#am i going to play the same game with some graphical touchups for the 5th time?

[obliviousriki]

My Initial thoughts

Hey everyone! I just got XCDE and played it for about an hour. I’ll be playing it a lot more tomorrow and in the coming weeks, but I just wanted to share some things I saw after playing the game for just a little bit.

(These are in no particular order)

-The ambient noises in the game are amazing. I really love the birds during the day in Colony 9, but especially dear to me are the crickets/cicada noises at night. I live right next to a forest, and I had to pause the game to see whether the noises were coming from my window or from outside. It’s just a fantastic little touch that I think adds a lot to the ambiance.

-The lighting engine seems to be very similar to XC2′s. This is definitely not a bad thing, and I could also just be straight-up wrong, but the way that things that are very far away look reminds me of XC2. 

This singular still image does a poor job describing exactly what I mean, but it’s more present when you’re moving around a bit more, I think.

-I’m enjoying the remastered soundtrack much more than I thought I would initially. The music of XC1 has had a profound impact on me, and editing these already-fantastic tracks seemed unnecessary to me. I still absolutely believe that the originals are basically untouchable, but the remaster touches them up in ways that I wasn’t really expecting. They aren’t significant changes in orchestration, but maybe an instrument here and there is touched up, or a little something is thrown in to spice things up. My favorite as of this point is the glockenspiel that is added to the Colony 9 town themes (both day and night). I really love the little flair it gives to the track.

-Fashion armor is implemented in a way that seems almost too perfect. You collect a piece of armor, and it is added to a collection. You can change your fashion gear to any piece of armor in this collection, whether or not you still have it in your inventory. This fixes the only problem that I had with XCX’s fashion armor system, where I would accidentally sell a piece of fashion armor and not be able to get it back easily. It also prevents excess inventory clutter, which is always welcome.

-When I first saw the game, I was unsure about the style. It looked a little too different from the original, the faces looked a little too strange to me. Maybe too round? It was hard to tell what I really disliked about it. 

But after playing for even just a little, I’ve grown to enjoy the new look. The facial expressions are so much more interesting, and I think emotion is conveyed much better than in the original.

-The UI is nice. I never really had trouble with the original UI, but the upgrade is pretty decent. It definitely looks more modern, which fits with the more modern look of the game in general. There’ll still definitely be reason to go back to the HD texture pack, though, at least for the grungy, nostalgiac aesthetics of the original.

-Time for me to talk endlessly about something that I’m absolutely obsessed with: The camera! 

Oh boy is this a big one for me. There are a number of little things that just make me very excited, and two of them are present in the above picture. The first is that you can still turn the UI all the way off. This scared me very badly, because the ever-present UI in XC2 ruined a lot of the potentially beautiful moments of that game by having text in almost every corner of the screen.

This is a fantastic shot, but it’s hard to concentrate on the townscape in the center because the easy-to-see UI draws your attention as soon as you set eyes on the photo. 

The other thing that I am extremely excited about is that, like XCX (and I think XC2 but I can’t really remember), you can zoom in all the way through a character. No more relying on clipping the camera into walls and through the character, which is how I took all of my pictures in XC1. This means that I’ll be able to take pictures of open areas like Gaur Plains and Eryth Sea much easier, as my back won’t always have to be to a rock to get a nice landscape picture. 

Speaking of zooming the camera in, let’s talk about how far away from the character you can get. 

This isn’t even as far out as the camera can go, but it shows promise for some very nice shots. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get some nice group photos in the environment for once. This also depends on how cooperative the AI characters are, and. Well. They can only be better in XCDE than they were in XC1. 

One final camera thing is the difference in docked resolution and handheld resolution. This was a big issue for XC2, and I wanted to do a quick test to see how big of a change it is for XCDE.

The above image is in docked mode.

And this image is in handheld. The difference is very small, but definitely noticeable if you look at it for a long time. I’ll still prefer playing in docked mode for the slightly better resolution, but playing handheld is definitely still an option. It’s nothing like the huge resolution drop that XC2 suffered. 

-The last thing I think I’m going to talk about for now is also something that will make my life so much easier, and is actually extremely exciting in terms of this blog. 

The event theatre is going to let me take pictures of any event that happens after it officially occurs in the story, and with the Switch’s record functionality, maybe even make some GIFs out of certain pieces with relative ease. This is a very welcome addition, and definitely something I plan on spending some time with. 

That’s all for now!