The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release | Hacker News Reader

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

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654 pointsetrvic755 comments

I cannot describe in words how impactful Ocarina of Time was to me as a kid, how intensely I got sucked into that world to the point that I even wrote some (bad) fanfic set in that universe back in the days. When Majora's Mask came out I was almost bursting with excitement until I was actually able to play it and was again totally blown away by a unique experience.

When I played Breath of the Wild, I felt ... nothing. It's not that I hated the game, it was even enjoyable up to a point, but I just can't seem to get as excited about it as many others, and it seems to be missing everything I loved about Zelda. I'm also not a huge fan of open world games in general and to this date, the only one that I think pulled this of well is IMHO Witcher 3 where every side quest feels meaningful.

So I wish everyone a ton of fun with Tears of the Kingdom, but I feel no particular urge to play it right now, given that it appears to largely copy BotW's formula from what I've read. Maybe I will pick it up at some later point.

I think "as a kid" is the operative phrase here. Nothing will ever live up to that nostalgia.

That's not to discount the criticisms or "feel" you get from the game, but it's worth noting that nothing lives up to our childhood favorites.

I agree. It's a formative stage where everything is novel - even a new game that does everything right can't capture that in adulthood. You also have way more patience as a kid with nothing but time. I didn't mind trudging through jrpgs then, but I hate it now.

I don't replay old games like this (the ones that have you solve and explore). It's effectively a security blanket, with no thrill - the opposite of the first experience. I find it bittersweet and it dulls feelings I associate with those games.

You can never go back, is the thing.

I don’t know. If we’re strictly speaking of nostalgia, I can still feel a very strong sense of nostalgia from things I’ve experienced as an adult, even experiences from just a few years ago — or even the previous year!

This can apply to a trip we went on, or a TV series we watched, or music I listened to, or a video game I played (e.g. I really experience this when playing Factorio again after it’s been a while).

So maybe YMMV, but I can still have things that (at least almost) live up to “feels” I had from childhood.

Agreed. My niece loved Breath of the Wild and has been eagerly anticipating Tears of the Kingdom since it was announced.

I loved Star Wars as a kid. Then the prequels made me jaded that there could ever be anything as good as the originals. The sequels and other content did nothing to dissuade me from this. Then Andor showed up and it's like, holy cow, this is actually good.

Sometimes when the follow-on content is bad... it's because the follow-on content is bad.

Ok... that was my path and since I was not interested I did not know of Andor. Will have to take a look at it.

It really is brilliant. The screenwriter is Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, Bourne Trilogy).

Andor is the first SW content I have re-watched since Jedi.

[spends a few minutes on a mental inventory]

Well, okay: I watched all the SW eps with my son. (His words after seeing Ep1 were "Daddy, that wasn't a very good movie.")

Still, I rest my case. Andor is the first content that I would actually miss if it went away.

Check out Clone Wars and Bad Batch. These brought me back to star wars fandom. Don’t be put off by animation. The stories are excellent and there is lots of character development.

Rebels as well, which IMO was the best of all 3.

Clone Wars & Rebels both suffer at first from being a bit too kid-oriented, but both wind up getting pretty serious over time.

I really tried to make it work, but going through the first season was unbearable dread... imagining that there are like 5 more to get to good stuff is IMO not worth it.

I did watch The Clone Wars (note this is the 2008 TV series, not the 2003 one). The last season (especially the finale) was amazing, up there with Andor for best Star Wars content of all time. But watching the rest of it to get to that point was honestly a slog, and plenty of the shows are gag-worthy or at least blah. It's bad enough I can't recommend it to friends, but I've been trying to think about whether there's a minimal subset of shows I can recommend watching to give enough of the experience that you can appreciate that finale without needing to suffer through the rest of it.

Andor comes with the distinct advantage that you don't have to slog through hours of questionable content to get to the good stuff.

There are lists out there on which clone wars eps are skippable vs not if you just want to be up to date with all of the key storylines and hit the good eps.

Rebels is harder because they had a habit of sneaking key storyline bits into the meh episodes.

I was able to get my kids obsessed with Star Wars before their first Disney trip - watched all of Clone wars, every main movie. Their favorite? Episode 2.

Breath of the Wild is objectively a masterpiece though.

These things are not incompatible in any way:

X is a masterpiece Some person doesn’t enjoy X

I think that's why they used "objectively"

It gets the big things really really right but it is missing human character in a lot of ways compared to Ocarina and MM. Not sure if it was infeasible to do both or if they were on principle trying to let the nature elements do 100% of the work.

Weird because I am split on this. I still game a lot but never got those feelings again that immersed me in the world. Sid Meiers Pirates in my C64 for example. the first CIV or Xcom. I still rack up significant game time but the immersion is less. This I attribute to me not being a kid anymore.

When I was a kid I gobbled up all movies, good, bad, ... Whatever I watched it all. Last decade I haven't watched that much movies anymore. I am in the middle if it is me not being a kid anymore or it is quality.

The difference is that I still put significant time in gaming although it doesn't make me immerse into it like I did as a Kid. Movies I just quit on most of them and watch a couple of good ones.

Maybe it is unfair. A good movie you watch once but even if in a year only 1 good game comes out you can still rack up a big amount of time ;)

Moreover, today's kids, including your own if you have them, like different things than you did. Most kids growing up with Breath of the Wild are not going to be impressed by Ocarina of Time. Most likely, you have pretty different preferences for book/music/movie preferences than your parents.

