreso comparing Zelda to other N64 titles as I am aware CD tech is better. Zelda looks great compared to a lot of other N64 games that can look very muddy.
Zelda has its own series of sacrifices, it couldn't run at 30fps so they targeted 20. This was made to use a more aggressive render distance but it does tie to another point I want to bring up:
The pre-rendered areas in zelda 64 are really, really ugly. I don't actually see a good reason for them even existing. They look legitimately awful and always have, it's like they wanted to say "we can do pre-rendered environments too!" but proceeded to make the worst looking prerendered environments ever They're really ill fitting.
I never thought they were ugly, just not immersive, because they look like some background and not an actual space
I literally didn't notice any pre-rendered backrounds other than the temple of time. What else was there?
wtf are you talking about that looks realer than real life
All the buildings in Kokiri Forest.
All of castle town.
Bro Temple of Time wasn't prerendered, unless you're talking about the outside.
Stuff like castle town. You know, places where there's a fixed camera that at most moves along with you and can't be adjusted because you're effectively moving along a picture.
Bait. The very first room in the game is pre-rendered.
I haven't played in 2 years. Sorry if I don't remember every little detail.
it looks so good you can easily mistake it
yeah this was the point I made when I said I didn't remember any pre-rendered parts. The fact I didn't notice says that they were very well done. But of course people like
interpret that as me just being stupid.
you made my day anon thanks
Doesn't a lot of that come down to the fact that N64 relied on proprietary microcode that nintendo didn't share with 3rd parties? So basically everyone besides Nintendo was developing for the system with one handed behind their backs? Or so I've heard
are you seriously comparing pre rendered bgs to 3d environments?
Yeah, and also ocarinas own pre-rendered environments.
>the art design of nintendo games has always been their weakest trait
homie wat?
>frankly the art design of nintendo games has always been their weakest trait
lol what? that's literally Nintendo's strongest trait
It's all Fisher Price kid slop.
this is one of the worst posts I've ever read on this board
The art of releasing a console 2 years late to the gen with stronger hardware on paper that's actually worse in practice and still losing out.
Time and budget set the maximum limit, skill determines how far it goes based on that limit. There are also other things like whether the team is familiar with the software being used or needs to be retrained.
One thing you need to also consider is talent. I define skill as the ability to make a 3D model that uses as little computing resources as possible, as quickly as possible. Talent is the ability to just make something look good or aesthetically pleasing. In early 3D skill isn't that important because the shapes are so simple so once you figure out how to use the software there is no much you can do to optimize geometry or speed up the process. Talent is why Ocarina of Time looks better then indie games made with software that is a super-computer compared to the past and they can use much more polygons and a billion other features.
It looks better because of talent. See that geometric structure under the slingshot icon? The tower. That's just 6 sides and a texture. Anyone could make that within a day of training and the texture is just someone's drawing that was scaled down and they used pre-purchased assets to get the stone and moss look. That's also a very low level task.
But someone without talent would make it look like shit. You could let them work with more polygons or higher texture resolutio or textures with advanced features such as reacting dynamically. But it would still look like shit without the talent.
>they used pre-purchased assets to get the stone and moss look.
the amount of people who do not know this about 3d era nintendo and sega makes me lol. so, so many bought assets
It's not shameful or untalented.
Would you rather buy an asset pack for $500 or spend $50,000 to have the artists make it? Ok you chose the $50,000 route, now decide what content you are going to cut to adjust for this. If they made the entire game with no asset packs and less content no one on the planet would give them any respect for it. They would juts complain the game is short.
And there is talent in picking the correct premade assets and applying them. And as we are learning from ai generated art talent is actually the only thing that matters because skill can be outsourced.
They're first party games. They were made to sell consoles, optimized specifically for a single console, and likely had close communication with the hardware design team.
This actually looks amazing. Thought it was the 3DS remake first
Lighting and perfect colour composition.
FF7 AND FF8 look horrible.
Nintendos president at the time said they intentionally made it hard to develop on for third parties.
Something something pressure creates diamonds. It backfired hard IMO, as a lot of third parties said frick it and went to sony like square, with the only ones able to pull off anything close to Nintendos quality were Rare (basically 1st party) and lucasarts (full of tech wizards). Most other N64 games look ugly as sin and are why the console has such a poor reputation for graphics; despite being able to pull off shit the playstation just literally could not do.
The truth is a bit more subtle.
Companies like Square was on board with shipping their games on the N64.... if they got to deliver FVMs on what would be the 64DD.
Then the RAM prices got cheap enough for the 64 Expansion pack and 64MB cartridges happened
And the 64DD died. Even if it didn't it would most likely have failed for the same reasons the Genesis CD addon failed, as many others have.
Then it turns out Sony bought out a Liverpool studio that made a improved PS1 devkit as well, and said studio was later responsible for the Net Yaroze
At which point the generation was sealed.
>they intentionally made it hard to develop on for third parties
Just BS
Understanding the hardware was no more complicated than understanding the PS1, the thing that made the N64 difficult to develop for was Ninte do cheaping out on the RAM by having the CPU and GPU share the same RAM
I'm not even memeing, but OOT does not look good and there are many games from 1998 that look better.
What is actually wrong with you people?
