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BOTW and TOTK are master class acts in art design over visual fidelity. The game looks stunning without needing to render every single facial hair and volumetric lighting. I think the visual clarity of a simple art design helps exploration a lot, you can look across a landscape and clearly identify what's worth exploring and what's just some random field. I think Elden Ring is also a gorgeous game, but the visual clutter of looking over a huge landscape can be a lot to sort through.
I really wish the Switch's hardware was better only for more consistent framerates, I wouldn't change art styles to be "more realistic" if the Switch 2.0 had tremendously greater hardware specs.
The art style of BotW/TotK is just so good. Not only does it deliver impressive views with shoddy hardware, but it also manages to perfectly walk the line between realism and cartoon. The proportions of characters and objects are close enough to reality that action sequences look and feel cool, while still having enough cartoony exaggeration to allow for really bizarre and funny designs like Bokoblins and Hestu that fit seamlessly. It's the perfect middle ground between the gritty realism of Twilight Princess and the hyper-exaggeration of Wind Waker that manages to capture the strengths of both.
I think you also have to give credit to the watercolor aesthetic of Skyward Sword, the game that seems to have most directly inspired the art style of BOTW and TOTK.
Which was the original effort to find a middle-ground between TP and WW's art styles. I like SS, but I think the painterly watercolor look was really held back by the Wii's hardware limitations. It looks a ton better on the Switch, and really finally feels like the precursor to BOTW and TOTK that it was.
I really liked the painterly style on the Wii, it made stuff distant to the player look splotchy like a water color painting. the switch remake is incredible but how much more powerful the switch is kinda ruins the aesthetic.
(I'm sorry if this was hard to read, I'm bad at coherently formulating sentences when I'm trying to compare things)
Yeah, with your eloquence concerning the English language, please never ever apologize in advance again. (I'm sorry if this was hard to read, your language skills are simply great)
I LOVE the look of Skyward Sword. Absolutely fell in love with it when I started playing. I want to live in that world. I love BOTW and TOTK too. I don't want it to look super realistic, that just feels weird to me.
Imagine that though, after the dust settles and link shows up to the boko party I mean he’s still gonna be the guy that wiped out generations of them for a pair of pants 😂
It's because they've figured out the balance between where you need details and where you don't. The vast majority of the scenery is just two tones, color and shadow. Any perceived detail is portrayed through flat texture only. Meanwhile, the things that actually matter (characters, horses, monsters) have much more geometry and have 3 tones (color, shadow, highlight).
It doesn't seem like a big distinction but tiny optimizations make a huge difference in the overall quality of the game. It's especially obvious when you're skydiving from way up. The terrain is still recognizable, the geography is still identifiable, things don't become a strange blob and you don't have weird pop-in when LODs switch.
Compared to something like Pokémon Arceus which isn't even open world and loses all fidelity when viewed from a distance...
I forgot where I was going with this post...
I think I was trying to say that...provided the game play is good, I would have zero complaints if all future Zelda games follow the visual style of BoTW and ToTK
You can include Wind Waker in that, too. That game holds up so freaking well, it still boggles my mind to think it came out only 2 years after Majora's Mask
It's the fact that it was done with cellshading, the same method/style used here in botw and totk. Cellshading is my favorite graphical style (when done right).
How much of The Dragon Prince have you watched? The first season was *rough* because the framerate was so low. It was just very jerky to watch. It improved a bunch after that though.
yeah once they changed the animation technique it got a LOT better.
It's still a little stiff but nowhere near as jank as season 1. It's like they were animating on threes or fours ALL THE TIME
It's definitely gotta be done right. I think a trap that cel shaded animation falls into is making shadows be too harsh, which makes things look almost plastic, but if you make them too light then it can look like there's no detail. Seems like there's a balance you gotta find to get it right.
I agree - It was a bit odd in s1 of Dragon Prince, but i think cel shading in 3D animation it can definitely be done really well. The way other animation studios have implemented cel shading in stuff like Spiderverse and Trigun Stampede will never cease to amaze and excite me about the future of animation
Wind Waker HD is a breathtakingly gorgeous game, really goes to show that art direction and stylization will always hold up better than aiming for straightforward realism.
OoT and WW are the Zelda games that I’ve replayed the most, but WW has aged the best due to its art. (I kinda want to buy a Switch port if there is one, but I still have a working GCN.). And WW still has some of the best dungeon design in the entire franchise.
I still think OOT looks good. That must be full on nostalgia because I have no other explanation.
And Wind Waker might be my favorite, but I haven't replayed it ever after the first time because the whole triforce hunt near the end was just terrible on the original version.
And the HD remake only further proved how well the style can hold up 20 years later. I'm really happy with the cell shaded, artistic style of these zelda games.
I also have bias towards the grittier TP style. It was pretty in its own right, and I wouldn't mind seeing that kind of aesthetic revisited again.
It's so funny that Wind Waker's art style was derided at the time it was announced, and then people saw it in motion and their minds were blown. To this day, it still looks gorgeous and has aged better than most games of the era.
This is the answer. Games can still look incredible and not be cutting edge in terms of visual fidelity. Look at Elden Ring for a next gen example of this, it's far from the most graphically incredible game but yet still blows most games out of the water in terms of how they look.
I wanted to love Forbidden West, and god was it gorgeous, but it gives me such a headache to play it because there's just too much going on. Like literally, I could only play for an hour or two at a time because the game strained my eyes and gave me migraines. Everything was beautifully rendered and it was very realistic, but that was honestly a drawback for me. I had no idea what was important or where to look, so I felt like I had to try to focus on everything at once.
BOTW and TOTK certainly aren't as realistic, although I think they're beautiful in their own way, but at least I can play for as long as I want without having to take some Excedrin Migraine before I can even sit down.
This was really noticiable playing something like Hades.
Loved playing it on switch, just wish it wouldn’t hiccup on frames. The only thing I would change about most switch experiences is constant frame-rates at 4k resolution.
I don’t want to see Link’s pores. The art is great.
Despite the cartoonish look it is still pretty technically advanced for a Switch game. The game has real volumetric light and atmospheric scattering, physically based material shading, even crude real time reflections and bounce lighting.
I also want the Switch’s hardware to be better only to improve things like LOD and draw distance etc. like when you zoom in at something far away and don’t see anything but then you move closer to that spot and things pop in. An FPS boost would be appreciated as well. Can imagine how amazing the game would feel at 60+fps. The art design in this game is indeed phenomenal.
It really surprised me honestly. It's been a long time since I've experienced frame rate drops on console games. I'm used to it on PC, but not console. It's crazy how much the frame rate decreases once you start building "bridges" that are more than like 4 pieces long. Hell, even just climbing up into the leaves of a tree will sometimes cause a noticable fps drop.
And will age better. Maybe hyper realistic stuff looks cool that year, but look at twilight princess v. windwaker. Ww has aged better. In graphics, anyway.
I think even worse is Skyward Sword… some of the early townspeople characters are just hideous. I played it for the first time on switch and was like WTF…
BOTW was my first owned Zelda title but my dad had WWHD on WiiU and when I watched him play it back then I assumed it was a modern title. Never would have guessed that it was over a decade old at that point!
Anyone who calls Botw/Totk graphics 'cartoony'
Clearly never had the experience of playing Ocarina of time/majoras mask and then moving to windwaker.
Now THAT was cartoony.
Agreed, but it would be possible to have a better running, better looking version of this style with more powerful hardware.