It’s funny… talking about the Tears of the Kingdom yesterday with my son, he kept bringing up Ocarina of Time as an example of a perfectly rated game. He’s never played it and yet, it’s stuck in his head. I played it when it came out, but I still had more of a fondness for the original Zelda which somewhat betrays my age. I think Ocarina felt a little too guided for me (or maybe it was the limits of the platform).

My son never finished BOTW, but I did. But I have a feeling he’s going to try to play Ocarina of Time before the summer is through. (And yes, I’ve already put in some time in TOTK).

I would disagree. As a kid I played OOT to death but never owned a copy of Majora's mask. I have just started playing it and I think it may even be better than OOT (though it is not really even a "Zelda" game.)

I think if you play MM before OOT you would think MM is way better. In a way MM is genius because it feels so alive with all these characters reliving the same three days over and over. The time reset makes all those hard scripted events believable.

Ocarina of Time does a fantastic job going from the bright world of young Link to the more serious and darker world of adult Link. This adds a ton of depth to the game. And let's not forget the clever game mechanic of swapping between young and adult Link to solve puzzles.

There are indeed modern releases that live up to nostalgia for games of yore and they are... games that are incredibly similar to their predecessors. Game design has gone through a variety of eras and fashions and fads, and games "back then" (for whatever period you happen to be nostalgic for) were just built different. That doesn't necessarily mean better or worse, and maybe nostalgia is the reason people prefer games from the time period when their tastes were developing, but it's not just the games themselves. It's the way games operated.

I guarantee you that if Nintendo released "A Zelda in the mold of OoT but with a new set of dungeons and items and such" people who love OoT would go nuts for it. Look at what happened with Sonic Mania. For some reason, though, publishers/developers are very wary of doing this. Nintendo refuses to make a new Zelda that just reapplies the winning formula. Sega refuses to make Sonic Mania 2 - honestly, I was very pleasantly surprised they made the first one! I blame the late 2000s mantra of "innovation" and its presence/absence that seemed to be all the rage in critic circles.

> There are indeed modern releases that live up to nostalgia for games of yore and they are... games that are incredibly similar to their predecessors.

That just seems tautological to me. Of course things that are deliberately trying to tug on your nostalgia will "live up" to it.

> I think "as a kid" is the operative phrase here. Nothing will ever live up to that nostalgia.

Of course, you're entirely correct but other entries in the series, even Skyward Sword with all its flaws, has managed to capture some of that spirit. BOTW to me is just an entirely different game.

I thought I was too dried up and curmudgeonly to get immersed in a video game but BOTW dispelled that myth. Prior to BOTW Ocarina of Time was my greatest gaming experience.

Nostalgia is definitely the reason I love civilization II so much (I'd argue it's #2 behind civ IV in the series).

It's a damned shame civ II is so hard to get properly running (dosbox, win3.1, etc, sound drivers, etc)

I don’t think that’s true. I played Ocarina as an adult and loved it, but BotW left me feeling similarly cold. It’s just a different style of game.

Meanwhile, Elden Ring drew me in like no other game in recent memory.

I've experienced the opposite, where I played OoT as an adult but thought it was only okay but got completely absorbed into BotW. OoT is too railroaded for my taste, especially the dungeons that often have one linear path. Towards the end of the game when you have to do several temples I thought of quitting. BotW on the other hand gives you plenty to do all at once and doesn't care how you do it. I enjoy devising my own approaches to things rather than finding the singular linear solutions to OoT's dungeons.

I played OOT for the first time at the start of COVID after no gaming for 20 years.

It's the best game. As a kid I liked Marathon and Mario but never played Zelda for some reason. OOT is just a perfect game.

As a kid Zelda might be too hard. You need to be able to read. And as me, read a foreign language, English. I could not play it properly until I was like 12-13yo.

How would you compare it to MM? I think MM is better.

MM is better aesthetics but I enjoyed the storyline and adventure of OOT more.

> When I played Breath of the Wild, I felt ... nothing.

Interesting. Opposite for me. Playing BotW reignited the feeling of playing OOT and MM for me.

I don’t know man. Compare the ambience of Zora’s Domain, music and all, to the equivalent area in BOTW. Compare the divine beasts to literally any temple in OOT. BOTW doesn’t even come close to the magic of Ocarina imo. The story in OOT was also much better imo. Seeing Hyrule as a kid and beginning to love it, then seeing it waste away as Adult Link, and being motivated to defeat an enemy with clear character development, Ganandorf, as opposed to a vague dark force. BOTW substituted magic for tedium. I didn’t have fun running around (because my horse is too far away and can’t be summoned), breaking weapons, running out of stamina constantly, and completing grindy uninspired shrines, all with almost no music. There’s enough there that I’ll finish the game…eventually. 7/10 at best

For me the magic of BOTW was the way its design encouraged you to approach the game more as an environment for free form play. My best experiences with BOTW were when I turned the HUD off and just enjoyed the world, finding Koroks, clearing enemy camps, but mostly just wandering. There are a lot of design elements that come together to make this play style really rewarding and fun like the density of Korok placements and the way you can easily spot shrines from a distance. I think it's hard to compare BOTW to OOT since they have such different designs. OOT is like a carefully constructed theme park ride where BOTW is more like an enormous playground filled with toys. But BOTW succeeded at giving me the same childlike sense of wonder I had with OOT (despite now being an adult).

