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Tears of the Kingdom's only graphical issue is framerate and resolution. Maybe some ground textures.

If you have issues with it it's entirely with the style, the graphics are fine.

Lack of ram meant it could only handle a couple trees at a time

That's not true. There's a couple of forests that are as dense as gameplay can reasonably allow.

Most of the environments are empty planes with a 1-2 trees I think they needed to use a lot of tricks to have more than that. It might have also been an ai pathing issue

Most of the time isn't the limitation? Maximum is the limitation. Look at the forest on the plateau. Look at where memory 11 is in BotW. Look at the lost woods.

Sure, most of the time there are just a few trees, but when they want to they blow right past that

The style is entirely informed by hardware limitations. They did their best with what they could.

Yes, hardware limitations of the Wii U, not the Switch

Tears of the Kingdom is a Switch exclusive.

The style is influenced by Breath of the Wild, but nothing about the development of Tears was held back by the Wii U.

The world is noticeably empty due to hardware limitations.

To me, Nintendo is more about gameplay then graphics and i hope it stays that way.

Exactly. If you want to be dazzled with AAA titles running at 120Hz/60fps/4k then there are plenty of ways to spend your money. Frankly that segment of the industry feels like a treadmill of never ending upgrades for the same basic game.

My whole family shares and island in animal crossing, firing up some arcade brawlers on the couch. We’ve been playing the hell out of our switch for years and never once have we complained that it’s not flashy enough.

My main issue with the art style is that it's very flat, with large areas of a single, solid color, when more shading would add a sense of nuance and depth. A character's face, body, or hair will have a single light color, and a single dark color. This isn't about 4k, 120Hz, or huge polygon count, it's about basic shading to convey that things are 3d.

I've played mostly 20+ year old games for years, and don't own a gaming machine or high-end console. I'm into Doom from the 90s, OpenTTD, and Morrowind. But TotK should have been better, in my opinion. The art style just isn't my cup of tea.

BOTW and TOTK are clearly influenced by the look of Ghibli movies, especially Nausica and Laputa. I guess it’s meant to look “2d”.

Is sharing an island possible to do across multiple Switches?

Agree completely. I loved Tears and didn’t once think it looked bad in any way. It was a very clever game and made me feel like a kid again. That’s what I’m looking for in a Nintendo game. I’ll jump on my PS5 if I want to be wowed graphically.

I would say gameplay and art style instead of what the rest of the industry calls graphics (polygon count basically).

Nearly all Nintendo (game freak is not technically Nintendo) games look beautiful thanks to having a great art style instead of just focusing on higher polygon count.

> what the rest of the industry calls graphics (polygon count basically)

IMO the focus of cutting edge triple-A graphics is physically based rendering.

“Physically based rendering” does not mean “photorealistic rendering.” After all, PBR was pioneered by Disney for use in their animated films. I would be surprised if Mario Odyssey doesn’t use PBR.

I agree with you, but in some newer games it just doesn't make sense to me.

They want good graphics but the Switch can't handle them, but they still try to make them.

For example, Pokemon Scarlet & Violet.

Gameplay and the game design for me personally is really great, but I can't stand the graphics. I would rather play on worse graphics just to not have constant frame drops and in some parts of the game N64 graphics and in some 4K ones.

Scarlet/Violet look atrocious even next to other Switch Pokemon games. The art direction wasn't great, and it was a really poor game technically.

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2022-pokemon-scarle...

Can't find it right now, but someone did some side by side comparisons of Scarlet/Violet next to similar Breath of the Wild scenes, and it's night and day.

Neither generation of Switch Pokemon games looked or performed decent, but I guess bad performance is a gamefreak constant since at least the 3DS

I assume you're referring to Sword/Shield and Scarlet/Violet, but Legends: Arceus is also officially part of the main series. Offhand don't remember performance issues in that one.

Arceus is amazing. I never bothered to get Scarlet/Violet because to me they're a regression and just look like a lazy attempt at money grab.

> My kids played Breath of the Wild and when they got Tears of the Kingdom I walked in and was astonished at the graphic quality.

You must have good eyes! I've played through both and would be hard-pressed to tell a scene from BotW from TotK at a glance.

TotK seems extremely washed out and low-contrast is a majority of the environments. I played a bit of BotW and thought it was much more vibrant.

I can see the lower quality of the rendering, but the graphical content is stunning in my opinion. The art in the game inspires me a lot more than more photorealistic games tend to. I think they did a stellar job given the resource constraints and the scale of the game.

State of the art imo is Metroid Prime

Beautiful art direction to be sure.

But let's be real, it's Super Metroid. :)

It's a beautiful game, one of the first to use programmable shaders, and one of the earliest that doesn't look dated at all. The shaders make everything look smooth without looking blurry.

Loading screens are hidden, it's not like the contemporaneous PS2 game Mafia where you wait a few minutes to load, spend a few minutes driving across town on a mission to shoot up some people at a restaurant, get yourself shot up, then have to wait for it to load all over again.

As soon as you said Mafia I felt that loading in my bones…