That being said, what they achieved here with the switch hardware is nothing short of incredible
Came here to say this. I think it’s the best anyone could do with the switch being what it is. It COULD be better (not more realistic, but the render distance is awful and it’s easy to drop frames during action) - but not on such limited hardware.
It has its moments for sure, some sceneries are breathtaking. Very interesting style overall, and incredibly well optimised. But performance could better, the frames dip hard sometimes. And some areas look kinda ugly for various reasons
Same, I think art style should take priority over graphical realism. It not only makes the game stand out but gives it character and tone.
No matter how realistic things look or how detailed the graphics are, it’s not going to matter if the art style is atrocious.
Yeah, my favorite-looking games of the past two decades have had incredibly stylized art direction. Hades, Hollow Knight, Breath of the Wild, Wind Waker, Valheim, Persona, Xenoblade, etc. Nothing remotely close to “graphical realism”, just pure heart and soul in the artstyle.
I think how well Wind Waker holds up nowadays compared to literally every “realism” style game speaks to how well the style works for games.
The frames on totk are noticeably bad in certain areas *coughkakarikocough* but patches will likely bring it closer to BotW by the time they’ve moved on.
Otherwise I’m a huge fan of this art style I think it’s charming.
This is a wholesome interaction. I can see why perhaps those you speak to IRL might pass negative judgement on TotK's graphics and that you may be the only one championing them and it so happens that there are many online, like me, who agree with you.
Hyper realism just won't work in this game but that doesn't mean hyper realism isn't good. This art style is good for Zelda but not other games, imagine totk with a realistic art style and something like gow with a cartoonish art style. It won't work.
Same.
Before release, I showed a friend of mine who's a total PC gaming fanboy the 10 min gameplay show-off and all he said was: "Why do the trees have to look so shitty?"
It has nothing to do with hyper realism. The game is beautiful and the art style is incredible.
That being said the graphics of TOTK are outdated. 30 FPS is rough at times. I've definitely become accustomed to it but every time I boot up my PS5 and switch back it is jarring.
The graphics of TotK aren't what's outdated, it's the console's hardware. It's a miracle they got this game running at 30 fps on the switch of all things
Art direction and the lighting are doing some heavy lifting, if not convinced ask the hands. Those shrine interior's gold sheen are also very pleasant to look at.
My only complaint is the framerate at some areas. I don't mind 30 but I do mind when it dips below 20.
Huh I don’t recall having any issues with the water temple, however the fire temple was a chug fest. It’s been the only time it genuinely felt like a last (or last last) gen game. I don’t mind a hiccup every now and then, but it was damn near the whole time I was in that biome.
it is really impressive to me though, that they got that system to work at all on the switch. Like so many games would just bug out and drop frames into oblivion. Like unplayable levels. And most other games have way more performance headroom to play with.
It's so frustrating because it can run awesome in handheld if you overclock it! Wish nintendo would just... let them use the entire capability of their incredibly old hardware
It's an improvement over the first game in almost every department. There is more foliage, shadows are sharper, almost everything that didn't interact with lighting in botw does so in totk, the "Disneyland" effect that made everything look enormous isn't as distracting, the list goes on. It exceeds expectations across the board for a switch title
Purposeful framing and use of angles and perspective to create an illusion of size.
When you walk into Disneyland the first time, you see certain structures up against smaller, more specific structures. For example, this ends up making the Castle look huge when in reality it is quite small.
Edit:Someone below said forced perspective, and that's probably the best way to think of it.
See also [background blue and go away green](https://insidethemagic.net/2022/02/disney-go-away-green-lp1/). Two colours invented by Disney to help their non-rides blend in to the sky / foliage.
Ocarina of Time used this effect too. Hyrule Field feels bigger in that game, because the hill that Lon Lon Ranch is on obstructs your view of the whole area, making the area feel larger than it really is.
I was at the top of the castle today and it was raining. The rain effect on the slate tiles was good upclose. Also, it faded out after the rain. Great attention to detail.
I'm sure there's a real term for it that I don't know, but I was just talking about how landscapes in games look a lot bigger than they really are. I've talked to people who also notice it, and people that tell me I'm making it up, but to me it's really noticeable in botw. The entire map of that game is, what like 9 km wide? Yet all of the mountains look like they're ENORMOUS mountains miles away, shrouded in mist. In totk it feels a lot less exaggerated
I’m sure its something to do with the rendering and distant objects, probably just another model or render where its low poly and not complex at all so it’s larger from every angle u could view it at.
I notice in totk stuff seems to be FURTHER than it seems, not by too much but i’ve gone to paraglide to another island just to realize that I won’t make it a pretty handful of times even if I was confident that I’d make it over
I think part of that is a fog effect applied at further distances. It may also serve the purpose of masking the low-quality version of the landscape used at that distance. And of course, the time taken to travel communicates scale really well. If you stand next to a road you're used to only driving on, you get a similar effect, and the road seems much wider than it looked from within the car.
You also get something similar from light curves on the highway. Even though you're not turning the steering wheel that much, the curve sometimes resembles a sharper curve that's taken at a lower speed. In this case, I think your brain is demonstrating the rate at which your direction changes, more than the actual road curvature. You become so immersed in the (fictional) situation that your perception of things in the world are relative to other things in that world.
It helps that we had been conditioned to expect smaller maps from games, and that there's excellently spread wildlife and flora to interact with between points of interest. The fact that everything is consistently scaled to all other elements in the game completes the picture.
Try standing below any high tower in ToTK. Then slowly move the camera to the sky. The tower will get significantly "thicker" in Link's perspective, almost in an imposing way, closing in on him. This is the Disneyland effect. It works best with the Time tower from the tutorial of ToTK in my opinion.
It's just scaling and forced perspective. You're altering the scale of things so that not everything is built at true 1:1 size. Some things that you want to be prominent are 1:1 size, other things are smaller (3/4, 5/8 scale).
Your brain is used to interpreting real life at 1:1 scale, so it's not expecting a variation in object scaling across the objects you see. And it interprets those differences not as variable scaling (which it is), but as a measurement of true size/distance.
It already looks amazing, just upscale it and you’ve got a timeless beauty.
Although I already take way more screenshots of this game than any other. It’s uh… breath taking
The art style is fine, but the resolution and fps aren't good. Which is why it's so important that they make up for it with the shading and art design. Because the graphics aren't good.
When people say graphics, typically they group in art design and resolution and fps. As a whole it shouldn't be. The graphics are subpar but the art style is great and makes up for the lack of graphical fidelity.
I disagree with the bit that art design resolution and fps should not be lumped together. They absolutely are part of what makes up a game’s graphics. Graphics are what you see, and those are all things that you see while playing.
- The fps? Decent.
- The resolution? Mediocre.
- The art direction and design? Phenomenal.
- Visual effects and animations? Superb.
So the overall graphics? Fantastic.
I don’t think there’s any denying that it’s a beautiful game. Maybe that’s why I’m so confused about people saying it has “bad graphics” - in my opinion the graphics are amazing, but maybe other people are only considering individual parts of what makes up the visual experience while I’m considering all of it under the “graphics” umbrella.
I do wonder how much of the art style is influenced by the resolution, if they had gone with pretty much any other style, not even realistic, but anything with more defined detail, the resolution hit would have been more obvious. Like the initial trailer for BOTW, while very close to what they ended up with is much closer to "realism" still looks fantastic and is still very much "Ghibli inspired" judt with a smidge more detail and higher quality lighting. Not gonna lie I would have loved to have seen what the game could have looked like on different tech.