Exactly. I played the hell out of BotW, but I never came anywhere close to beating it. I spent countless hours just running around and seeing what I could see and do.

I think I might have beaten one or two of the beasts and probably about half the shrines. And most of that came in the tail end of my many hours of gameplay. Yet I'd been all over the world, and had all kinds of fun adventures.

That's how I played Horizon Zero Dawn. I am playing Botw at the moment but it lacks that Alttp or Oot or Link's awakening spark. I guess the zelda novelty wore off along the years because I can see how BOTW has better mechanics than Horizon (but I prefer Horizon settings much more).

Again, ‘as a kid’ is what’s going on here.

I also grew up with OoT, absolutely obsessed and life-defining in many ways. Now I’m a certified Old, and while BotW didn’t click for me initially, I grew to love it and soon understood it to be one of the greatest games I’ve ever played.

That did require me to consider the context though, and force myself to play it with a type of ‘beginner’s mind’.

A few months ago, I decided to give Ocarina a play via the Nintendo Switch Online N64 emulator and—I couldn’t do it. With modern games to compare it to, the graphics, the frame rate, the controls, etc. was just not a good experience and I had to stop.

Same thing happened with Goldeneye. I can’t believe this was tolerable way back when. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

The kids growing up on BotW/TotK will have the same rose colored glasses for those games as many of us have for OoT.

I can’t wait to get off work today and fire up TotK.

Personally I'm never put off by old visuals, and find that as you go along with it you stop noticing. However, I avoid replaying games like this. Once it's finished, it's finished - you won't get the same experience ever again. Instead I go through old catalogs of games I missed.

> Same thing happened with Goldeneye. I can’t believe this was tolerable way back when. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

I played dozens of hours of Goldeneye back in the day (a friend had it, and I spent a lot of time at his house) but it very nearly wasn't tolerable to PC gamers. Its sole redeeming feature was that it was far more social than PC shooters. Playing it felt like going backwards 5-10 years in graphics, level design, gameplay, et c., plus the controls were astonishingly terrible (unless played in dual-controller mode, but that was no good for multiplayer). About the only feature it had going on that was up-to-date for the time were the multiple hit-zones on enemies (different animations and amount of damage depending on where you hit them).

Perfect Dark was a huge improvement in every way (and in many ways is still unsurpassed), and with modern controls on the XBox 360 port, I still play it to this day. Going back to Goldeneye from Perfect Dark, though? Oof. Even at the time, Perfect Dark's release seemed like it straight-up obsoleted Goldeneye, aided by the fact that it included renamed clones of some of the best Goldeneye multiplayer levels and many of the weapons (though, why would you play with them when you have Perfect Dark weapons available? They're so bland)

You didn’t have to use two controllers. You could do the preset where you use the D-pad to strafe and the stick to turn. It’s basically the same as PC.

That's just a flipped mapping of the default, which used the c-pad (just another d-pad, really, but with discrete buttons) for strafe, right? I wouldn't think that's an improvement, since A and B are on the c-pad side.

[EDIT] I mean, I was just nostalgia-playing a little Goldeneye on the Switch like last week for the first time in years, and checked the mappings because my god is the default bad, and if you know one that can put look + turn on the stick, and forward/back/strafe on the c-pad... that'd be great. It didn't look to me like any did that, so I just stuck with the default.

I have the same feeling about OoT but I find many old games to be extremely playable. I think the difference is that the highly replayable games have very responsive controls and throw you into the action very quickly. I could probably replay original Legend of Zelda and enjoy it, but I actually did try with Skyward Sword and the game is too much in the player’s way too often. BotW was very good at getting out of the player’s way and letting the player do things.

For me, "as a kid" was Zelda 1 and Zelda 2. I played some of the intervening Zelda games, and I liked them well enough, but they were fine. Which isn't a knock on Zelda in particular, 99.9% of games I thought were, well, "fine".

And then I played BotW. Since the late 90s there were only 2 other games that I put in more playtime than it and those were Ultima Online and WoW. And this was a single player game. It was the most amazing experience for me.

Same here. And so far with TotK I've got the same feeling. My original zelda experience was a link to the past on the SNES though, so maybe I enjoy the "openness" aspect more? LttP lets you go around pretty much wherever from the beginning, while OoT is pretty linear, especially at the start.

For me Zelda was always more of a puzzle game than an adventure game, and I feel like those puzzle aspects are much more amplified in the last two entries, though in a much more "freeform" way.

Glad someone mentioned link. It was open ended but the world was limited, thankfully. I spent a year stuck checking each square until I met someone who told me to walk through the forest a certain way to obtain the letter/scrolls I needed.

> I cannot describe in words how impactful Ocarina of Time was to me as a kid

Maybe it's an age thing? My first Zelda was the original Legend of Zelda, and while I absolutely love the whole series (except for Tri Force Heroes), Breath of the Wild brought me back to the feeling of playing the original like nothing has since. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask were huge, but I was already in college at that point.

It’s definitely an age thing. I’m a little bit younger than you, so Ocarina hit when I was 15. I mean, is there a more perfect age for a game like that to land?

I was fortunately able to takeoff my nostalgia glasses for Breath of the Wild, and similarly it blew me away. Haven’t felt that kind of emotional connection in a very long time.

