You all okay with these low-res textures?

Hey maybe it's just me but wtf. I love how the game looks, but I would appreciate having some kind of toggle for the graphics at least. Just got to the first real area and it's gross looking; almost everything is a muddy texture aside from Cloud.

Playing on a Pro, too. This one of those Watch Dogs / RDR2 type things where if I go into my PS4 settings and fuck with HDR it'll look better?

Does any Asian dev put the kind of graphical perfection into a game that a Naughty Dog or equivalent does? I feel like they've struggled to keep up with Western visuals since like, everything post-PS2. Maybe I'm way offbase and forgetting some key games, but whenever I try to come up with a mental list of like "what's an unranked list of the approximately 10 best-looking games each generation", rarely have Japanese or other Asian devs made that list in the past decade. Gran Turismo is like...pretty good, but it's no Forza. Also didn't Gran Turismo 4 have that issue where a bunch of cars were of lower quality than the "premium" quality cars because they didn't have the art bandwidth to make all the cars the good quality?

Post PS2, some studios just didn't feel like staffing up the size of the art team/their games couldn't possibly scale up to HD graphics. Anecdotally I've heard that a lot of studios basically kept designing games as if the PS2 specs were still current and just sought to release those games on PSP/DS/Vita/3DS (this is what happened to most JRPGs unless you have Square Enix money).

Even the games that really go for visual pizzazz, I feel like inevitably you find some environment art that looks grungy as hell (all of the PS3 and PS4 Final Fantasies have this to varying degrees).

So tl;dr I'm not surprised to hear people blast FF7R for having parts that look like straight garbage.

@bisonhero: i mean the 1st immediate thing I think of is RE2 Remake which was like the best thing I'd seen at the time. Only issue it had on PS4 was weird reflections.

edit: Capcom is japanese.

edit2: also FOX Engine kicks ass. I think your comment might be a little off base.

edit3: also Bloodborne is my fav game and when I invariably go back to it I am still impressed w how good it looks. Looks way better than any Dark Souls game for some reason, if you can forgive the framerate.

If it were just a matter of like.. we made the cutscenes and important things look REALLY nice and then everything just kinda whatever then I don't think I'd pay attention.

But it's incredibly obvious what they were able to spend money on and what they hoped they could shove into a corner and bet that most players would breeze by it and not pay too much attention. There are a couple assets here and there are just some fuckin' polygons strewn about.

@development: Good call on Capcom. SF4 was stylish as hell when it debuted, and Resident Evil 7/RE2 Remake were generally praised for their visuals. I still think I'm generally coming up short on thinking of other best-in-class visuals from Japanese devs.

Kinda in the same boat as SF4, Nintendo accomplishes great amounts of stylish-but-graphically-simple by explicitly NOT going for the high visual fidelity that some Western devs achieve. Like BotW looks beautiful and the draw distance/vistas are well designed, but the shaders and texture detail and so on are relatively simple. If you actually use the spyglass to zoom in on ANYTHING, things are extremely low poly, low texture detail in BotW if they're more than like 500 feet away from you.

@bisonhero:but tbf I don't expect much out of a Switch, and BOTW to me still looks gorgeous.

@efesell: I think that's why it's so obvious to me. I'm slowly walking around talking to everyone and looking for loot and as soon as I stray from the main path pedestrians start looking like the crowd in a wrestling game, and doors and building walls look like mush. I even got a tutorial pop up on my first "STAGGERED" and the enlarged text on screen looked aliased to shit. But to be clear I do like the way the game looks... it's just ruining the illusion a lot every time something like this makes itself known.

They get on my nerves a bit, but only cause they contrast what is otherwise a great looking game. The standout, for me, was the door to get in and out of the apartment in the early chapters. A super low-quality texture, on a door you interact with multiple times, and there's other doors in the room with much higher quality textures that you cannot interact with.'

Bizarre.

Actually, yes. Emphatically. I'm super okay with how weird the variable fidelity of this game is. Like I said in the impressions thread, for me it's impressive how variable the textures on from scene to scene and distance to distance. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing four generations of 3D video games in a single image. It lends to the nostalgic quality of the game, and perhaps even some of the odder qualities of its ending I've seen hints of over the past week. Sometimes I feel like I'm viewing a dream, a memory and a reality all at once. It's kind of rad.

Really, what I take issue with is the constant praise for this game's visuals in general. Mouths move weird, textures are bad, environments are bland and NPCs are typical indulgent Nomura bullshit. Every visually inventive moment is sabotaged by something. Over twenty hours I've fallen in love with that sabotage and don't think they should upload the hi-res assets to solve it, but the game is not that good looking. It might be one of the most patchwork looking games I've played all gen honestly.

It's not just textures, it's models as well. It's a bit jarring that you get some beautiful looking environments (particularly the scale of each environment is impressive), and then some broken looking Nintendo 64 style objects and blurry textures.