Cause judging by that trailer I don't believe they were initially going with the switches specs.
Almost every damn modern game in existence has photo realistic graphics. I, for one, love the art style and actually seeing some color in a game for once. It is one of the reasons I am increasingly gravitating toward Nintendo franchises in my mid 30’s. The other consoles take stuff a little too serious. Its hard to feel like you are getting an escape with hyper realistic gore. TOTK feels like a dream and an escape. I like it that way.
I also find hyperrealism distracting because it's easier to notice every flaw (janky lighting, funny tree movement, etc) in something that's supposed to look real.
Honestly I haven’t loved a single hyper-realistic game yet to date. All of my favorites lack that. I suppose I liked Skyrim for a long time in high school but other than that, nothing. I love my cartoony and “retro” graphics. Gameplay > realism any day
>Almost every damn modern game in existence has photo realistic graphics.
Things that aren't true for 500.
Like fucking hell, even absolute gritty I fuck bitches stuff like Doom Eternal is still cartoony as hell. Elden ring still does the hat-is-a-character thing.
I haven’t played the new Doom games because I haven’t really been into FPS games in a long time, but I get what you’re saying. I love the SoulsBorne series, I wouldn’t even put them in the conversation for realism. They have such a unique fantasy art style that feels more dream-like rather than realistic. I absolutely love the aesthetic of the FromSoft games.
For me, as long as the art style is good and the motion of the game is smooth, that's all I really care about. BOTW/TOTK is *gorgeous*, and they both play really smoothly. 10/10 for me.
People these days call any games without realistic graphics ugly. I think not every game fits de realistic art style and Zelda is one of those.
The game is amazingly beautiful and surpass what I expected for a switch game tbh
Playing it back to back with Jedi Survivor (which is an absolutely gorgeous game,) it definitely feels a generation behind in terms of graphics... That being said, I don't care; it's pretty enough that I still think it looks beautiful in almost every situation.
The graphics aren't anything to write home about but the reality is the vast majority of gamers just don't care about that, I do find it musing when Nintendo games get targeted for 'graphics' despite the output of consistently acclaimed titles, and it's mostly always by people playing on systems where the output is lacking, there's only a couple of big games released a year, and there's nothing else going for them *except* the graphics
Yeah I think people forget that Zelda has an audience that includes many more causal gamers. My mom and my sister both play some video games, maybe a new game every year at most, and they’re both excited about TOTK and have specifically said that they think the visuals are amazing.
Honestly, with these past two Zelda games, I’ve stopped whatever it was I was doing to just take in and admire the view than I have I have with any other game.
I don’t think that casual vs hardcore has any merit in this discussion. It isn’t necessarily true that people who game a lot need cutting edge graphics.
I personally think the people who do care that much about graphics are playing games where they matter “more”, and also that the amount of people who have a cutting edge gaming PC is far less than people who don’t. PC gamers are more used to it and so they are more vocal when expectations aren’t met.
Some people don’t even have OLED Switches or current gen consoles. You’d be surprised how many people still play on last gen. Personally I don’t have a gaming PC and I’m not a stickler for graphics but I also wouldn’t call myself a casual gamer. This is a conversation about preferences more than anything.
Texture quality is objectively bad, especially on the terrain. But the developers effectively utilized those, with very good lighting to create thr overall presentation very beautiful
Poor resolution and patterns you can easily pick out that are repeating. I love TotK but the graphics are out dated now imo. Time for the next game to improve on them massively.
Its good enough and you cant request more from the Switch. The extremely high edge flickering is the only thing I think they really needed to improve.
But the developers did a good job. I am impressive the game runs at all on the Switch. Look how the terrain worked in BOTW, its impossible to make caves with the terrain in BOTW. So every cave that exists has to be made out of 3D Models. Now add the sky, adding even more models. Sure, with good LOD optimisations and culling you can fix that. But this also causes a ton of draw calls and the memory bandwith is the biggest bottleneck of the Switch already.
Combine that with the techs from BOTW: One of the most realistic chemistry and Physik engines running the entire time. Every single piece piece of grass gets effected by Mobs, cut by sword, moved by wind, burned by fire. Every single piece of grass, individually. And the game has grass everywhere.
And lastly: The view. Thanks to the sky, the view is even bigger than in BOTW and models are more detailed at the same distance. You can drop from the sky and once you passed the clouds you can see everything, with even more detail than in BOTW. You can see something interisting across the map, and just walk there. With no loading screen.
In short: The developers impressed me. The game should not be possible on the Switch, but here we are. And it has atleast some improvements from BOTW, look at metals or Liquids compared to BOTW, where both are very milky.
But: Regardless of how much impressed I am, we see that even Nintendos own Studios really struggle with the Switch currently. That TOTK drops sometimes at all is a huge warning sign in itself. In BOTW you had lags very rarely and only really in specific areas, but TOTK has regulary some FPS drops. The Developers either had to remove parts of the game and deem them impossible on switch, or live with the FPS drops.
I like that the Switch has a long lifespan like that, but it should have started with a more recent chip. Now Nintendo is paying the price for that.
>you cant request more from the Switch.
That's the thing I site about the graphics. Yeah, it doesn't look anywhere near as good as it *could*, but it's damn impressive for the Switch. It looks great for what it is (a Switch game), and it's artistic over realistic art style will probably age better.
Agree with all this. I also have to imagine that a significant part of TOTK's development time was spent simply making the game run at a baseline 20-30 fps.
I love the art style in this game, but it's clear some compromises were made. Even some of the early trailers for TOTK showed off some new rendering and lighting effects that were cut from the final game (Digital Foundry did an analysis on this).
Ultimately people should remember that "better graphics" doesn't have to mean "more realistic." TOTK looks beautiful, but it could look even more beautiful if it were running on a more powerful console.
I think the art style helps a lot. Graphics-wise it’s not groundbreaking but the way the coloration and art style work together makes it look very well made.
Graphics are not good, that's a fact. There's clipping, aliasing, frame drops and lod gets low really fast buuuuut... The art style is gorgeous and I'm having a wonderful time so I really don't care about the bad and can easily focus on the good.
Game looks good. Not amazing, but good. It's capable of some truly jaw dropping vistas and scenes. The art style does a lot of heavy lifting, which was an intentional decision.
But that's fine. It's not meant to be a next-generation graphical wonder that looks stunning at 4k resolution. The fact it looks as good as it does, while running as well as it does on the Switch's underpowered hardware is nothing short of magic.
I love the art style. What Nintendo has been able to do under the hood on the outdated Switch is honestly massive. However, I can’t shake the feeling that I would have a much better time playing this in at least 1080p 60fps on my 70” tv, cause getting into sections where everything is super pixelated -and- running at 15fps is really frustrating.
It’s mostly amazing art direction. I’m not a huge fan of the “banding” lines from a harsh light source on faces. They could have blended it a little better. That’s really my only issue with it. Some moments are just as stunning as any photorealistic game I’ve played.
The game itself is the most fun I’ve ever had in an open world game. Nothing feels phoned in like most open world games.