I almost want to write a book: ‘Zelda Mind, Beginners Mind’

> I almost want to write a book: ‘Zelda Mind, Beginners Mind’

I'd read that :-)

Now we’re too distracted by “I wonder how they render that” or “how don’t these physics explode all the time”

I'm having this issue also right now. I'm trying to play through it, but what really had me stopped at the beginning was the indirection, not knowing where to go, or if I was really headed in the right direction. It's not a problem per say, but it is when you expect "zelda is a linear experience". You have to treat it like Dark Souls or Elden Ring - which has helped me enjoy it more.

That's interesting. I'm roughly your age, and having played both the Witcher 3 and BotW, I vastly prefer the latter.

Part of it is just controls. BotW is nice and responsive, and Geralt feels incredibly sluggish in comparison because of all the presumably mocapped animations that have to play for every single little thing you do. Try running forward and turning around to run backwards in both games. Gerald has a hell of a time coping, but Link just does it.

Part of it though was definitely the design of the open world. The Witcher 3 just feels claustrophobic. You can't walk two steps without having to collect herbs or fight drowners or talk to NPCs. BotW spaces things out more, and I feel the pacing is improved by this.

I actually liked that sluggishness about the Witcher; it made Geralt feel like a person, in a way. Having read the books, he isn’t the youngest anymore - even for a Witcher - so it feels right that he isn’t as quick to turn on his heels as a teenager Link :)

However, I’m with you on the claustrophobia regarding the map. I guess that’s due to resource constraints of the previous console generations, and I have high hopes for future Witcher games. Glad the series isn’t dead yet.

I don't mind the sluggishness as much as the dialog in Witcher games. I tend to prefer games with little-to-no required dialog and Zelda's interactions tend to be more mechanical than conversational.

I'm fine with lore, but as soon as I have to sit down and listen to video game writing while losing control of my character, I'm instantly bored.

Well, then that game just isn’t for you, which is fine, and why Zelda exists.

The Witcher is also considered a "role playing game", which were always heavily focussed on story. Zelda was never considered an RPG, more an "action adventure with puzzles", although nowadays these genres have converged a lot.

I share this feeling. I loved Ocarina of Time on the N64. BotW was a total snooze fest for me, just felt like way too much to see and do without a lot of structure.

You can’t recreate ocarina. The link to the past structure has been criticized for being stale since twilight princess.

> I'm also not a huge fan of open world games in general and to this date

In theory they sound great. In reality it seems to work against every open-world game I've played. Elden Ring is almost an exception, but the side quests are completely broken in this format without following a guide.

I hated the Witcher 3. Much like RDR 2 it has great presentation, writing and VA - and everything else suffers. But it seems the new generation of gamers have spoken, and they like glorified interactive television with a low bar for gameplay.

Based on some of my recent YT watching:

Open world games need the open world to work with how players explore and interact. Interesting sites should be visually distinct from each other and the environment, and frequent. They should not all be visible at once, to avoid players being overwhelmed with unclear choices. They should all be rewarding so players are confident they aren’t wasting their time visiting. There shouldn’t be important content hidden from visibility because then the game is teaching the player that looking at the world is futile. And the world should be navigable without the UI, i.e. the players are focused on the world and not the UI.

That point about the UI is really important. I played a bit of BotW, and then at some point I had a dialogue with an NPC which slightly (not in am obvious way) hinted at some reward if I do something special. But then that immersion was immediately broken as this interaction was added to a "quest log". Instantly the feeling of being smart in the virtual world went away, and it was just a videogamey checklist with nice GUI. No need to remember what the person wanted you to do, or to recognize it as a quest in the first place. Apparently such quest logs are normal in games now.

Similar things hold about minimaps and teleportation. They make things easier, but also less immersive, and therefore probably less fun for most players.

> Apparently such quest logs are normal in games now.

Not in FromSoftware games. They relented somewhat in Elden Ring by adding NPC markers for last-known-location, but otherwise there is zero hand-holding for quests. In the other games it's more trivial since you tend to come across everything if you explore enough anyway, but Elden Ring is so absurdly huge that it's easy to miss a lot of content.

Well that seems part of the explanation why their games are so well-regarded. If you obviously can't miss things, you also can't get excited about discovering things.

When OoT came out I'd already played Link To The Past And Link's Awakening so I didn't find OoT very impressive.. it often had clunky camera and controls & the story was pretty lame(especially compared to Link's Awakening).

It also just wasn't that creative.. a very safe Zelda. Majora's Mask was much better though.

I'd agree that it is closer to Link to the Past in terms of storytelling, but I also think that Link's Awakening is the best Zelda story in the entire lot of games. I don't agree that the story was lame. Doing so would just be a condemnation of the series as a whole, which has always been light on narrative with very simple themes. Link's Awakening was the exception.

> It also just wasn't that creative.. a very safe Zelda.

It was the first 3d installment of the franchise. I think that it was unbelievably creative in how it approached the game design because it translated the ideas from 2D titles and took them 3D and found ways to make them new.

Majora's Mask got to be as creative as it was because it was just building on top of all the work that Ocarina of Time did to bring Zelda to 3D. In my case, I think it's a worse game, even if it is more "creative."

In terms of story, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in Orarina of Time that's gently implied but left as subtext.

