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Spyro looked a lot better without the textures IMO

Spyro without textures and only gourand shading looks like every mobile game from 2009-2019.

From the examples it looks like the textures in Spyro were mostly about hiding all the ugliness around the edges from the straight gourand shader output, aside from the characters.

I think Spyro is one of the best examples of Gouraud shading mastery on the system. The textures are there to add detail, in fact they had a basic LOD system for the environment where they swapped textured models with gouraud shaded models using the same tint for objects far away.

The skyboxes were rendered as well as meshes and then shaded, and they still hold up today from an artistic point of view: https://imgur.com/gallery/vocZw

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