Xenoblade 2 ORIGINAL SWITCH 1 VERSION lighting demonstration & appreciation :) Light Rays & Light Transitions (1/3)

Interior light (2/3)

Rain/Lightning illumination (3/3) These are all captured using Elgato HD60 S. Game runs 720p30 (max) docked.

Why did XC3 not look as good? One thingI observed when I played it again on an emulator and disabled the scaling and it seems like the upscaler even messed up the textures for some reason and it looked better off for sure but still not like XC2.

Not sure exactly the reason, but it probably has to do with them wanting to make each area much larger than XC2's whilst also trying to improve performance. They dialed back A LOT of the more demanding graphical effects that XC2 had. Luckily Genesis seems to combine both XC2's graphical effects with a world size comparable to XC3 :)

Yup! It’s still there a little but it’s nothing like 2. Not a lot of contrast between lights and shadows now. Also the bump mapping/highlights on objects and terrain outdoors is basically nonexistent. Like usually if you look towards sunlight, objects and terrain will have a shine to them but 3 is completely flat

this is really just a cheap screen space blur effect, and they've added since XCX. the tech is essentially not changed

I know this. Although cheap, it looks nice and for some reason is almost completely absent in Xenoblade 3. It has an even cheaper effect that looks horrible.

xc3 has a lot of visual degradation which came for no reason. like the terrain texture tiling issue which they should've solved back in xcx. and inproper volumetric cloud upsampling causing messy edges

Yeah it’s bad