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calibas

The title from Boring Report:

> The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Performance on Switch

Article's title:

> Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom’s Performance On Switch Sounds Like A Minor Miracle

I find the Boring Report summary to be much more informative that the article, it's like they trimmed away all the fat.

The fact that the game runs at 20-30 FPS doesn't seem like a "minor miracle", by 2023 standards that's barely acceptable. And I understand the limitations of the Switch hardware, I'm not trying to insult Nintendo or the Zelda games, but I have hard time using the word "miracle" to describe the performance of a game that runs at 20-30 FPS.

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Disagree. If you understand that the switch hardware is very limiting, you understand that the game runs despite that, and you understand the usage of hyperbole to emphasize how bad the switch hardware is for 2023, the original title should make perfect sense. It's also more informative on what the article will contain since you can infer that it will specifically talk about the hardware and its limitations, whereas the shortened title makes it sound like a plain benchmark.

It's not that you're explicitly wrong, it's that you and the article are putting a very positive spin on what is objectively mediocre performance. I could just as easily put a negative spin on it, and suggest there's something wrong with the fact that the Switch can barely run modern games.

For the record, I own a Switch and I'm thinking about buying the new Zelda game... I just like facts more than spin.

I care more about the loss of information than the spin in the title. The new title objectively gives you less information about what the article will actually contain even if it is less biased. The natural extreme of this would be a program that strips the titles of articles out entirely: It would be guaranteed to remove all bias from titles every time, at the cost of obfuscating what the actual contents of the article will be.

But it's still sensationalized. It could instead be something like:

"[Zelda] Performance on the Switch is Passable and Impressive under the Limitations of Hardware"

This is up to personal interpretation. Some would certainly argue that calling it "impressive" is still sensationalizing it. There is no clear line that should not be crossed when it comes to this sort of thing.

To be honest I think that the burden of this sort of issue lies with the reader. If you read "small miracle" in the original title and are able to correctly interpret the meaning of that ("The game runs despite hardware limitations"), there isn't really any problem with that. If you read it to mean "The switch is literally a miracle, Nintendo programmers have done something previously thought impossible," it's on you for failing to understand the intent of the author. The author should not have to police their language just because someone somewhere does not understand hyperbole or metaphor.

Ideally it would put the conclusions in the title:

> The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom performance: 20 to 30 FPS on Nintendo Switch

That would generally make it unnecessary to read the article.

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