Seriously? Name literally any other game from 1998 than Half-Life that has better visuals that OOT.
Unreal
MGS, Grim Fandango, RE2, Tomb Rider III, Rainbow Six fricking Unreal. And those are just at the top of my head.
Tell me I'm wrong. Oot looked nice, but it's nothing out of the ordinary compared to the resto of the AAA vidya at the time, heck IMO it's kind of lacking graphically compared to the rest.
All of those use "brown is realistic" visuals.
You are legit moronic.
Unreal, Thief, Daytona 2, Tekken 3, Ridge Racer Type 4
Crash bandicoot is from 1996 and has better visuals, as do most games really
I like OOT but it's one of the ugliest games I've played.
Sure you do, now go back to bed grandpa
Sonic Adventure, MediEvil, Spyro the Dragon, Ridge Racer Type 4.
You honestly think this looks better?
You've cherrypicked a shit screenshot, but I think MediEvil does look better than OoT.
>More charming aesthetics/art direction
>Definitely has good use of colour, though some areas are deliberately quite muted
>Much better in motion, animations have pleasing weight and bounce
>Better particle effects
>Nice dynamic lighting for the time
>Draw distances can feel pretty long in some areas
>Cutscenes look pretty cool, and far exceed anything Nintendo did before the millenium
Kind of? It doesn't look bad.
He was saying it looks better than OOT.
I just grabbed a google image. I watched a brief playthrough and while it looks good, it just looks like another above-average ps1 game.
Its smoother than OOT, but It only has to draw a few feet around the camera. Not as bad as turok1 but close.
Turok 2 was peak graphics back then.
Duke Nukem: Time to Kill
That in itself should put a boot in the ass of your opinion.
Uh. Anything 2D. A heap of pc games? Do you mean 98 specifically because from about 95 onwards pc was already shitting them out.
Post a detailed list with screenshots.
True or false:
Zelda 64 was considered by N64 early adopters to be a pseudo-follow-up and spiritual sequel to Super Mario 64 when it was released.
True, if you read game magazines and considered it to be the next Miyamoto masterpiece.
>pseudo-follow-up and spiritual sequel
Depends on what those words means.
I factual words used by magazines are closer to THE NEXT 3D MASTERPIECE BY MIYAMOTO! And that is far less subjective.
MediEvil like a lot of PS1 games look competitive until it has to draw more than just near the camera. And if you can't rig the camera on rails and precalculate the LOD, there is going to be a gap.
PC games in 1998 on high end hardware could look better, but even for something like Unreal there are tradeoffs being made despite the hardware and engine advancement.
>are there other factors involved
Of course. If you knew the minimum basics of game design you would know that studio developed games go through a horror process:
Money, management, publishers, executives, directors as well as deadlines, experience, knowledge, proper vision, thought-out game concepts, play testing, etc. Not in that order obviously.
>Console war gays trying to rewrite history (again)
You can literally look up OOT reviews from the 90s, the graphics get praised consistently in basically every review.
>POSTED: NOV 25, 1998 7:00 PM
https://www.ign.com/articles/1998/11/26/the-legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-time-review
>Middle picture in bottom
This place poisoned me.
Let me guess, this is from some nintendo magazine?
Nope. Sorry little snoy.
>16pages on N64 crap
So I was right after all.
God of war lost.
yeah its hilarious how people here are like ' umm akshually, OOT wasn't that great. Muh 20fps, muh draw distance, muh pre-used assets" Like it universally got praised for it's visuals and very few games of the era matched it. Some nuclear cope happening here.
>DOODE just trust these paid off reviewers instead of your own eyes!!!
Nintendo has built it's empire on this shit.
I've played the game myself and many other retro games. It looks far better than any other game except maybe a few cd based games.
>DOODE just trust me, it looks better! Just ignore all these titles named in the thread that are clearly better looking.
Its just one guy having a meltdown 30 years later.
You keep telling yourself that ndroid.
They get money for doing that, remember cyberpunk?
You Black folk are always the same, just slit your throat and be done with it man. You clearly aren't interested in honest discussion.
>guaranteed replies: the thread
This is what Ocarina of Time actually looked like
It's 240p, horribly blurry, objects like fence posts were corrupted at a distance
The only reason it looked good was CRT TVs
If you plug it into an LCD screen you will see this though
w. CRT shader
There's plenty of things I though were emulator issues, and every time they're not, and present on real N64.
The missing/flickering window when you enter Kakariko village happens on real N64
The flickering shadow under Link happens in Jabu Jabu on real N64
etc.
Angrylion and ParaLLEl are incredibly accurate.
does slowdown happen sometimes on real N64? it happened to me with ParaLLEl but I didn't know if it was accurate emulation, or my laptop struggling
>Game looked good when used on the hardware it was made for
No vey
Yes for sure, Majora's Mask had a lot of it
The cutscene where the 4 giants stop the moon intentionally had a lot of lag
?t=950
is meant for:
Man, are the people on this thread for real?
>This actually looks amazing. Thought it was the 3DS remake first
Jesus christ.
MML came a year before and blows the frick out of it
Playing through OoT for the first time now. It's fun. But I cannot comprehend how anyone ever thought it had good graphics. There are hundreds of PS1 games that look better.
Ugliest Zelda by far. Even worse than the CDi games.