I recommend the video essay called OCARINA OF TIME - A Masterclass In Subtext "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyUcwsjyd8Q"

Thanks for that, It was interesting. There was no chance I'd ever pick up on any of that as a kid, let alone as an adult. I'm always pretty amazed by people that do these deep analysis.

Nostalgia is a funny beast. Your comment holds true for me but the wonder was with the original NES Legend of Zelda and I felt nothing for Ocarina/Majora's Mask.

Interestingly, Breath of the Wild is the first modern game I can remember that brought back that sense of wonder I had as a kid.

Good to get some other perspectives from OoT fans. I played it multiple times as a kid. No other video game came close in terms of the connection. It was the perfect game IMO.

My interest in video games declined greatly as the trend in the video game industry shifted toward heavy violence and more realistic graphics. Fast forward to last year, I decided to pick up the Switch as I found one for a really good deal. I wanted to try the new (to me) Zelda. I felt pretty unimpressed, decent not great. As it turned out, I had mistaken the much hyped BoTW release with the Zelda release that I bought. I was playing Skyward Sword.

Once I realized my error, I picked up BoTW and took it for spin. I now think the hype is totally justified. I got all the feelings I felt with OoT. It's been wonderful so far. I'm only about halfway through and stocked for Tears of the Kingdom.

I think BOTW was too non-linear. You could do the main storyline and shrines in any order; there were no new skills or items blocking you from exploring the entirety of the map from the beginning (just health/stamina); and the dungeons and shrines are all visually identical. It lacks a feeling of progression.

Compare that with the "old" Zelda formula: you have to do dungeons in order, because the item you get in each dungeon unlocks the way forward on the overworked or in the dungeon. There are few to no side quests that aren't actually necessary to beat the game. Each dungeon (and overworld region) has a completely different visual aesthetic.

I think a middle ground would lead to a much better experience. Talking just about BOTW, imagine if 2 of the dungeons had to be done first, but each of those gave some item or ability that allowed you to complete one of the other ones. Or if the game was divided in half like most Zelda games are (light/dark world, young/old link), this makes you feel like you've accomplished something and are moving into a new chapter of the story.

> I think BOTW was too non-linear. You could do the main storyline and shrines in any order; there were no new skills or items blocking you from exploring the entirety of the map from the beginning (just health/stamina); and the dungeons and shrines are all visually identical. It lacks a feeling of progression.

This is exactly why it was one of my top 2-3 games of all time.

Yeah, I feel exactly the same way.

The Shrines were a huge part of why I was so unimpressed with BotW, because they were all so transparently made piecemeal. "Open World" doesn't mean a whole lot when you're expected to complete random identically flavored puzzles every 15 minutes.

I can also picture how Shrines were engineered in a fast-food style assembly line: "Nintendo Engineering Team 46-b, you're being assigned Shrines 5-23, complete them in x weeks."

Even barring Shrines, the "Open World" itself was fairly devoid of interesting things.

Crucially, the shrines are basically 100% optional. If you hate them, there are lots of other ways to improve health and stamina.

I had a very similar experience to you. The only parts of BotW that came close to the "feel" of OoT were the Divine Beasts, but they were such a small part of the game.

My biggest criticism was how much like it felt like you were canonically in a game. Link with his iPad complete with selfie camera, and the clearly computer-generated matrix-y shrines, and if you went too far towards the mountains a "You can't go further that way" message, the strongest feeling I got playing that game is that in truth Link is being observed in a simulated fishbowl environment. A cool idea for a game to lean into, maybe, but not in this case.

> and the clearly computer-generated matrix-y shrines

Good observation. Compare with Ocarina's temples which felt genuinely scary.

Yeah because you’re not a child anymore. This is like saying you can’t get into fruit rollups like you used to. Don’t fight your nature and find some mature hobbies to get excited about rather than looking forward to the next Zelda game.

I don't understand this. Someone expressed feelings about two entries in a franchise with wildly different gameplay designs. The age of the player does not change the content of the game.

As a kid you would play the dumbest stuff and think it was amazing. The age is 100% relevant to how you remember it.

I am not sure I agree Ocarina of Time falls into the category of "the dumbest stuff"

How could the OP be enjoying the feeling of Witcher 3 if they have childhood blinders on? Someone could draw roots of W3 & BotW back to Ocarina. It is reasonable to wish they made a modern Zelda that went down more of the W3 open world path instead of BotW style.

I think it is the difference between a fine crafted adventure/narrative versus an open world sandbox for you to experiment in.

I am very similar to you in that Ocarina of Time was a game that blew my mind and converted me from "kid who plays some video games" into "video gamer". I couldn't get enough of it. And while I also yearn for that older style of Zelda adventure, I find that because I always loved the puzzles, that experimenting in the shrines and around the world with BOTW brings me some level of enjoyment. However, I agree that I am not as "over the moon" with this style of game like some others are.

Well, ocarina was open world...

I'm in my mid-30s and loved SNES and N64 Zelda games with a fervor bordering on zealotry.

BOTW is certainly different regarding its core game design, but then again Majora's Mask and OOT are incredibly different in design as well. Look at the contrast between the first NES Zelda and Zelda II. Compare the SNES/N64 titles to 4 Swords on GameCube as well.

My point is there is incredible gameplay variation in the Zelda franchise historically. While they've often come back to release more "classic" Zelda games, Nintendo has _always_ tried new mechanics and gameplay loops. Some of these titles that deviate from the core/classic design have major flaws, but I think it is important for a game development studio to branch out and deviate from their "winning" formula.

