I'd seriously doubt this'll end up being 60fps. Look how insane and huge the world is. Must be pushing the Wii U quite far. I doubt they'd sacrifice other concerns for framerate in this genre.

Can anyone comb through all of the thousands of bits of info we have on this game to answer the question:  "Will you level up by exploring the world, like in the prequel?"

I also want to add my voice to the "stop moaning about supposed visual downgrades" position. Most of the in-game visuals have improved hugely from the first footage we saw. Having 1 cutscene look slightly worse is hardly a problem and really shouldn't be categorised along with the Watch Dogs fiasco which was a huge across-the-board lie about the visuals.

I'm keen for populated areas like clock town or twilight's castle town

I like those too. I hope they have a fairly big settlement this time. Something equivalent to New LA in XCX would be cool. I like that sort of thing because it creates a greater contrast between civilisation and the wilderness.

They need to give us something to actually analyze!

Am I allowed to post how dumb it is to buy a console based on architecture?

What he said. This would be like choosing your girlfriend based on eye colour.

It also means that an awful lot of people bought a New3DS just for the sake of the shiny new hardware (as I think they'd said over a million had been sold already). Which you might argue is a bit of a sad fact.

The example I posted was a curvature/perspective example. The distances between the bottles were all exactly the same. The only thing that changed was the fov, which means if you use the wrong fov in calculations for measuring distance using a the known height of an object (the bottle), your calculations will be off exponentially the more distance you try and measure.

In order to make any concrete measurements, you would actually need at least one, certified, official, measurement of a known object.

I cant tell exactly what the fov is, though I can tell its considerably greater than 60, which Nintendo used for Zelda until ww (gc ww). I am very good at identifying fov's with pc games, but thats because they are designed for 60 degree fov (thanks ps360), so when you slide it way past that to 120, you get some serious frustum/fish eye distortion, although you become a god and people think you have eyes in the back of your head. As long as you stay away from scopes.... (Why do so many studios have problems with this? Change the fov for scopes, they are scopes! Thats what they do!).

Here are my approximations on fov for 3d Zelda games

oot-ww 60 degrees
tp gc 60 degrees
tp wii- 80 degrees (I recall them being very pleased with this in an interview, perhaps an Iwata asks? or perhaps a lecture... The increase was simply do due to wideescreen support)
ss wii 60 degrees (I recall them being less than satisfied with this)
wwhd ==100 degrees (They were so pleased by the increased fov, that they actually bothered to rework the game a bit around it, like moving npc's)
Zelda U ==100 degrees

I know the original Xenoblade also had a fov of around 80 or 90, it doesnt seem to adjust well during gameplay when you zoom in, which made zooming in right on the characters and trying to play like that really awkward.

 

I would never have noticed they changed it with wind waker. You got any comparison shots or anything that demonstrate the difference?

 

I would never have noticed they changed it with wind waker. You got any comparison shots or anything that demonstrate the difference?

 

Lol, that's awesome. Good job! They completely won me over with the excessive bloom in Wind Waker too. To start with it looked a bit much. But it does somehow look good when you're playing.

Darksiders is awesome.

I love Darksiders too. Heavily underappreciated series. Look at the Darksiders 2 sales on Wii U, they're abysmal. 

Lololol that's quite the encyclopedic answer. Sorry to disappoint but I did already understand what field of view is. It's the last part I'm specifically questioning. So yes, I think you're right. Although the example you gave with the bottles was perhaps slightly bad as it was focusing on the perspective due to distance, more than curvature which seems to be the main issue here?

So I guess that width of the ledge, that is already an incredibly speculative method in itself, will change slightly based on the fov. Do you have actual evidence that they're using 100 though? I really can't tell myself. I can tell that main Zelda preview is higher than Darksiders. It's very hard to tell from the recent preview footage though! I suppose it's possible to reverse engineer if you make some calculations in-game. I'm sure someone's into doing that.

What is so hard to understand where he literally uses Kyoto as his base size for Zelda U?

 

 

Been posted in this forum a hundred times how the maps match up. The size matches up.

You have no idea if he meant it literally. It could've just been a bad translation.

Point me at where someone shows that the "size matches up".

http://www.gengame.n...to-kyoto-japan/

http://nintendoevery...to-as-his-base/

Hmmmm, I'm not convinced that was necessarily meant literally. He could've just meant that as a way of saying "it's huge."

When you look at the world map on that preview video, it doesn't look that big. Certainly not as big as XCX! Of course, maybe what we saw wasn't the entire world map.

And I can't really imagine them going that large with Zelda. Just doesn't seem to fit the formula.

if Nintendo's claim is correct yes. They claim the size of Kyoto. So Zelda U is maybe double the size of XCX.

Can I have a reference to that?

This is news to me too.