I don't really like it, it feels more like an LOD bug than intended. But maybe it is as designed.

lol this is brutal.

It's therapeutic to read impressions like this, though. I don't get why people can possibly be hyping the graphics as much as they are. It's those early influencer impressions that made me so confused and why I made this thread.

I've adjusted to it, but I still remember when Tifa walks you up to the apartment doors and I was like "ok this is some bad texture pop in on this door." and then realized it wasn't actually pop-in that hadn't loaded but that the door was actually just a very, very low res texture.

The two things that I still find jarring though are the mouth animations are worse than the non-story characters in Horizon Zero Dawn and some of the animations that the characters go through, particularly Tifa, during dialogue scenes are kind of stiff, don't match the tone of what's being said and repeat themselves a lot.

This is both one of the best and worst looking games at the same time.

That apartment door is an insult, honestly.

It is a bit surprising that an 85GB game has such a heavy dose of low-res assets.

Will sit and wait for the PC version, don't really expect a gigantic difference, but will see.

If someone were to randomly ask me to name a game company that has produces good graphic for their games. Square would probably be the first name that comes to mind. It might not be the most correct answer in current time, but I still say SE is known to take their own graphical tech very seriously and given the resources they can definitely hang with the top of the top. However they aren't using their own tech this time around, they are using Unreal which was the first thing that caught my attention years ago when they announced this project. I am not dogging on Unreal, it is fine, and probably one of the reason why this game can even hit its current release date, but this is a disconnect to how SE usually handles FF in recent years.

The low res texture was the first thing I noticed regarding the graphics in the quick look. I won't say the game is bad looking, but it is employing some interesting trick. I do wonder if some of the less than stellar looking parts are intentional, time constraints, or tech related.

@development: I haven't played the game, but I know of the issues you're talking about. The HDR and low texture quality aren't the same things. You'll just have to deal with the low textures which seem to be your biggest issue. With the HDR, it's actually (and unfortunately) recommended to be turned off.

There are some hideous textures, it is baffling, and they are very noticeable. That being said, it didn't really affect my play experience. I'd still say it's a very impressive game, but clearly they spent their budget on the main characters.

Could be that they decided to spend 70% of the systems performance to run the main character models and whats left over is why everything else looks a generation or two behind. It is what it is. Maybe they'll patch it, or the PC or PS5 version will come around and fix it.

What DID affect my experience and somehow I keep forgetting: This is FF7: Shimmy Edition. Ugh, jesus the amount of times you have to crouch under, shimmy through, balance across.. And I guess it's a perfect example of what these new systems are supposed to solve? I've never seen it this bad. They took a page right out of their Tomb Raider games.

What low res textures?

I've seen plenty of people complain about this, but I can't say I've noticed it personally even a little bit. I've been far too absorbed in the game to care about that stuff. Also, my primary console these days is the Switch, so what do I even have to compare it to? The only other PS4 games I've played over the past year have been KH3 and DMC5. Does it look as good as those? Sure, I guess? It definitely doesn't run at 60fps like those games do (on PS4 Pro), which is unfortunate, but not something I was expecting in the first place due to how dense this game is.

Yeah, the days of Square Enix using custom tech are a thing of the past, for better or worse. The final nail in the coffin was when they set up a new studio for the director of FF15 specifically to create games for the Luminous Engine, only to shut it down within a year and kick him out of the company.

KH3, DQ11, FF7R, Trials of Mana... They all use UE4 now. KH3 was the first to announce dropping their own tech in favor of UE4, which gave me quite a scare when they released the BBS 0.2 demo back in 2017. That was probably the ugliest game they've ever released. But, two more years with the engine gave them enough experience to release one of the best-looking games this gen. Still, when you heard them talk about the "Kingdom Shader" and how ambitious that sounded, you can't help but think they could've done even more with their own tech. But then the game still wouldn't have been out right now, so eh.

Maybe the most consistently inconsistent game graphically that I've ever played. One chapter will look absolutely stunning, the next will look okay, the next will look like a early PS3 title, and the one after that will be back to looking gorgeous again. This continues the entire way through.

Compare chapter 15 to 16, it's absolutely insane. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say chapter 15 genuinely looks like a PS3 title, and chapter 16 could easily be early PS5. One looks absolutely hideous, while the other is perhaps the most impressive thing I've seen this entire generation, visually.

The only thing that is visually consistent throughout the game is the fantastic character models and particle effects. That, and it runs at a rock solid 30 fps that maybe dips a few times over the course of 40 hours.

In general I think the lighting is great as well. There were a number of times I took a moment to just look at a scene because of lighting.

It doesn't bother me much.

But the slow-walking and squeezing through tight corridors in this game is next-level.