That's a good point. I don't know of any other gaming franchise which tries to reinvent itself basically every time. (Maybe Final Fantasy is similar, though I haven't played any of those games.)

The Witcher 3 is a truly remarkable game. Probably the only one where I’ve felt some kind of connection with the characters, and somehow felt sad when the game ended. It’s extremely well written.

I totally agree with you. Being a kid was certainly one factor, but breath of the wild got a little boring and repetitive after a while.

There was something fun about getting Nintendo Power and the guidebooks which sticks with me as well. Super nostalgic

Similar situation for me. Ocarina of time is my favorite game of all times. Got BOTW and after playing ~40 mins I left it and never touched it again. It felt too open and overwhelming, maybe as an adult I don't have the time to commit or I missed a more contained/guided approach like with Kokiri Forest.

I enjoyed Breath of the Wild for a bit, but felt it was over hyped. The open world feels pretty empty compared to other games (Skyrim, GTA5), and the shrines are a bit of a repetitive loop. Still had fun with it, but never finished. Of course also much less of a gamer than I used to be.

Good game, but seems to be a fair amount of herding/rose colored glasses with reviewers.

I also have a preference for more linear RPG's that tell a great story over big open worlds. The time and investment in a 100 hour open world RPG is too much for my FOMO/ADHD addled mind to handle. I can't commit long enough to finish.

If you want more of that kind of Zelda seek out the earlier Ocarina-like games. Wind Waker & Twilight Princess were remastered in HD on the Wii U and Skyward Sword was remastered for the Switch.

I got a switch and BoTW and played a bit but I hit a wall. I think its personal, maybe similar to you, where a game with big open worlds including long main quests and side quests I feel lost or rather overwhelmed after a while. It feels like never ending, repeated chores. Some of that I attribute to the game developer just repeating a bunch of content like the shrines, fetching things, weapons breaking (but not clothes?), etc.

I also don't like replaying games - I've tried this a few times but once the nostalgia wears off I don't find it fun. Maybe my brain knows I did it already so it feels like chores? I don't know what it is but I just don't really replay things at all. This means I pretty much don't play Nintendo titles because they are all revivals/remakes of the same IP. Its-a-me Mario, again.

Yeah, it's hard to word it exactly, but that's how it felt for me too. OOT felt like the characters and world were more personally touching and meaningful, and BOTW felt more cold/meaningless in comparison. I think they're both great games, but BOTW just felt hollow at various points.

Majora's mask is hugely underrated IMO. It's on par with OOT for me.

BotW is post-apocalyptic, so the hollowness is kind of by design IMO.

Of course it is a copy of the initial formula... just like EVERY direct sequel to pretty much every video game ever made.

TOTK is just bigger and better than BOTW in every conceivable way. It's the perfect video game sequel.

I caved and bought a Switch last week. It’s the best tech purchase I’ve made in years! The games on it are fun, the versatility of the Joycons is incredible, and the loading speed is a breath of fresh air. My main console is an original PS4. I upgraded to PS5 last year and returned it. It’s just more of the same. Huge game downloads, huge update downloads, a huge console, and long load times. And tbh, I didn’t see a lot of difference in terms of graphics. If you want to play super realistic games then Nintendo doesn’t seem to be the way to go, but if you want to have fun and don’t care about frame rate/whatever other performance metric people complain about, the Switch is amazing.

Did you get a chance to checkout Horizon: Forbidden West (the sequel to Horizon: Zero Dawn)? I have been gaming for a few decades now, and this is the most impressive technical achievement I have seen in a game. For me, everything else pales in comparison after this experience (The studio develops their own game engine Decima)

It looks beautiful, but I tortured myself through zero dawn and then dropped forbidden West an hour in. The story is dumb, the dialogues are a nightmare and I feel like the more they try to paint the female protagonist as some kind of strong woman the worse it made the whole thing. Instead of making her seem strong she's like a petty person, constantly complaining and badmouth everything. The game mechanics make it hard to overlook the terrible storytelling, constant boring grind with an extremely boring skill system.

But it's not exclusive to her. All of dialogues are silly. If you had Horizon with the script writers of God of War (2018) even with the boring game mechanics, it would probably be a masterpiece.

> The story is dumb, the dialogues are a nightmare and I feel like the more they try to paint the female protagonist as some kind of strong woman the worse it made the whole thing. Instead of making her seem strong she's like a petty person, constantly complaining and badmouth everything.

The Mary Sue trope has infected Hollywood and now the gaming industry. Every woman needs to be perfect; flawless. Every man serves only one purpose: make the Mary Sue appear even more perfect. At this stage I'm impressed when media doesn't include a Mary Sue. I'm really disappointed to see this game is similarly compromised, as I was looking forward to playing it one day.

I really didn't get the vibe that there's some kind of pandering going on with Zero Dawn (haven't played the sequel). I would also note that it's extremely common for video game characters to be Mary Sues, probably because they're often a stand-in for the player. In this regard, Aloy is not particularly different than a Gordon Freeman or a Link. Perhaps that's an indictment of how poor the writing in Zero Dawn is, but it's not unusual.

Completely different from Link. It's not even in the same dimension.

One character that might be similar is that guy in Devil May Cry 5 and I find him equally cringe, I'm glad I didn't actually pay for it.