That's some pretty heavy Bethesda criticism. I do agree on what you're calling spatial compression as a form of bad game design. The difference between Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 3 is a great example of this. Mass Effect 3 is so clearly designed to appeal to a mainstream audience that you have to have a consistent list of attractions at every single location in the game. Mass Effect 1 feels more like a more believable universe. Planets you explore are mostly barren and empty. There are whole areas in the various "hub" locations that are completely meaningless, but are simply there to be explored. I remember 1 part on the Citadel, you run down a long corridor to someone's office. There's no-one in there. And nothing of interest throughout the entire game. That's actually a good thing. It makes it a more believable world.

He didn't give a specific answer though did he? "Use kyoto as my base" is not a specific answer. "It's 100miles^2" would've been a specific answer.
I have no idea what "as my base" means. And also the sizes of cities are defined in quite a few different ways.

I didn't see anywhere in the post you linked where they calculated the size.

These guys in this thread calculated the size: http://www.ign.com/b...what.454321442/

They got around 16mi^2 for Zelda. 

Whereas XCX is apparently 125mi^2. (about 8 times the size)

I'm not saying I necessarily believe that. Skepticism is better than certainty. Certainty just leaves you looking stupid when you're wrong!

I wasn't necessarily assuming it was translated. "Using kyoto as my base" could simply be a way of saying "it's huge." or "so big that I've lost track" or something along those lines. People have lots of different expressions like that around the world. You can't tell enough from a transcript. If he'd said it with a complete straight face, I'd maybe take it as literal. If he'd said it whilst laughing, I'd probably assume he was being hyperbolic.

I have no idea what you're going on about with the NES map. And there's nothing in that video you linked that says anything about specific sizes at all! 

And what are you talking about Zidane being 400 feet tall? The world map in Final Fantasy games was purposefully out of scale. There is no world map screen in Zelda. It's all to scale! That's where the measurements for a game world actually come from, comparing it to the character's height. 

I'd love to know what they actually include in their calculations of world size. If there's a lake that's 1mile x 1mile in area with an interesting island at the centre of it, I'm betting they include that whole square mile in their arithmetic. Which is kinda cheating. 

 
That looks pretty good.

Only thing I would be concerned about would be, whats the field of view being used? Although thats not too huge a concern, So I dont blame him for leaving it out.

Aside from that, there are only a few possibilities for error.

1. If he somehow got the wrong land feature (Not looking likely since its at links arrow.) or got the right lind feature but made a brainfart and used one other than what he wanted for the calculation.

2. If the overview map is not to scale with the in game map (Possibly to fit it on the game pad, whilst still being functionally usable by human eyes at a 480p res?)

Seems a good size to me for a level 4 LvO game as tightly designed as Zelda. So... assuming we got another 8 dungeon Zelda, that would be 1 dungeon hidden somewhere in every 5 square clicks.

Yeah, I wouldn't take it too seriously as an accurate estimate. But as a rough estimate, it seems quite plausible to me.

I wasn't sure what you were suggesting by field of view though. Which part of his calculation would've been altered by the fov?

As for #2, I assume you mean in proportion to the real map? Yeah, there's no way of knowing that for sure. I think generally the safest assumption is that it is in proportion. The reason being that that's the easiest way for developers to handle drawing the player's cursor on the minimap (just read the X-Z coordinates and then scale them down by a constant)

Well only time will tell. You might indeed end up being correct. But I'm very skeptical.

I'm also fairly skeptical that you'll admit you were wrong if that does indeed turn out to be the case. The classic behaviour of people who are too sure of themselves is to just pretend it never happened when they're shown to be wrong. Cognitive Dissonance time!

 

Basically. Wii U will optimize more over time while PS4 and XBO have no secrets. 

What is this based on?

not the huge leap from 32/64bits systems to the 128 bits systems like gamecube,xbox and ps2 or the great leap from these consoles to the ps3 and 360. 

 

That whole bit-rating was largely marketing nonsense. After you get to 32bit, it's mostly just meaningless. As seen by the fact that the vast majority of recent PC games still ran on 32-bit operating systems. (as recent as Assassin's Creed 4)

Wii U uses a console architecture. XBO and PS4 are just PC's with a custom OS. PS4 and XBO have diminishing returns. Consoles traditionally because of how they were designed games got better looking over time as they optimized better. PS4 and XBO being a PC you see what they have to offer now.

Not really seeing how this is different for consoles than PCs. "Console architecture" is a completely arbitrary term. The improvements over time happen everywhere. Skyrim looked a lot better than Oblivion because of all of the graphical techniques they learned throughout the last generation. It looked better on consoles and it looked better on PCs. In fact, Skyrim runs on my PC a lot better than Oblivion does.

If anything, I'd think it'd be the exact opposite. PS4 and Xbox are going to increase in potential MORE than the WiiU because they can largely share a knowledge base with PC developers and therefore more pioneering techniques will be discovered for them.