I was just about to post something about this. The Slums looks like something from a PS2 game it's truly awful and it really is bothering me to an extent. It's clear that the textures didn't load up for some reason and some other UE4 games have this issue I know. But man going from Midgar to the Slums is such a drastic difference in visuals. What frustrated me even more is when I watched this youtuber Maximilian Dood his Slum's ground textures looked much better than mine and I'm on a PS4 Pro... Also the sky box for Midgar is blurry as shit looking. I'm less annoyed by that though.

She is not amused!

@casepb: Lol That boiler thing, yea that looks like something out of FF11 (the bestest game)

I'm not sure why anything would look better for anyone else. I've watched some of his footage and other peoples. Everyone has the same issue. It looks like the usual Unreal Engine issue of textures taking forever to load in (FF7R has that issue as well) but these just never load in. That's just the texture they've used.

Although it would be incredibly hilarious and very awesome if there was just some bug that made half the textures in the game not work.

I don't mind blurry textures, sometimes i actually like them because it means the game isn't pretending it's not a game and has bigger memory issues to worry about :P.
It could be a bad thing of course, such as when you're not sure if the game is bugged or not, but when intentional it's usually fine.

I do kind of understand why the textures are ass, btw. I mean, maybe. You develop a game for a decade under ideal circumstances, on the best hardware. Maybe they even wanted to wait for PS5 at some point, or were using the inevitable PS5 version as their target model.

Anyway, finally the time comes to crunch the performance down to something manageable on current gen systems and you start tweaking settings. Somewhere in that last process they decided they wanted DOF, motion blur, AA, decent resolution etc. over good textures. OR, they were adjusting up til the last point and just didn’t notice how some textures in the engine don’t load in, ever, when you grab the auto texture scaler slider and move it to “60%”. Personally I think it’s the latter.

Basically none of that matters and they should just patch it or give us an option in the settings, cause shit is constantly taking me out of it.

@development: The X1 and PC versions probably won't have any of these low res textures. I'd imagine they will slowly patch the Slums to look better on PS4. I doubt it will ever look as detailed as Midgar though. You can really tell they put in far more time and effort into Midgar. I am really wondering how the inevitable PS5 definitive version will look though.

I'm not a "graphics first" player, especially if the gameplay really clicks with me, but I'd have to be blind to not notice some of the incredibly low-res assets and textures. They look really awful at times. Some of the npcs have a real sockpuppet syndrome going with their lipsync too.

...buuut basically everything else works for me, so it really hasn't come in the way of my enjoyment at any point. Obviously it would be nice to have everything look high-res, but I have a feeling this is something that's not going to get sorted out, maybe not even with the pc-version.

This game was also being developed by an entirely different studio for the first couple of years after it was announced formally. Then Square Enix in 2017 took the development "in-house". So they either had to work with a game they weren't happy with, or had to start all over. I imagine that caused them to cut a lot of corners either way.

The craziest one for me has to be the alley outside the Honey Bee Inn. You shimmy into it and what's back there? One single hallway with two guys arguing over the best Honey Bee model and two guys mugging a third for everything he's got. Like, why did they need to hide a load into that scene? It's literally nothing, they could have just scrapped the alley and put the little chest with ether or whatever anywhere else on the map. You can't even get to that chests because of the three guys standing in front of it, so maybe something changes back there later but it's pretty wild it exists based on my experience so far.

I just got to a chapter where all the textures look 10x better than the various areas in the slums.

What I've noticed is that the the slum areas where you collect side quests generally have worse textures than the linear story exclusive areas. And I bet the boss battles in this game take up a lot of space too in terms of memory.

I still haven't finished the game, but still assuming there'll be a FFVIIR-2, I wonder if it'll generally look better in hub areas than this game does.

I'm also surprised they went with plain-Jane UE4 to develop this game instead of whatever in-house engine they used for FFXV. Maybe it's faster to develop for? Or maybe that's what the third-party developer chose originally and SE had to stick with it when they took over development.

@lajiaya: Found it pretty funny that the places you spend the most time in (if you do the sides quests) look the worst. I've also noticed around the internet that very few talk about this. Did this game get a free pass because Midgar is so well done or something? Almost seems unfair to other games that got torn part for being rushed this gen. Mass Effect Andromeda comes to mind.

It does feel like most of the positive impressions of the game out there on major outlets are from the first few hours of the game. The part where the game is undoubtedly at it's best in every way.

Personally, the low-res textures didn't bother me so much. I can see why they'd bother others but I just don't mind it for whatever reason.

Absolutely not. I’m playing on a launch PS4 and some of the textures just look awful. I get that it’s old hardware, but that’s why I would’ve preferred to play on PC or at least my Xbox One X. Maybe waiting a year was the right call for me after all, it’s clear that the base model Ps4 just isn’t up to the task of running new games well anymore.

