Developer claims

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Shane

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I feel like every developer claim should be disputed because oftentimes, developers even good ones stretch the truth to make sales. The popular thing to do is to dispute developer claims you disagree with, such as "Wii U is slow performing" and not dispute things you like, such as Xenoblade X where the developer claims the world, though it IS big, is X size, making it Y times the size of any other game out there minus Just Cause 3.

I learned you should question everything after playing Sonic Boom and experiencing a bug the developer claimed it had fixed.

Another example. They say that Zelda U will have the biggest world the Wii U can handle, and yet power and world size don't always go directly hand-in-hand. So the world could be any size. For all we know, the game could be really graphical, detailed and demanding, but be significantly smaller than Xenoblade X's world.

I just want us to think more and use higher standards of proof when it comes to games. Although, we don't have to.
 
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Speaking on Zelda U, Aonuma said that he uses the 320 square miles of Kyoto as his base, making the game bigger than Xenoblade X's stated world size. But the wording was tricky to what Aonuma said. He said base, he didn't say it was per se. That base could be 1:1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc.

I bring this up because I know someone else is going to bring it up.

That being said, I am playing devil's advocate a bit in this thread. I do have a gut feeling Zelda U may be around the size of Xenoblade X or larger. But I'm also ready for if it isn't, and is just a countable number of times bigger than Twilight Princess.

But just to show I'm not a total downer on the new Zelda, I will also say it depends on how much you can do in that space. Xenoblade X has a much larger world than Twilight Princess, but does each block of space the size of Twilight Princess do what Twilight Princess did in that space? To me, the answer is not really.

Edit: A math error slipped into my post. Fixed it.
 
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Game developers obviously want to sell their products so do tend to exaggerate a little when it comes to promoting their games.

The same can be said though for any company I think, and claims can be wildly far from the mark when you actually start playing. The online reviews aren't much help these days either as a lot are bought and paid for positive reviews written by people who have never even played the game to start off with.
 
He also said as big as Wii U can handle but with Nintendo that can mean many things. Personally thing the game will be closer to Witcher 3 size pre DLC because unlike most of XCX, Zelda you enter a lot of buildings and dungeons so need to compensate.
 
^ That's pretty much what I noticed. They say Xenoblade has a larger world than The Witcher 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 combined yet it isn't nearly as alive as any of those games.
 
Xenoblade X is a strange case. I'd argue you can do more than most games in it overall, counting the entire game, yet the amount you can do per an amount of space is record-breakingly small.
 
GunGunW said:
^ That's pretty much what I noticed. They say Xenoblade has a larger world than The Witcher 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 combined yet it isn't nearly as alive as any of those games.
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No. XCX is a living breathing world. Nothing in a Bethesda game has ever been a living world. Just useless big spaces that only serve the purpose to be big for the sake of it.
 
@Segata What do you mean by that? I'm just not sure how you see it that way. I can rob a bard in Skyrim and he'll send a mercenary after me to beat me up. I don't see how that doesn't qualify as "living".
 
I love Xenoblade X with almost all my heart. It's my favorite game of all time. But placing a bunch of really big objects in a really big world and adding day/night shift doesn't really make it living, breathing. I do love many things about the game though, the mechanics, the exploration. But it's possible for a game to be my absolute favorite game of all time, and yet not be perfect to the point where it topples everything. I can still put on another hat and be pretty objective of it at the same time.
 
I also think it's great. I'm not saying Bethesda/CD Projekt Red games are "better" or "worse" than it, I was just comparing the differences.
 
The problem is, there is some great evidence to support both our arguments, both Segata's and what we may say.
 
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GunGunW said:
I also think it's great. I'm not saying Bethesda/CD Projekt Red games are "better" or "worse" than it, I was just comparing the differences.
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Bethesda games are pretty terrible to begin with. When a game is made on a system like PS4 and 360 and using 1996 Daggerfall design for combat in Skyrim and the world game design is from the PS2 era,there is a problem. It's the same problem that plagues FFXV. Valley flat like design and impassable borders and invisible walls is inexcusable.

These games think in a dated way how to make a world and move in it. I will give Skyrim this much,they make walking speed slow to make the world feel larger than it is and it's a pretty small game. FFXV is supposedly much larger than XCX but in the areas you are on foot for no good reason you move like a turtle in molasses even when sprinting. The sprinting in that game is the speed I crawl at in XCX. It also has a map full of impassable mountain ranges and invisible walls near bodies of water like a small lake or river. Now back to Bethesda. These games just think of the world in a 2D way and grounded. Your character can move in weighted fashion 360 degrees on a mostly flat area with little in your way to traverse and practically no disparity on the open map itself. XCX thinks in a 3d fashion. You can run across on the land but given a fast run a high jump and a lot of disparity. For cliff sides or high rocks give you a ledge in a puzzle platforming sort of way. They then give you a tool to explore the world as much vertically as you would horizontal. They give purpose to that as some places cannot explore otherwise. This makes the world organic.

Then we come down to narrative. Skyrim gives little to no reason to ever finish the story and most people don't. The world is part of the narrative and the narrative is one big part that makes a game alive as well. Just because you can do whatever doe snot make it alive but a set piece back drop that is there but not followed up on to why. Don't try and say XCX has a bad one as in reality it's really in depth and told in a obtuse but fascinating way. Much of it is extremely subtle and given to you in small pieces that you have to put together. How I was able to put it together Mira is what used to be Bionis and we are likely not seeing the whole planet but one side of it.

Bethesda is a terrible developer. Can their games be fun..sure but Dragon Age Inquisition can be fun as well but it's not a good game either. Assassins Creed IV is a bad Assassins Creed game but a fun Pirate game. Fun is not always the same as good.
 
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Wow, I have to admit that regardless of who thinks what and what has been said in this thread, Segata really went into depth explaining the horizontal and vertical depths of Xenoblade X. When you put it that way, I just...... well said....
 
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