Not unsurprisingly, trades are made in order to deliver this type of seamless experience. One such compromise can be seen in the game's day/night cycle. Xenoblade X makes use of shadow maps, as you'd expect, but these shadows are completely static. Shadow position does not change based on the location of the sun - they remain completely still until nightfall when they are simply faded out. This doesn't have a significant impact on minute to minute visual quality, but it does sap away a little of the atmosphere typically gained from dynamic time of day cycling.
Alpha texture resolution also takes a hit in the game, impacting the effectiveness of transparency effects. If you look at the edges around objects which intersect with any sort of alpha, you'll notice obvious saw tooth edges. When these effects fill the screen it can even give the impression of a lower overall screen resolution. While the effects work used in battle is hardly distracting, the wispy clouds used to add fog to the terrain definitely stand out. Depth of field, often used in cut-scenes, is also rendered at a low resolution with obvious artefacts visible throughout many sequences. Beyond that, water reflections are limited to basic cube-maps that do not accurately convey the world around it, while such bodies of water also lack any sort of interactions with the player.
More noticeably, Xenoblade X exhibits significant pop-in even when playing the game from a faster external drive. We've tested the game on both the Wii U's internal storage and using an external drive but in both cases, we encountered a significant amount of object pop-in. Running through the city, you'll see huge Skells and crowds of NPCs appear out of thin air just metres from the player. Thankfully, we only found this distracting while exploring New Los Angeles, the game's central hub. Once out in the wild, pop-in can still be observed but it becomes somewhat less noticeable.
_/¯. Hey i am all hyped of this mysterious 720p 30fps little bit less grass and geometrie but everything else looks very similiar port of this game.
