Digital Foundry, the kings of technical teardowns, have set their sights on Metroid Prime Remastered. Not surprisingly, the team has come away quite impressed with what they’ve found. Just as fans were surprised to see, Metroid Prime Remastered is much more than just an up-rez of the original GameCube release.

You can watch the video above to get full insight into what Digital Foundry discovered, but if you’re just looking for the finer points, check out the summary below.

  • sophisticated baked lighting solution with beautiful light propagation
  • bounce lighting, subtle shadowing and plenty of fog
  • new light sources
  • existing objects gain emissive properties
  • static volumetric-style lighting
  • materials exhibit accurate lighting response with the game’s environments
  • Specularity is usually kept to a minimum
  • beam weapons no longer cast dynamic lights throughout the environment
  • models and textures have been completely remade
  • new models boast higher polygonal complexity and refined textures
  • substantial improvements to image quality, lighting and water
  • the visor still fogs up, gets covered in guts or shows the reflection of Samus’ face
  • helmet responds to environmental lighting and is also now affected by player weapons
  • raindrops collide with the player weapon, now leaving trails on the cannon itself too
  • geometry-based water ripple effect from the original is replicated
  • there is now more intricate deformation in smaller pools of water
  • normal-mapped ripples and cubemap-based reflections
  • cubemaps do fall out of alignment fairly easily
  • glossy domes in the Chozo Ruins area no longer reflect Samus
  • enemy animation appears to largely be a match for the source material
  • cutscenes basically line up one-to-one in object and camera movement
  • the game operates at 900p in docked mode and 600p in portable mode
  • no sign of dynamic resolution scaling and no anti-aliasing
  • no noticeable frame-rate dips from the locked 60fps in both docked and portable
  • loading times are virtually non-existent

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Comments (1)

hawk

1y ago

It sounds awesome. And it also sounds like they've laid the groundwork for the two sequels. I hope they get made.