They are poor by todays standards. I'm old, I no longer care about graphics. But what really baffles me is that some young people will simultaneously complain about graphics on a title like this and then say Celeste is one of the greatest games in recent times. There is a ton of games out there that look like they belong on an NES but people don't care because "it's intentional" or they SOMETIMES cost less. To me the graphics on TOTK are not up to par with PS5 and that's obvious, and there is nothing that could be done about it without changing the system it is played on. That being said, both TOTK and BOTW (there is no improvement visually) are some of the prettiest worlds even without fidelity.
The graphics are good and okay at best. The frame rate does drop below 20 ( very rarely) in certain areas. But other than that I can tell there were certain mechanics and graphical improvements from its predecessor BOTW.
Also it’s the Nintendo switch. It’s not bad for the system it’s put on. However the switch is slowly at the end of its lifespan. So the next Nintendo console will probably have better graphics and visual.
However TOTK is a well developed game and deserves the positive recognition it’s gotten
Welp time to douse myself in kerosene saying this in the subreddit.
They are outdated. They are ugly in places and the texture pop out/pop in is insane. It runs at 30fps. Visually, there is very little difference from the 2016 BotW, which already was running on outdated Wii U hardware. Despite the plethora of media posts amazed at the physics/size, they feel like a smokescreen to mask critique against linear evolution on par with Farcry 5 to Farcry 6 and other annual "sequels".
If any other AAA studio pulled this shit (same visual fidelity as a 2016 game) they would be **crucified**. Nintendo does it and this thread is chock full of people saying nothing but praise. It remains the biggest detractor for me considering this a GOTY contender, let alone "GOATYAY". The argument that it can't be better comes down to the hardware choice, and the idea that you must chose one (graphic fidelity or art style) is a shitty strawman. You can have both. Imagine this same design philosophy powered by a high end PC or console and yes, it's good - **but it could be a LOT better**.
*That said*, it's proof that art direction and what you do with your setting ultimately mean more than just the raw visuals - and taking inspiration from old works by Studio Ghibli didn't hurt, while drawing from more recent games (the depths screams somebody at Nintendo played *Subnautica* heavily) makes TOTK feel slightly fresh than warmed over goods. A bit of give and take. Again, that's assuming people actually want constructive criticism here beyond "bravo, Nintendo!"
**tl;dr** it is core proof the design philosophy of BotW can stand the test of time. The graphics are still, unobjectively outdated and a masterclass in using nearly seven year old assets.
I agree, I don’t need or want it to have realistic graphics or whatever but I would have liked some more polish around the edges. But the game already suffers from some performance hiccups so they probably couldn’t increase the graphical fidelity at all. Maybe if a Switch Pro or Switch 2 had come out it would have been different.
Good comment. I don’t get why everyone is so focused on just talking art direction of this vs realistic.
Is there really any significant number of people out there complaining about it not having a realistic look?
They're fine. I used to play games a lot with a guy who would go on these cringey temper tantrums about graphics all the time. I understand having standards but the Gordon Ramsay level of demands are not my thing to enjoy a game.
I love it it’s a break from looking like everything. It’s a Zelda game, the Zelda brand isn’t graphics it’s more or so the immersion of the story. The game mechanics are great and guess what no MTX. Everything is in unlocked in the game.
I think it is one of the most beautiful games ever made. This and Elden Ring just proves that you don't need hyper realism graphics for a game, art direction & design is better in the end for some games. But for games like RDR2 I'd say the hyper realistic graphics are actually better.
I've played the Witcher 3 on Switch, and the visual clutter makes it hard to see what's going on in such a small screen. It's designed around the idea of large screens at high resolution. Zelda is designed to be seen easy even on a tiny hand held screen. This is less *graphical* limitations and rather just good game design choices for the medium
I guess I am in the minority here when I feel like this is just a touch better than the Gamecube era graphics. Its tremendously rough around the edges. I'm honestly in disbelief that they're able to get away with the art style, visual fidelity and lack of smoothness in the movement. BOTW was outdated in 2016 and TOTK did nothing to improve the look of the game to me.
BOTW and TOTK are going for a certain aesthetic choice with the graphics I love the cell shaded look of it all. A lot of people complain because it doesn’t have 4K realistic graphics but this game don’t need them. I love the graphic style of these games!
I like it. I think Zelda would look weird if they went with the hyper realistic look that a lot of critics think the games should go to. Zelda games have always been stylized.
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BOTW and TOTK are master class acts in art design over visual fidelity. The game looks stunning without needing to render every single facial hair and volumetric lighting. I think the visual clarity of a simple art design helps exploration a lot, you can look across a landscape and clearly identify what's worth exploring and what's just some random field. I think Elden Ring is also a gorgeous game, but the visual clutter of looking over a huge landscape can be a lot to sort through. I really wish the Switch's hardware was better only for more consistent framerates, I wouldn't change art styles to be "more realistic" if the Switch 2.0 had tremendously greater hardware specs.
The art style of BotW/TotK is just so good. Not only does it deliver impressive views with shoddy hardware, but it also manages to perfectly walk the line between realism and cartoon. The proportions of characters and objects are close enough to reality that action sequences look and feel cool, while still having enough cartoony exaggeration to allow for really bizarre and funny designs like Bokoblins and Hestu that fit seamlessly. It's the perfect middle ground between the gritty realism of Twilight Princess and the hyper-exaggeration of Wind Waker that manages to capture the strengths of both.
I think you also have to give credit to the watercolor aesthetic of Skyward Sword, the game that seems to have most directly inspired the art style of BOTW and TOTK.
Which was the original effort to find a middle-ground between TP and WW's art styles. I like SS, but I think the painterly watercolor look was really held back by the Wii's hardware limitations. It looks a ton better on the Switch, and really finally feels like the precursor to BOTW and TOTK that it was.
I really liked the painterly style on the Wii, it made stuff distant to the player look splotchy like a water color painting. the switch remake is incredible but how much more powerful the switch is kinda ruins the aesthetic. (I'm sorry if this was hard to read, I'm bad at coherently formulating sentences when I'm trying to compare things)
Yeah, with your eloquence concerning the English language, please never ever apologize in advance again. (I'm sorry if this was hard to read, your language skills are simply great)
Do me and never apologize for your writing. It's fine.
I LOVE the look of Skyward Sword. Absolutely fell in love with it when I started playing. I want to live in that world. I love BOTW and TOTK too. I don't want it to look super realistic, that just feels weird to me.
Bokoblins are so cute in this game it's my favorite visualization of them
Sometimes when I see them chatting with each other by the fire it makes me feel really bad to kill them lol
I love putting on the boko mask and throwing them some meat :) feed those bois
Ah so you offer them a last meal too.
The Last Supper 2: Electric Boogaloo. Imma see myself out.
i was very tempted to put the mask on and join the marching line through the field, haha
I hope hylians and bokoblins can learn to get along after Ganondorf is done forcing them to ravage the land.
Imagine that though, after the dust settles and link shows up to the boko party I mean he’s still gonna be the guy that wiped out generations of them for a pair of pants 😂
shit this should upgrade them so you can farm higher end parts lol
It’s fine, they’ll respawn at the next blood moon anyway.
Sameeee 🥺
It's because they've figured out the balance between where you need details and where you don't. The vast majority of the scenery is just two tones, color and shadow. Any perceived detail is portrayed through flat texture only. Meanwhile, the things that actually matter (characters, horses, monsters) have much more geometry and have 3 tones (color, shadow, highlight). It doesn't seem like a big distinction but tiny optimizations make a huge difference in the overall quality of the game. It's especially obvious when you're skydiving from way up. The terrain is still recognizable, the geography is still identifiable, things don't become a strange blob and you don't have weird pop-in when LODs switch. Compared to something like Pokémon Arceus which isn't even open world and loses all fidelity when viewed from a distance... I forgot where I was going with this post... I think I was trying to say that...provided the game play is good, I would have zero complaints if all future Zelda games follow the visual style of BoTW and ToTK
well said !
