It seems Nintendo Switch Online fans are listening regarding emulation issues with some of the classic games on offer. After a January 20th NSO update that brought Rare’s N64 platformer from 1998 Banjo Kazooie for the subscription service it seems that there is water in it The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was improved. This could bode well for future emulation quality on Nintendo Switch Online.
As discovered by VGC, ocarina of timeThe graphics of the infamous Water Temple have been slightly adjusted to look a little better. If you remember, the Water Temple is where Link faces his shadow form. It’s a pivotal moment in the game that drew the ire of fans for not having any reflections back then ocarina
Continue reading: Gamers have a lot of complaints about Nintendo Switch Online N64 games
Without the reflective water and foggy atmosphere, the mood of the icon ocarina of time Boss encounter will be badly damaged in NSO version.
However, according to Nintendo dataminers LuigiBlood and Oatmeal Dome, it seems that the water problems in ocarina of time were improved so easily put them a bit closer to, say, the GameCube re-release of the game.
As per the tweet, the tweaked water looks a little more faithful to the original. OatmealDome noted that the fog is still missing, but that this solution, tiny as it is, shows promise for what it could mean for the future.
When reached for comment, OatmealDome said igamesnews that while the water doesn’t look as ugly as it used to, there are ongoing problems affecting other areas ocarina of time, like the Kokiri Forest.
“Regarding the Water Temple room, the water now has some translucency and correctly renders reflections, so it doesn’t look as ugly as it did before,” OatmealDome said. “However, there is a scrolling water texture layer that’s a lot less subtle on Switch when compared to N64/GC/Wii/WiiU, so it’s not quite right yet. Fog isn’t there yet either – there’s said to be a distant atmospheric fog in this room that just isn’t there in the Switch version. This is game-wide as well, so areas like Kokiri Forest will continue to be affected.”
Reached out via Twitter, LuigiBlood echoed the sentiment and also explained why some of the emulated games on NSO have such horribly rendered graphics.
“[The NSO N64 emulator] is based on the Wii U Virtual Console emulator, which includes per-game graphics display capabilities,” said LuigiBlood. “But in an attempt to get more games to work, it was decided to remove these features from the emulator and try to configure the graphics through external means such as configuration files. This was done specifically for NSO and in their attempt to do this they clearly corrupted the graphics emulation in the process and may not have had enough time to fix the issue.”
Continue reading: Nintendo will continue to improve Switch Online after Backlash
Now the company seems to be slowly stepping back in and ironing out the graphic kinks.
Both OatmealDome and LuigiBlood are optimistic about what this could mean for other classic games in the subscription service’s vault. Nintendo said last November that it will continue to “make an effort to provide services that satisfy consumers,” and these small changes suggest the company is making at least some effort to fulfill that promise. Hopefully we’ll see more improvements ocarina of time as well as fixes in other particularly buggy NSO games, such as Paper Mario and Yoshi’s story.
igamesnews has reached out to Nintendo for comment.
.