I don’t really think it’s incompetence. laziness, maybe, but it would be a non-trivial amount of work to doctor the static backgrounds to remove the baked in characters, and for at least some of them you might even need to make new models to replace them.
for the time it was a completely acceptable tactic to create more complex scenes using limited technology. it only just drives home how bone headed it is to try and make everything as HD as possible. final fantasy VIII looks fine at native resolution with just some gentle filtering. that’s the way it was meant to be viewed. these games do not benefit at all from higher res polygons. I will never understand how anyone thinks that looks better.
Well, FF8 was all done in higher res and then downscaled for PSX. Its not like we are talking about pixel art backgrounds or something. About the only part of FF8 which I think should stay low-res, are the textures on 3-D models. Because I like the “texture” and look of the low res textures. and it seems clear that maybe the textures weren’t ever higher res. Even looking at the higher res models used in the strategy guides for the bestiary and whatnot.
And yeah, removing the static characters would be real tough. Especially because they do not have the original assets to work with.
if the source assets still existed that will completely change this discussion. it would be amazing to be able to see the prerendered backgrounds in full resolution as they were originally designed, but that just isn’t possible. heck, if they still had the source assets it might be possible to render it all in real time with some amount of work.
I just think it’s objectively worse to try and make some things HD and other things not. it would have been cool if they had tried AI upscaling but that process is far from perfect and I imagine a conservative company like squeenix just wouldn’t see that as an option. maybe someday. or maybe someone will mod the steam version of ffviii remastered. I could see that actually looking good and natural. remako is cool but the differences in lighting and rendering style between the polygonal models and the backgrounds are even more jarring when the backgrounds are that HD. but it might work really well with these new character models.
I don’t see what the difference is, it’s not like they created the art at a higher resolution originally because they intended it to ever be displayed at a higher resolution and it’s not like they even have the original hires art anymore. I don’t need to see the full frame camera negative or whatever of a movie before they cut it to whatever resolution
abstraction is best anyway. have people learned nothing from dead empty open world games, more is not better
Even if they were, I think this would be a bad idea beyond a certain resolution – the lighting and textures would hold up to a point (double original res? triple?), but then they’d start looking less convincing.
In general, I’m a big advocate of doubling resolution but no further – PSX, N64 stuff can clean up swimming textures but not isolate elements at 640x480; PS2 games can look good at 1280x960 but start to look like empty block rooms past that. Especially late-gen games that push the systems tend to have detail waiting to be revealed with a moderate resolution bump.
honestly just slap a crt filter on anything up to 480i and it will always look better on a modern display than increasing the native res. if it’s 3D content some anti aliasing can be good. that’s pretty much all these old games need tho.
I have the FF8 strategy guide, which has high quality prints for every background.
Albeit, they are printed small on the page. Otherwise the start guide would be waaaaay thicker. But you can still appreciate the full color depth and lack of pixelation. They look fantastic. I’ve no doubt that an FF8 with original higher res, full depth assets on the backgrounds (whatever that res is), would look amazing.
I don’t think the problem is wanting to make everything as “HD as possible”. I think the problem with FF8 is that they are only going like 1/3 on the improvements. This is a case of do it right, or don’t do it. Now we end up with a massive visual imbalance. Indeed, they changed a few character models (the main ones). But you’ve otherwise been able to run the 3-D portions of FF8 in high res, for decades. To the same imbalanced effect. And now we have a few improved models, looking imbalanced compared to others, which did not get the improvements. And at least in the case of Squall: a noteable departure from his original visual style.
Square couldn’t even be assed to get analog movement in there.
They added a random battles toggle. Undermining the game’s sytems, which allow you to set one up through junctioning, back in 1999. People love to complain about FF8 but right now I’m lurking forums and seeing people being surprised at how much they are loving it.
only strengthens my belief that 95% of the Eight Hate was people piggybacking on the attitudes of people who had only played 7 before and hated 8 because “where’s Cloud”
It kinda seems like there’s been some sort of critical reassessment of 8? I remember an underwhelming release with people mostly complaining it was just a bland/predictable/expected sequel to a beloved game.
I mean, in the specific case of this screenshot both the character-less background and model readily exist. And from my explorations of the game files back in the day, I’d bet all backgrounds that use the faux-poly characters trick have character-less versions. I’ll buy that they’re too lazy to figure out how to rescript the scenes though.