The character writing in Forbidden West is largely of the same quality as Zero Dawn: serviceable with a few outstanding characters (none of whom are the MC, unfortunately).

I feel like the reason it’s suddenly become an issue is that the quality of the Main Story took quite a drop in the sequel and it’s easier for people to pick out and criticize examples of poor characterization.

And to be fair, I never thought Forbidden West would be able to match/exceed the fantastic Zero Dawn plot - since ZD relied on a fantastic sci-fi premise that couldn’t be easily repeated once the “truth” had been revealed. But going with cackling immortal demigods dressed like a low budget episode of Star Trek: TOS was a poor choice for the middle act of a trilogy.

What’s really strange is how the new FW expansion lays out more breadcrumbs for the closing act of the trilogy that honestly should have been part of the second act (eg: VAST SILVER and the interactions between Old World AIs). I’d be less disappointed in the mustache twirling, scene eating, villains in sparkly spandex if they were the final remnants of humanity’s ancient hubris that had to be dealt with to bring lasting peace.

I think this is an idiosyncratic use of the trope “Mary Sue”, which isn’t really gendered, or wasn’t originally. Unless the usage has drifted a lot more that I’m aware of?

I think there may be some linguistic drift here, because I've always heard of a male "Mary Sue" referred to as "Gary Stu".

Huh, interesting. I think I recall running into that one also, but not consistently. The mis-match with GP usage are deeper than re-gendering the name though. Seems to me Mary Sue/Gary Stu is fundamentally about projection/wish fulfillment on the part of author (or in this case, player?), and has no real opinion on gender roles/relations/etc. GP seems to be adding a bunch of that; I’ve no opinion on whether or not the text (game) supports that take, but seems a bit orthogonal to the Mary Sue concept.

There are certainly examples of men embodying the Mary Sue trope. I'm highlighting the recent trend of women in the role.

There's a really good story reason why she's Special and the Only Possible Savior. Much better than "Darth Vader was your daddy" or "you're the Boy Who Lived because your mom loved you a bunch and... that's it, that's all" at least.

[EDIT] As for those complaining about her personality, the sequel actually kinda explores that in some... interesting ways.

> Much better than "Darth Vader was your daddy"

That particular twist might seem contrived, especially by today's standards, but Luke had a story arc. He didn't appear in the world as a perfect being. He made many mistakes and earned his redemption and victory.

Similarly, Harry Potter had a story arc. He began completely unskilled and naive. He made many mistakes on his journey to competence.

Both of these examples are the antithesis of the Mary Sue trope. It sounds like you're confirming that Aloy was born a Mary Sue, and didn't have to earn the mantle like any good story arc demands.

Do you think you would feel the same about Aloy if she were presented as a male character?

As the protagonist of the story she’s privy to information and intelligence far beyond the knowledge of much of the rest of the cast. She’s treated as a literal outsider for much of the early story and is often held back from completing vital goals by archaic and arbitrary belief systems throughout both games.

The character is arguably too nice and accommodating to those blocking progress, given the situation, yet your complaint is fairly common.

Absolutely yes. Maybe there are male game characters like that, but I clearly don't remember them. Do you have any examples?

You can be snarky by the way. She is not snarky. She's just superior to the "dumb plebs" and whiny at the same time.

I can't currently think of stupid annoying completely superior male protagonists, but they are quite common in certain types of anime. If the comments on streaming platforms are any indication on their popularity, for the most part, unless the story is extreme parody, they are usually universally disliked.

I don’t really agree with your interpretation of the character, I would argue she’s more understandably frustrated and desperate given the context of the story than whiny. To me that makes her a more realistic and well-rounded character. She’s certainly nothing close to an anime cliche even at the characters more stubborn or impulsive moments.

Edward Kenway (Assassins Creed: Black Flag) is a similar character that comes to mind, though I concede it is difficult to think of many open world video-game characters that deviate from blank-slate people pleasers.

I did the same. Aloy is supposed to be the chosen hero who destroys massive killing machines with just a stick, but instead she’s stuck dealing with a petty bureaucrat who refuses to open a gate.

PS: I tried shooting the dude, to see if that works. He’s bulletproof because railroads and scripted events

Horizon: Forbidden West is an amazing technical achievement, I just wish I had found it more enjoyable, instead it was "fine". Elden Ring coming out 2 weeks later kinda made me forget all about it - it gave me a feeling I haven't felt playing games in decades that I had been really missing.

> The studio develops their own game engine Decima

Death Stranding (Hideo Kojima's latest game) also uses Decima and is a nice showcase as well, runs like a dream on even the Steam Deck.

Curiously, Death Stranding's PC port is much better optimized than Horizon: Zero Dawn's port.

Death Stranding on the PS4 is the last time I remember being truly immersed in the world the game is presenting - in a non-Nintendo game.

The first time you go out of the city, the world just opens up to you and the soundtrack just gets more and more calming and you're left with Sam, the cargo and the target. It's just... wonderful.

Of course, the same exact thing happened this morning in the first few minutes of Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo seems to get this right way more often than everyone else.

I felt the same. I came late to Zero Dawn playing it 5 years after it came out. My first Zelda was the original Zelda (I was 7 when it came out) and Zero Dawn is the closest I ever came to that same feeling as an adult. I don't know the siblings comments are on about—I usually don't really care about the story, though I found myself super curious to find out what was going on the whole time and worried less about what kind of person Aloy was.

