Art direction trumps graphic horsepower every time. Tears of the Kingdom is a great example of this. Alan Wake and Control are great combination of style and visual dazzle.
One the hugest misses of Nintendo to be honest. The art styles they develop are designed to scale down to their hardware, but they also scale way up and they never provide you an official way to take advantage, even on future hardware. The art team is being done a bit dirty in this respect.
I'm convinced that as long as people want those games they will be made available eventually, but probably not on the timeline you want. I think some kind of 'continued availability' provision in copyright law would be more realistic than an appeal to resort to piracy.
It was on sale for a limited time and got delisted apparently. Better than nothing, I guess - but if you missed it - then it might not even exist.
My point still stands - pirated copies of those games are available 24/7. As GabeN said - piracy is a service problem and Nintendo fails to provide a better service.
If pirates stop, there's no alternatives to get a lot of media in many cases. There is zero incentive to stop because you can't get worse than nothing. Nothing being what is available in many cases for older media.
You want to embolden your argument that pirates should stop? Then don't take away all legal means of getting something. I have zero sympathy for copyright holders who refuse to make an IP available anymore yet litigate after those who do.
I disagree - I had a google and found [0]. This is emulated, at 4k with raytracing. It's a good decade behind what we're seeing come out these days IMO. It's dated, suffers from the hallmarks of not-quite-HDR (that lovely shiny surface that we all learned to love during the late 360/PS3 days).
Finished TOTK last week and had a lot of fun with it. I'm not blind and can clearly see jaggies, frame drops and resolution drops, but nowhere in the game did that really interfere with the core gameplay or make it impossible to enjoy it.
While newer systems have more detail, most of the time it's imperceptible since you don't have time to look at the scenery anyway and when it matters (e.g. when rendering faces) it still doesn't look realistic to me. Burning a kilowatt just to get a bit more detail or framerate for the same old gameplay just sounds insane to me.
This gets to the heart of the matter for me. No matter how much hair sways like real hair, skin wrinkles like real skin, or eyes get a glassy look when emotion suggests they should, real humans can spot weirdness from miles away.
That person you see walking towards you, barely visible in the dark and without your glasses on? The tiniest stiffness in the way they made that last step, the way their elbow shifted, have raised your awareness and you’re now considering them a threat, and will watch them carefully and keep your distance.
Or the way they get up from the table they are sitting at clues you into the fact they have a pulled muscle in their lower back or upper right leg and you instinctively watch a little closer in case they fall and you can help somehow.
The scowl and glare of a woman who is playfully admonishing her kids and encouraging them to play along.
While we asymptotically approach ‘perfect’ rendering and simulation, we are still just alongside it, unable to climb out of the uncanny valley.
A game can look beautiful with some creativity and care in its visuals, and it seems like nearly everyone who’s played Tears of the Kingdom or Breath of the Wild is enamoured with their beauty.
I often play just to travel around and enjoy the beautiful landscapes. Even The Depths is enchantingly beautiful, reminding me of what you can see while scuba diving. I wonder if this was intentional.
So yes, while I do appreciate a super high resolution game with rock solid megahertz framerates and physically correct lighting, these are additive in their enhancement, not multiplicative.
Spending effort on these that could have been spread more evenly across art direction, gameplay, music and other aspects serves only NVidia, AMD and those who enjoy ‘high fidelity’ visuals or the game (in its own right) of chasing hardware that is capable of running these games.
To me, there is a parallel with the 'audiophile', who lusts after higher and higher 'fidelity' and perpetually upgrades their equipment but only ever listens to a playlist titled "Songs to test headphones with". Spine-tingling cymbal wash and awe-inducing bass sweeps are amazing.
Others are here for the remaining 90% of the music, and are happy to listen on their phones, and don’t even notice when a live performance isn’t a clone of album tracks.
I personally fall into both camps. I love to put on some headphones and listen to ‘audiophile’ music, but that’s a hour or two every few months. Most of the time I’m having a blast with medium fidelity, ultra fun music … and gameplay.
You just made me wish for a Wind Waker like game with a full underwater world ;)
Games could render realtime reflections using various tricks even 20 years ago.
I remember that in Hitman Blood money enemies could spot you in a mirror and mirrors were functional in that game. It's a game from 2006 and mirrors were placed only in small rooms.
But higher resolutions never were about more details. At least not for TV's (and thus consoles).
At the end of the SD era (576p) I had a 28" TV. At the end of the HD era (1080p) I had a 50" TV. That's a very similar pixel density. We're now partway through the 4k era (2160p) and I currently have a 77" TV. 8k TV are not here yet in any significant numbers; my last 4k TV will likely be around 100". When we move to 8k it won't be because we want a more detailed image, it's because we want a wider field-of-view. We need more pixels so our screens can get larger.
Also, I don't think the market will ever get to 100" TVs as a norm. You're an outlier: most people have other priorities (don't want TV to dominate the room, don't have room, don't want to pay for the extra energy required etc).
They didn't neglect the style and art direction, but it absoutely required graphical horsepower. Maybe - though - you need top tier art direction to sell the sizzle of top shelf graphics.