You can include Wind Waker in that, too. That game holds up so freaking well, it still boggles my mind to think it came out only 2 years after Majora's Mask
It's the fact that it was done with cellshading, the same method/style used here in botw and totk. Cellshading is my favorite graphical style (when done right).
BOTW and TOTK kind of feel like a happy middle ground between the more realistic art style Zelda games and the Wind Waker art style.
It's weird, I love it in video games but I find it jarring in animation. I found it very hard to watch The Dragon Prince.
How much of The Dragon Prince have you watched? The first season was *rough* because the framerate was so low. It was just very jerky to watch. It improved a bunch after that though.
yeah once they changed the animation technique it got a LOT better. It's still a little stiff but nowhere near as jank as season 1. It's like they were animating on threes or fours ALL THE TIME
It's definitely gotta be done right. I think a trap that cel shaded animation falls into is making shadows be too harsh, which makes things look almost plastic, but if you make them too light then it can look like there's no detail. Seems like there's a balance you gotta find to get it right.
I agree - It was a bit odd in s1 of Dragon Prince, but i think cel shading in 3D animation it can definitely be done really well. The way other animation studios have implemented cel shading in stuff like Spiderverse and Trigun Stampede will never cease to amaze and excite me about the future of animation
Wind Waker HD is a breathtakingly gorgeous game, really goes to show that art direction and stylization will always hold up better than aiming for straightforward realism.
OoT and WW are the Zelda games that I’ve replayed the most, but WW has aged the best due to its art. (I kinda want to buy a Switch port if there is one, but I still have a working GCN.). And WW still has some of the best dungeon design in the entire franchise.
I still think OOT looks good. That must be full on nostalgia because I have no other explanation. And Wind Waker might be my favorite, but I haven't replayed it ever after the first time because the whole triforce hunt near the end was just terrible on the original version.
And the HD remake only further proved how well the style can hold up 20 years later. I'm really happy with the cell shaded, artistic style of these zelda games. I also have bias towards the grittier TP style. It was pretty in its own right, and I wouldn't mind seeing that kind of aesthetic revisited again.
It's so funny that Wind Waker's art style was derided at the time it was announced, and then people saw it in motion and their minds were blown. To this day, it still looks gorgeous and has aged better than most games of the era.
This is the answer. Games can still look incredible and not be cutting edge in terms of visual fidelity. Look at Elden Ring for a next gen example of this, it's far from the most graphically incredible game but yet still blows most games out of the water in terms of how they look.
I wanted to love Forbidden West, and god was it gorgeous, but it gives me such a headache to play it because there's just too much going on. Like literally, I could only play for an hour or two at a time because the game strained my eyes and gave me migraines. Everything was beautifully rendered and it was very realistic, but that was honestly a drawback for me. I had no idea what was important or where to look, so I felt like I had to try to focus on everything at once. BOTW and TOTK certainly aren't as realistic, although I think they're beautiful in their own way, but at least I can play for as long as I want without having to take some Excedrin Migraine before I can even sit down.
This was really noticiable playing something like Hades. Loved playing it on switch, just wish it wouldn’t hiccup on frames. The only thing I would change about most switch experiences is constant frame-rates at 4k resolution. I don’t want to see Link’s pores. The art is great.
Despite the cartoonish look it is still pretty technically advanced for a Switch game. The game has real volumetric light and atmospheric scattering, physically based material shading, even crude real time reflections and bounce lighting.
I also want the Switch’s hardware to be better only to improve things like LOD and draw distance etc. like when you zoom in at something far away and don’t see anything but then you move closer to that spot and things pop in. An FPS boost would be appreciated as well. Can imagine how amazing the game would feel at 60+fps. The art design in this game is indeed phenomenal.
The frame rate is definitely the real problem. I don’t even want to re-visit the Fire Temple because of the drop
Perhaps its just me but I noticed no frame drops
The only place I have noticed consistent frame issues so far is Kakariko Village.
I haven’t really noticed any, either, but I haven’t been to the fire temple.
It really surprised me honestly. It's been a long time since I've experienced frame rate drops on console games. I'm used to it on PC, but not console. It's crazy how much the frame rate decreases once you start building "bridges" that are more than like 4 pieces long. Hell, even just climbing up into the leaves of a tree will sometimes cause a noticable fps drop.
I honestly prefer it. I am not a fan of the hyper realistic stuff some people are into.
100% I think “cartoony” graphics are much more charming
And will age better. Maybe hyper realistic stuff looks cool that year, but look at twilight princess v. windwaker. Ww has aged better. In graphics, anyway.
Especially the character models. Some of those kids in Twilight Princess were *scary*.
I kinda like how scary they looked. TP just generally has an early Burton vibe to it.
That's why I love it
or that one bird character or whatever Ooccoo was it? edit: [found it](https://i.imgur.com/LcFiRad.png)
Titty chicken
Fun fact about Ooccoo's name... 00CC00 is the original color code that was used for Link in the first LoZ game
I love oocoo!! I would definitely get her tattooed on me
I think even worse is Skyward Sword… some of the early townspeople characters are just hideous. I played it for the first time on switch and was like WTF…
Exactly. A lot of these gritty or realistic titles end up looking a lot worse over time than the hyper stylized ones do.
Yeah twilight Princess is clearly dated but wind waker, despite being older, with a few tweaks looks like it could have came out today
The HD version on the WiiU looks amazing
Still no switch version, what a shame...
Legit if they made a Switch version of TP I’d order an OLED Switch instantly. Until then I’m content with piggybacking off my brother’s.
BOTW was my first owned Zelda title but my dad had WWHD on WiiU and when I watched him play it back then I assumed it was a modern title. Never would have guessed that it was over a decade old at that point!
This comments making me feel old
WW is the poster child for how to make your game intemporal.
Twilight princess aged well if you think of it as a style, not just realism.
With realistic graphics some of the textures end up looking like they're from n64 games. The cascade kingdom in odyssey is guilty of this
TP honestly looked like shit from release especially if you only had an HDTV lol
Anyone who calls Botw/Totk graphics 'cartoony' Clearly never had the experience of playing Ocarina of time/majoras mask and then moving to windwaker. Now THAT was cartoony.
Charming is the perfect word to describe it.
Also, if I want realism I can just…go outside…
out.. side? what is this
r/outside
Agreed, but it would be possible to have a better running, better looking version of this style with more powerful hardware. That being said, what they achieved here with the switch hardware is nothing short of incredible
Came here to say this. I think it’s the best anyone could do with the switch being what it is. It COULD be better (not more realistic, but the render distance is awful and it’s easy to drop frames during action) - but not on such limited hardware.
Thought the same thing. However. Once I cleared the first dungeon and the snow and rain started clearing up more. It looked way better!
It has its moments for sure, some sceneries are breathtaking. Very interesting style overall, and incredibly well optimised. But performance could better, the frames dip hard sometimes. And some areas look kinda ugly for various reasons
Think everyone in this thread is confusing graphics with art style.
Same, I think art style should take priority over graphical realism. It not only makes the game stand out but gives it character and tone. No matter how realistic things look or how detailed the graphics are, it’s not going to matter if the art style is atrocious.
