Crossing from the green continent to the white continent looks fun. Although the white continent looks pretty ugly in the preview vids.

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.

The white continent has no snow on it, the area is called the white sands.

A basic sense of pattern recognition should have tipped anyone off on a seemingly bland area in a Xeno game.

Satorl Marsh day:

Bland and colorless, full of vison reducing fog
Satorl marsh night:

Psychadelic

Its called contrast and juxtaposition.

White sands day:


Dull and colorless

White sands night:


Psychadelic

I'm still waiting for the 3DS version to do a proper playthrough of the original. 

This is very good information though! Bravo.

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.

And then EA and the like throttle down the PC version so that the console versions are "Competitive"

Ha, I've got a mediocre gaming PC. I'm happily unaffected. Although some incidents like Dark Souls PC port are just ridiculous. 

I still can't figure out for the life of me Why Microsoft and sony went with x86..

To close the difference with the PC gaming, which has had a massive explosion of popularity?

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's sitting at 630,000 sales now. Add digital to that and it's probably around 750,000 (not exactly sure what percentage is digital).

I imagine that's probably considered a success for them. Compared to the sales of the original which was targeting platforms that had much larger install bases, this is pretty good.

Hopefully we'll see a 3rd.

I will definitely buy this eventually. It wasn't at the top of my last because I'm just not very good at combo-based action games

Bayonetta 2 doesn't really require you to be good at combos. Not unless you're wanting to try the highest level stuff. Your dodge-timing is far more valuable.

They need to give us something to actually analyze!

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.

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.

I want to but can't. I am not sure I can get Splatoon and XCX CD at the same time whatever the case XCX CD comes first. I wanna see peoples impressions first. Game sounds like a decent romp.

There'll probably be a big gap between those I'm guessing. Especially with Zelda being delayed. 

I'd love to see some footage or screenshots of this if anyone's noticed any (the remaster)? If it's a remaster along the same lines as the 3DS Zeldas, id definitely be interested. I'm guessing it's probably more of a Vita style remaster though. Which probably means exactly the same game in a new resolution.

Isn't the soundtrack all kinda J-pop rubbish? 

I'm not seeing this on the UK amazon yet. Anyone?

On the US side I can't find it in search anymore however it's still in my wishlist and if I click that the listing shows up. Might just be off the grid so to speak until official info is updated.

Mmmmm yeah, info on the internet seems to find its way into the public somehow. Either way, I hope the prices being mentioned here are the final prices and not some placeholder. I'll almost definitely buy this if it comes at budget price. Assuming they've actually remastered it of course. A direct port, maybe not.

This isnt that likely of a scenario, because of the reasons I already stated, publishers have ZERO interest in actually forwarding the progress of game design and optimization. That requires talent, risk, and motivation. They are far happier to keep things exactly where they are, and use marketing to convince their brainwashed audience that crapping in their face is actually advancment, and anything else is backwards.

Oh sure most of them don't care about that. But some do. If you ever read those graphics white papers or whatever they're called, you do come across companies who innovated on the way to their goal. I believe realtime ambient occlusion was first used in Crysis, for example. I don't know if they entirely invented the algorithm or not but I think they were the first to get it working. 

I also read one on how Valve invented a particular kind of improved motion blur for Portal 2.

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.

 

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)

I'm definitely getting it. Although I'm skeptical it will remain enjoyable for that long a period. I imagine it'll be the kinda game I play for maybe a week and then only bust out when friends are round. I hope it's successful and reviews well though cos it's a good opportunity for them to start a new series.

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.

Darksiders is awesome.

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

 

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.

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. 

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.