The sewer areas wouldn't look out of place in FFVII Remake. And I am not kidding. Not only the geometry is good, but there is a good amount of complementary colors, doing a good contrast of hot and cold.
Sewer and cave areas are rarely interesting in games, and, somehow, it looks GREAT in ZA. A game where the graphics are quite unimpressive.
And yet, I came to realize that indoors areas are usually visually pleasing. They have nice textures, the scale isn't off, there is some baked in ambient occlusion, lighting is believable. Quasartico looks stunning.
The game looks… actually amazing. I've came to realize that the outdoors areas (mainly the city) is to blame here for the initial bad impression. As the last pics show, they pale in comparison with indoors. The streets are uninteresting, palette and geometrical wise. The textures are repetitive and they do nothing to break the monotony. The mountains at the distance look like placeholders… And we spend the majority of the game there. Hard to think of ZA as a good looking game due to that.
And yet, we can see that there are areas that ARE actually nice. Even outdoors: the Rusty Sindicate entrance, the battle courts, the malls, for example.
I know that people complained a lot about balconies already, but I raise another reason for why the main streets are so bland looking: the lack of lighting. The city has too few lamp posts. And the light from the windows don't shine on the streets. They don't shine at all. So we have a dull night scene, where it looks like the city is under a blackout, with occasional emergency lights on from the zone borders.
Anyways, this post isn't really about trashing what we already did many times before. But I really wanted to say how much I appreciated the indoors areas and showcase through the images that.
by Benhurso