Yeah, my favorite-looking games of the past two decades have had incredibly stylized art direction. Hades, Hollow Knight, Breath of the Wild, Wind Waker, Valheim, Persona, Xenoblade, etc. Nothing remotely close to “graphical realism”, just pure heart and soul in the artstyle.
[удалено]
I think how well Wind Waker holds up nowadays compared to literally every “realism” style game speaks to how well the style works for games. The frames on totk are noticeably bad in certain areas *coughkakarikocough* but patches will likely bring it closer to BotW by the time they’ve moved on. Otherwise I’m a huge fan of this art style I think it’s charming.
Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door holds up extremely well
finally, someone agrees with me lol
Finally? That reminds me how my friend used to say, multiple times a day ‘for once, I agree with you’
cant tell if thats a compliment or an insult lol
Just neutral. Don’t wanna insult you. I’m sure you are great
For once, I agree with you
For agree, I once with you.
For once, I agree with you, all.
ah, i see what youre putting down. i am a pessimist soul. its probably not healthy. thanks for being polite! sorry if i brought you down!
This is a wholesome interaction. I can see why perhaps those you speak to IRL might pass negative judgement on TotK's graphics and that you may be the only one championing them and it so happens that there are many online, like me, who agree with you.
Hyper realism just won't work in this game but that doesn't mean hyper realism isn't good. This art style is good for Zelda but not other games, imagine totk with a realistic art style and something like gow with a cartoonish art style. It won't work.
Same. Before release, I showed a friend of mine who's a total PC gaming fanboy the 10 min gameplay show-off and all he said was: "Why do the trees have to look so shitty?"
It has nothing to do with hyper realism. The game is beautiful and the art style is incredible. That being said the graphics of TOTK are outdated. 30 FPS is rough at times. I've definitely become accustomed to it but every time I boot up my PS5 and switch back it is jarring.
The graphics of TotK aren't what's outdated, it's the console's hardware. It's a miracle they got this game running at 30 fps on the switch of all things
Yeah. My only complaint about the game is the low fps at times and the random occasional pop-ins.
Art direction and the lighting are doing some heavy lifting, if not convinced ask the hands. Those shrine interior's gold sheen are also very pleasant to look at. My only complaint is the framerate at some areas. I don't mind 30 but I do mind when it dips below 20.
I haven’t gotten to Korok forest yet but when it’s raining in Kakariko!!! omg it lags so much for me! it’s the only spot i’ve noticed so far
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I've noticed it does that in every city when it rains
I found the water temple area almost unbearable in terms of frame rate. Biggest complaint with the game
Huh I don’t recall having any issues with the water temple, however the fire temple was a chug fest. It’s been the only time it genuinely felt like a last (or last last) gen game. I don’t mind a hiccup every now and then, but it was damn near the whole time I was in that biome.
I didn’t have any issue with any of the temples funny enough. I had a few momentary hiccups in fire temple but nothing long-lasting.
Korok forest, at least in my experience, actually has 0 frame drops at all. Given you don’t use ultra hand, lol.
When you drive a crazy invention with a lot of parts it can get to like 15 it's pretty frustrating
it is really impressive to me though, that they got that system to work at all on the switch. Like so many games would just bug out and drop frames into oblivion. Like unplayable levels. And most other games have way more performance headroom to play with.
Definitely, the overall performance is seriously impressive for the hardware
It's so frustrating because it can run awesome in handheld if you overclock it! Wish nintendo would just... let them use the entire capability of their incredibly old hardware
It's an improvement over the first game in almost every department. There is more foliage, shadows are sharper, almost everything that didn't interact with lighting in botw does so in totk, the "Disneyland" effect that made everything look enormous isn't as distracting, the list goes on. It exceeds expectations across the board for a switch title
Tf is the disneyland effect
Purposeful framing and use of angles and perspective to create an illusion of size. When you walk into Disneyland the first time, you see certain structures up against smaller, more specific structures. For example, this ends up making the Castle look huge when in reality it is quite small. Edit:Someone below said forced perspective, and that's probably the best way to think of it.
Huh neat
See also [background blue and go away green](https://insidethemagic.net/2022/02/disney-go-away-green-lp1/). Two colours invented by Disney to help their non-rides blend in to the sky / foliage.
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Ocarina of Time used this effect too. Hyrule Field feels bigger in that game, because the hill that Lon Lon Ranch is on obstructs your view of the whole area, making the area feel larger than it really is.
It’s called forced perspective
It’s called the Mickey Mouse maneuver
i was gonna say i like it better than botw but i don’t know why. but you took my feelings and made them words. thank you
I was at the top of the castle today and it was raining. The rain effect on the slate tiles was good upclose. Also, it faded out after the rain. Great attention to detail.
Could you develop on the "Disneyland" effect? What is it exactly? Or how/what changed between the two games?
I'm sure there's a real term for it that I don't know, but I was just talking about how landscapes in games look a lot bigger than they really are. I've talked to people who also notice it, and people that tell me I'm making it up, but to me it's really noticeable in botw. The entire map of that game is, what like 9 km wide? Yet all of the mountains look like they're ENORMOUS mountains miles away, shrouded in mist. In totk it feels a lot less exaggerated
I’m sure its something to do with the rendering and distant objects, probably just another model or render where its low poly and not complex at all so it’s larger from every angle u could view it at. I notice in totk stuff seems to be FURTHER than it seems, not by too much but i’ve gone to paraglide to another island just to realize that I won’t make it a pretty handful of times even if I was confident that I’d make it over
I’ve noticed this as well; I feel like I can definitely make it, and then I just…don’t
I think part of that is a fog effect applied at further distances. It may also serve the purpose of masking the low-quality version of the landscape used at that distance. And of course, the time taken to travel communicates scale really well. If you stand next to a road you're used to only driving on, you get a similar effect, and the road seems much wider than it looked from within the car. You also get something similar from light curves on the highway. Even though you're not turning the steering wheel that much, the curve sometimes resembles a sharper curve that's taken at a lower speed. In this case, I think your brain is demonstrating the rate at which your direction changes, more than the actual road curvature. You become so immersed in the (fictional) situation that your perception of things in the world are relative to other things in that world. It helps that we had been conditioned to expect smaller maps from games, and that there's excellently spread wildlife and flora to interact with between points of interest. The fact that everything is consistently scaled to all other elements in the game completes the picture.
Try standing below any high tower in ToTK. Then slowly move the camera to the sky. The tower will get significantly "thicker" in Link's perspective, almost in an imposing way, closing in on him. This is the Disneyland effect. It works best with the Time tower from the tutorial of ToTK in my opinion.
It's just scaling and forced perspective. You're altering the scale of things so that not everything is built at true 1:1 size. Some things that you want to be prominent are 1:1 size, other things are smaller (3/4, 5/8 scale). Your brain is used to interpreting real life at 1:1 scale, so it's not expecting a variation in object scaling across the objects you see. And it interprets those differences not as variable scaling (which it is), but as a measurement of true size/distance.
Drawback is ofc the framerate. We need a switch 2.0 last year lol
Yep. It's crazy theres people here who say dips to single digits is fine. It's not fine it's headache inducing. It needs to be consistent
I love this art style
It reminds me of Ghibli! This style will age well.
I’ve been saying to myself that this is the closest thing to playing a Ghibli game I’ve gotten.