Glad to hear that it gets better after the slums though, I’m still early on and really like the gameplay/story thus far. It’s just some of the muddy textures really bum me out.

@vikingrk: It's mostly just disappointing to me that the whole game doesn't have the same level of detail. If the Slums looked as good as Midgar it would be amazing. It makes me feel like I already want a remaster of the remake ha.

It's really only jarring because so much of the game actually looks really phenomenal. Then there's shit like ground textures, doors, logos, and that big pile of junk that's just a jagged scrap texture sloppily tossed onto like a fucking PS2-level highly polygonal small mountain texture. I dunno what happened, I mean with that last one it somewhat makes sense cuz you can't just render individual bits of ALL that junk, but then so many of the textures and models just look chunky or blurry or both. Then you see one of those pre-rendered cutscenes and it's god damn gorgeous. I don't have too high of standards for graphics, I play a lot of low budget games new and old, but I'd prefer them to be consistent.

Just took this one not long ago. These pre-rendered skyboxes are killing me! Why would SE allow something of this quality?

@casepb: See now this though? I think this kind of rules, albeit completely by accident. Looks like you fell into the craziest mod of FFVII yet.

Yeah, I'm super ok with it. I think the game looks amazing about 95% of the time. There's the occasional blurry texture or weird thing here or there, and yeah when you're sprinting and come to a sudden stop the textures can take a second to load, but overall I think it's a phenomenal looking game. Really excited to see how it will improve on the PS5.

@casepb: I'll come clean and say I don't know what you're on about.

Regarding the other textures: holy hell do they look like something didn't load in.

@casepb: Yea, I think the backgrounds look great for the most part. Kind of a fun throwback to the original's pre-rendered backgrounds. And I didn't look directly at them for any period of time except for the first time I wanted to take in a new environment.

I think the door is going to loom over this game forever. Even if they fix it. It isn't the only one of course, just probably the worst example and it's in your face multiple times through the game. There were definitely similarly bad looking spots throughout the slum areas though.

@rahf: Really? Well I must admit this thought is more interesting to me than anything. So it seems clear this game is being given a pass due to nostalgia. I do understand that because I also have fond memories of the 97 game. But it does make me wonder about the younger generations who are playing it for the first time. Will they be as forgiving towards a 2020 game having these super low resolution textures? Now I'm wondering the age group of these forums. I'd imagine most of us are in our 30s.

@casepb: I should clarify that this is only in reference to the skybox. Those other textures look ludicrously low-res.

I just started playing and the door, and area behind the bar at 7th Heaven seemed crazy low res especially with how amazing everything else looks. It feels like they just... forgot.

There's a really bad example not too far into the game where it kind of ruins the story moment. The apartment doors look bad, but there's a scene where Aerith is talking to the flowers and there's a close up on the flowers and they all look like complete ass. That scene was kind of important and seeing those look so bad is kind of embarrassing.

@jesus_phish: lol yep. Constantly being distracted by the textures, even 28 hours in. There have been countless "dramatic" moments that I couldn't focus on because a part of me was either saying "wow this actually looks good" or "wow this looks like an uprezzed PS1 game without the updated textures".

ALSO, the FOV is wayyy too low and I play on a 62" TV. The game is hard to look at. Literally: it's difficult to look at. I have a narrow living room, already sitting back as far as I can, and the unchangeable FOV is a problem. My eyes are constantly trying to adjust. Before anyone tries to blame me for this, it's never a problem with other games because usually the only games w/ very low FOVs are 1st person, and even on consoles modern 1st-person games usually have an FOV option, or get one patched in later. With a game that has as much detail packed into the backgrounds as FF7, it makes taking in all those details especially difficult and uncomfortable.

I think I'm going to wait for the PC version. It'll probably be a year but I think it'll be worth it letting the game improve on that system, plus patched over time. I can get into Persona 5 Royal in the meantime.

Glad to see i'm not alone in being distracted by this. Like you see the character models and you're like DANG.. that's a good Cloud / Tifa / Barrett / Rude you have here! You see these big fights with colorful particles sprayed all across the place and it looks quite impressive. But at the same time these pixelated boilers, doors and fences are really noticeable. And they don't do a good job of covering up the lower resolution textures all that well. Like the Rude fight that happens in the quicklook, that fence that leads to it is pretty much in the center of the screen. When you talk with housemother, it's hard to look past her flappy mouth and how much worse it looks compared to the main characters. That boiler is front & center of the shop. That low poly door is the one you engage with.

Hopefully we'll eventually see some of the more prominent textures get a boost in quality. Like it's fine if there's some real gunk to be found at the end of a alleyway that 99% of the playerbase won't even look at for more than half a second. But when you corral the players to engage with these very blurry objects multiple times, it's getting hard to ignore and that does impact the game negatively.