Quote Originally Posted by Bolivar View Post
Alright, dude, I was as disappointed by FFXIII and its art as much as you were, but seriously!? A launch title? Should we juxtapose Palompolum with ultra-blocky, hyper-grey, and superugly Chimeran mug shots??? Do I really gotta do that?
Perhaps launch title might be a small amount of hyperbole on my part, but there was nothing impressive about it from a technical standpoint. No cool graphical effects, no advanced lighting models. It was essentially an HD PS2 game if you really stop and look at it. It pushed a lot of polygons and that was about it. Games like Uncharted, Call of Duty 4, Gears of War and Mass Effect were being released 2-3 years before it and looking far better, to say nothing of the stuff that came out since.

Are you really going to sit there and tell me FFXIII was anything special when you get to see a bunch of flat textures instead of grass, or the terrible enemy pop-in that is impossible not to notice in Gran Pulse? Should I be impressed by what amount to some half-assed sky boxes that I never get to see or interact with up close?

Even then, you list Mass Effect 2 as contemporary? It's Unreal Engine 3!!! Representative of the industry, sure but not making a point of what quality graphics are nowadays.
Mass Effect 2 was released at the same time (almost to the month) as FFXIII meaning that it is a contemporary of FFXIII. And while the Unreal Engine 3 is starting to get a bit long in the tooth, it's continuously updated by a company that's main business is making and selling that engine to developers, and it still manages to pump out better looking games than FFXIII. Honestly, looking at what the end result was from a tehnical perspective alone, it's pretty pathetic that it took Square as long as it did to make the Crystal Tools engine.

Uncharted 2 is, but c'mon, there's 2, arguably 3 games on consoles that look as good as Uncharted 2. Even, then, I would say FFXIII kept up with it. Not quite the mastery that Naughty Dog has, but seriously, it was a pretty damn good looking game, g.
A game doesn't have to look as good as Uncharted 2 to still look better than XIII. And there are certainly more than 2-3 that did. Honestly, I saw nothing that impressed me on a technical level in XIII. But if it makes you feel any better, XIII was lightyears ahead of anything Bethesda has ever done to date.