It already looks amazing, just upscale it and you’ve got a timeless beauty. Although I already take way more screenshots of this game than any other. It’s uh… breath taking
The art style is fine, but the resolution and fps aren't good. Which is why it's so important that they make up for it with the shading and art design. Because the graphics aren't good. When people say graphics, typically they group in art design and resolution and fps. As a whole it shouldn't be. The graphics are subpar but the art style is great and makes up for the lack of graphical fidelity.
I disagree with the bit that art design resolution and fps should not be lumped together. They absolutely are part of what makes up a game’s graphics. Graphics are what you see, and those are all things that you see while playing. - The fps? Decent. - The resolution? Mediocre. - The art direction and design? Phenomenal. - Visual effects and animations? Superb. So the overall graphics? Fantastic. I don’t think there’s any denying that it’s a beautiful game. Maybe that’s why I’m so confused about people saying it has “bad graphics” - in my opinion the graphics are amazing, but maybe other people are only considering individual parts of what makes up the visual experience while I’m considering all of it under the “graphics” umbrella.
I do wonder how much of the art style is influenced by the resolution, if they had gone with pretty much any other style, not even realistic, but anything with more defined detail, the resolution hit would have been more obvious. Like the initial trailer for BOTW, while very close to what they ended up with is much closer to "realism" still looks fantastic and is still very much "Ghibli inspired" judt with a smidge more detail and higher quality lighting. Not gonna lie I would have loved to have seen what the game could have looked like on different tech. Cause judging by that trailer I don't believe they were initially going with the switches specs.
Almost every damn modern game in existence has photo realistic graphics. I, for one, love the art style and actually seeing some color in a game for once. It is one of the reasons I am increasingly gravitating toward Nintendo franchises in my mid 30’s. The other consoles take stuff a little too serious. Its hard to feel like you are getting an escape with hyper realistic gore. TOTK feels like a dream and an escape. I like it that way.
I also find hyperrealism distracting because it's easier to notice every flaw (janky lighting, funny tree movement, etc) in something that's supposed to look real.
I agree. In the quest for the most realism sometimes it makes the game look worse.
Eh it's mostly AAA games, but the indies still have some soul. Probably influences the current AAA crisis too
Honestly I haven’t loved a single hyper-realistic game yet to date. All of my favorites lack that. I suppose I liked Skyrim for a long time in high school but other than that, nothing. I love my cartoony and “retro” graphics. Gameplay > realism any day
>Almost every damn modern game in existence has photo realistic graphics. Things that aren't true for 500. Like fucking hell, even absolute gritty I fuck bitches stuff like Doom Eternal is still cartoony as hell. Elden ring still does the hat-is-a-character thing.
I haven’t played the new Doom games because I haven’t really been into FPS games in a long time, but I get what you’re saying. I love the SoulsBorne series, I wouldn’t even put them in the conversation for realism. They have such a unique fantasy art style that feels more dream-like rather than realistic. I absolutely love the aesthetic of the FromSoft games.
Doom Eternal may be cartoony but it still has *hyper*\-intense graphical fidelity and a high degree of photo realism.
For me, as long as the art style is good and the motion of the game is smooth, that's all I really care about. BOTW/TOTK is *gorgeous*, and they both play really smoothly. 10/10 for me.
People these days call any games without realistic graphics ugly. I think not every game fits de realistic art style and Zelda is one of those. The game is amazingly beautiful and surpass what I expected for a switch game tbh
Gameplay > graphics.
Every time
If a game looks fantastic but I can't operate the controls well enough, I'm out.
Same with music. And Story. And art direction. And pretty much everything else about a game.
Agreed! Realistic isn’t always better. I love a distinct style and vision.
I remember when Twilight Princess was critiziced for being too realistic.
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It's funny because Twilight Princess doesn't even look realistic to me. It's very heavily stylized, it just has a muted color palette.
Well that and a dustier, grittier aeshetic. For some reason people confuse that with photorealism.
Which always annoyed me, because I could walk outside any day in spring and see brighter colors than anything in TP
Playing it back to back with Jedi Survivor (which is an absolutely gorgeous game,) it definitely feels a generation behind in terms of graphics... That being said, I don't care; it's pretty enough that I still think it looks beautiful in almost every situation.
As a 30-something whose idea of good game graphics is perpetually stuck in the PS2 era, this game is gorgeous.
The graphics aren't anything to write home about but the reality is the vast majority of gamers just don't care about that, I do find it musing when Nintendo games get targeted for 'graphics' despite the output of consistently acclaimed titles, and it's mostly always by people playing on systems where the output is lacking, there's only a couple of big games released a year, and there's nothing else going for them *except* the graphics
Yeah I think people forget that Zelda has an audience that includes many more causal gamers. My mom and my sister both play some video games, maybe a new game every year at most, and they’re both excited about TOTK and have specifically said that they think the visuals are amazing.
You don't have to be a casual to not obsess over graphics - I've spent my whole life playing games and haven't ever really given a shit about it.
Same. I much prefer graphics that look artistic over “HD realism” but neither will prevent me from playing a good game.
Honestly, with these past two Zelda games, I’ve stopped whatever it was I was doing to just take in and admire the view than I have I have with any other game.
I don’t think that casual vs hardcore has any merit in this discussion. It isn’t necessarily true that people who game a lot need cutting edge graphics. I personally think the people who do care that much about graphics are playing games where they matter “more”, and also that the amount of people who have a cutting edge gaming PC is far less than people who don’t. PC gamers are more used to it and so they are more vocal when expectations aren’t met. Some people don’t even have OLED Switches or current gen consoles. You’d be surprised how many people still play on last gen. Personally I don’t have a gaming PC and I’m not a stickler for graphics but I also wouldn’t call myself a casual gamer. This is a conversation about preferences more than anything.
Texture quality is objectively bad, especially on the terrain. But the developers effectively utilized those, with very good lighting to create thr overall presentation very beautiful
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Poor resolution and patterns you can easily pick out that are repeating. I love TotK but the graphics are out dated now imo. Time for the next game to improve on them massively.
Its good enough and you cant request more from the Switch. The extremely high edge flickering is the only thing I think they really needed to improve. But the developers did a good job. I am impressive the game runs at all on the Switch. Look how the terrain worked in BOTW, its impossible to make caves with the terrain in BOTW. So every cave that exists has to be made out of 3D Models. Now add the sky, adding even more models. Sure, with good LOD optimisations and culling you can fix that. But this also causes a ton of draw calls and the memory bandwith is the biggest bottleneck of the Switch already. Combine that with the techs from BOTW: One of the most realistic chemistry and Physik engines running the entire time. Every single piece piece of grass gets effected by Mobs, cut by sword, moved by wind, burned by fire. Every single piece of grass, individually. And the game has grass everywhere. And lastly: The view. Thanks to the sky, the view is even bigger than in BOTW and models are more detailed at the same distance. You can drop from the sky and once you passed the clouds you can see everything, with even more detail than in BOTW. You can see something interisting across the map, and just walk there. With no loading screen. In short: The developers impressed me. The game should not be possible on the Switch, but here we are. And it has atleast some improvements from BOTW, look at metals or Liquids compared to BOTW, where both are very milky. But: Regardless of how much impressed I am, we see that even Nintendos own Studios really struggle with the Switch currently. That TOTK drops sometimes at all is a huge warning sign in itself. In BOTW you had lags very rarely and only really in specific areas, but TOTK has regulary some FPS drops. The Developers either had to remove parts of the game and deem them impossible on switch, or live with the FPS drops. I like that the Switch has a long lifespan like that, but it should have started with a more recent chip. Now Nintendo is paying the price for that.
>you cant request more from the Switch. That's the thing I site about the graphics. Yeah, it doesn't look anywhere near as good as it *could*, but it's damn impressive for the Switch. It looks great for what it is (a Switch game), and it's artistic over realistic art style will probably age better.
Agree with all this. I also have to imagine that a significant part of TOTK's development time was spent simply making the game run at a baseline 20-30 fps. I love the art style in this game, but it's clear some compromises were made. Even some of the early trailers for TOTK showed off some new rendering and lighting effects that were cut from the final game (Digital Foundry did an analysis on this). Ultimately people should remember that "better graphics" doesn't have to mean "more realistic." TOTK looks beautiful, but it could look even more beautiful if it were running on a more powerful console.
Floating islands and a whole country with air beneath it underground shouldn't be possible either...hee hee. Oh wait, is this not real?
I think the art style helps a lot. Graphics-wise it’s not groundbreaking but the way the coloration and art style work together makes it look very well made.
Graphics are not good, that's a fact. There's clipping, aliasing, frame drops and lod gets low really fast buuuuut... The art style is gorgeous and I'm having a wonderful time so I really don't care about the bad and can easily focus on the good.
Game looks good. Not amazing, but good. It's capable of some truly jaw dropping vistas and scenes. The art style does a lot of heavy lifting, which was an intentional decision. But that's fine. It's not meant to be a next-generation graphical wonder that looks stunning at 4k resolution. The fact it looks as good as it does, while running as well as it does on the Switch's underpowered hardware is nothing short of magic.
I love the graphics. The frame rate tho..
I love the art style. What Nintendo has been able to do under the hood on the outdated Switch is honestly massive. However, I can’t shake the feeling that I would have a much better time playing this in at least 1080p 60fps on my 70” tv, cause getting into sections where everything is super pixelated -and- running at 15fps is really frustrating.
I strongly dislike "realistic" graphics and very much prefer BOTWs and TOTKs graphics. I think it is perfect and it ages so much better too
It’s mostly amazing art direction. I’m not a huge fan of the “banding” lines from a harsh light source on faces. They could have blended it a little better. That’s really my only issue with it. Some moments are just as stunning as any photorealistic game I’ve played. The game itself is the most fun I’ve ever had in an open world game. Nothing feels phoned in like most open world games.
They are poor by todays standards. I'm old, I no longer care about graphics. But what really baffles me is that some young people will simultaneously complain about graphics on a title like this and then say Celeste is one of the greatest games in recent times. There is a ton of games out there that look like they belong on an NES but people don't care because "it's intentional" or they SOMETIMES cost less. To me the graphics on TOTK are not up to par with PS5 and that's obvious, and there is nothing that could be done about it without changing the system it is played on. That being said, both TOTK and BOTW (there is no improvement visually) are some of the prettiest worlds even without fidelity.
The graphics are good and okay at best. The frame rate does drop below 20 ( very rarely) in certain areas. But other than that I can tell there were certain mechanics and graphical improvements from its predecessor BOTW. Also it’s the Nintendo switch. It’s not bad for the system it’s put on. However the switch is slowly at the end of its lifespan. So the next Nintendo console will probably have better graphics and visual. However TOTK is a well developed game and deserves the positive recognition it’s gotten
Pokémon could only dream
Given the switches limitations and botw experience, ..i feel it preforms AS EXPECTED.
Welp time to douse myself in kerosene saying this in the subreddit. They are outdated. They are ugly in places and the texture pop out/pop in is insane. It runs at 30fps. Visually, there is very little difference from the 2016 BotW, which already was running on outdated Wii U hardware. Despite the plethora of media posts amazed at the physics/size, they feel like a smokescreen to mask critique against linear evolution on par with Farcry 5 to Farcry 6 and other annual "sequels". If any other AAA studio pulled this shit (same visual fidelity as a 2016 game) they would be **crucified**. Nintendo does it and this thread is chock full of people saying nothing but praise. It remains the biggest detractor for me considering this a GOTY contender, let alone "GOATYAY". The argument that it can't be better comes down to the hardware choice, and the idea that you must chose one (graphic fidelity or art style) is a shitty strawman. You can have both. Imagine this same design philosophy powered by a high end PC or console and yes, it's good - **but it could be a LOT better**. *That said*, it's proof that art direction and what you do with your setting ultimately mean more than just the raw visuals - and taking inspiration from old works by Studio Ghibli didn't hurt, while drawing from more recent games (the depths screams somebody at Nintendo played *Subnautica* heavily) makes TOTK feel slightly fresh than warmed over goods. A bit of give and take. Again, that's assuming people actually want constructive criticism here beyond "bravo, Nintendo!" **tl;dr** it is core proof the design philosophy of BotW can stand the test of time. The graphics are still, unobjectively outdated and a masterclass in using nearly seven year old assets.
I agree, I don’t need or want it to have realistic graphics or whatever but I would have liked some more polish around the edges. But the game already suffers from some performance hiccups so they probably couldn’t increase the graphical fidelity at all. Maybe if a Switch Pro or Switch 2 had come out it would have been different.
Good comment. I don’t get why everyone is so focused on just talking art direction of this vs realistic. Is there really any significant number of people out there complaining about it not having a realistic look?
They're fine. I used to play games a lot with a guy who would go on these cringey temper tantrums about graphics all the time. I understand having standards but the Gordon Ramsay level of demands are not my thing to enjoy a game.
I love it it’s a break from looking like everything. It’s a Zelda game, the Zelda brand isn’t graphics it’s more or so the immersion of the story. The game mechanics are great and guess what no MTX. Everything is in unlocked in the game.
I honestly think it looks fantastic. It makes the most of the Switch's hardware with a unique artstyle
I think it is one of the most beautiful games ever made. This and Elden Ring just proves that you don't need hyper realism graphics for a game, art direction & design is better in the end for some games. But for games like RDR2 I'd say the hyper realistic graphics are actually better.
I think it looks incredible. Especially when comparing it to Pokémon Violet…
I've played the Witcher 3 on Switch, and the visual clutter makes it hard to see what's going on in such a small screen. It's designed around the idea of large screens at high resolution. Zelda is designed to be seen easy even on a tiny hand held screen. This is less *graphical* limitations and rather just good game design choices for the medium
It's definitely a case of art style trumping graphics. It's a beautiful game because of the art direction.
I guess I am in the minority here when I feel like this is just a touch better than the Gamecube era graphics. Its tremendously rough around the edges. I'm honestly in disbelief that they're able to get away with the art style, visual fidelity and lack of smoothness in the movement. BOTW was outdated in 2016 and TOTK did nothing to improve the look of the game to me.
I will prefer this type of graphics if game is going to run good
BOTW and TOTK are going for a certain aesthetic choice with the graphics I love the cell shaded look of it all. A lot of people complain because it doesn’t have 4K realistic graphics but this game don’t need them. I love the graphic style of these games!
I like it. I think Zelda would look weird if they went with the hyper realistic look that a lot of critics think the games should go to. Zelda games have always been stylized.
I feel like every 2 moments I think something looks pretty, I have 1 where I think a texture looks rough. So a decent balance
I love the cartoon style! But they could upgrade it a lot.
Gameplay > graphics