I've heard the Steam Deck emulates Switch games like Zelda BOTW much better than the Switch. And it's not much more expensive either.

I own a Switch, but I'm still debating whether I play BoTW on Deck or Switch. Either way I'll probably buy it on Switch because developers should be rewarded for making good games, but it's handy for me to have all of my games in one place. Plus the Deck is a much more comfortable for me to hold - more ergonomic, better fit for larger hands.

> but I'm still debating whether I play BoTW on Deck or Switch.

Debating what ? Are you pulling the "IP owners don't make their products available on my platform so I am forced to pirate it" netflix card when you own the device the game is supposed to be played on ?

If you read my comment, I said I'd pay for it either way. At that point while I might be technically pirating, I don't think I am ethically.

No, you wrote (emphasis mine):

> Either way I'll probably buy it [..]

If you don't for sure buy it then there is no debating playing it on deck unless what you are debating is playing the game or not.

He’s not debating on whether to pay for the game, he’s debating on where he’ll get the best experience with it.

It just happens to be that one of those options requires pirating game instead of paying for it.

Yeah, probably.

You're also not paying for their hardware. Like Apple, since they own both sides of the equation, the hardware is part of their pricing model.

Unless you also own a switch, in which case disregard!

I do in fact own a Switch (as I wrote above).

I would have thought that the console doesn't have much effect on the financial model though. The margin on the console has to be fairly low, and they sell many games for each console sale. I've always assumed that the vast majority of their profit was from the game sales.

Sorry, missed that part :(

TBH I don't know. Apple is obviously a hardware company that happens to make software.

As you say, Nintendo does sell software as you say. But there's plenty of people out there who buy the devices for a couple of games. The people that always just want whatever the latest Mario Kart or Smash Bros is, or whatever.

That's why I've figured they view themselves as a bit of a hybrid. If they viewed themselves as a software company I'd think they would be less fanatical about having their own hardware.

Do you act with the same rampant indignation at people who rip their dvd/blu rays to a home NAS so they can watch them without having to faff about looking for the disc?

Maybe read the whole comment first before reacting in future?

> Maybe read the whole comment first before reacting in future?

You mean that part ? Where it says "probably" ? Yeah, I read it. It says "probably".

> Either way I'll probably buy it on Switch because developers should be rewarded for making good games, but it's handy for me to have all of my games in one place.

> Do you act with the same rampant indignation at people who rip their dvd/blu rays to a home NAS so they can watch them without having to faff about looking for the disc?

Only those who claim they probably have the dvd/blu rays somewhere or are planning to "probably" buy them while claiming they'll watch the rip on their home NAS because it's much more convenient.

It's a no-brainer for me. The headache of setting up emulation of consoles more modern than about N64 era makes it way less appealing right from the start, plus the Switch is way lighter, and all the native hardware features just work better when you aren't going through a few levels of translation (Steam's controller mapping is great, but gyro working seamlessly is hard to beat, and amiibo support is a hassle to replicate). The Switch is a bit less comfortable to hold on its own, but there are lots of grips that fix that problem (I'm a fan of the Skull & Co one).

I've found emudeck on the Steam Deck to be surprisingly easy (I have a low tolerance for that sort of tinkering in my spare time). Downloading the right ROMs has been a little more painful (and slow), but once you've got them it's generally been just SCPing them onto the deck and then pressing the button to generate the menu entries.

Admittedly though, I don't care about amiibos or motion controls (I always turn them off when using my Switch).

Thank you for being part of normalizing consumer freedom while being responsible enough to support the people who worked on the thing.

Part of what makes the discussion of emulators or alternative means of playing games so difficult, is that the loudest voices are those who make it clear that they have no intention of actually buying the product to begin with.

It makes it hard for any conversation around the publisher’s pushback to “protect their IP” to move beyond their need to protect their income stream, and into the legitimate reasons a consumer would want to have more control over how they play the publisher’s game.

Can I play the Steam Deck handheld (with controllers attached), on kickstand with controllers detracted and split, docked with controllers in a dock to make a single controller, and docked with controller split and turned sideways for two player?

Sort of, yes - at least, the linux kernel has built in support for Nintendo controller connections over bluetooth, and there are some userspace drivers (or dkms, or maybe they've been merged into mainline now, `joycond` iirc) for support for split/merged/2p joycons. There's the Steam Dock peripheral for playing it docked to a TV just like the switch. The only thing missing is the ability to stow the joycons into the body of the deck (it has a built in controller so you don't need the joycons to play handheld), and you'd have to get a case for the deck with a kickstand as there isn't one built in. I've been using a Switch Pro controller to play TotK via Yuzu and it works perfectly, gyro included.

Steam Deck supports external gamepads. There's a dock too. It even supports switch joycons though you can't split them.

Obviously you can't attach controllers directly to the deck, but it does support a ton of controllers including the Switch ones. With motion control etc.

To offer a counterpoint - the Deck is heavy. For a system that is meant to be chiefly used as a handheld, the thing borders on being as heavy as your average laptop, which gets quite tiring on your arms after a while.

The Switch' fit is a lot lighter by comparison, which is quite nice.

Problem with emulators is that at some point they will fail you, and you will lose some saves.

Wrong.

I've used every emulator except the switch emu, and not only do you not randomly lose saves, you can duplicate, move them, etc.

I've used emulators on laptops, desktops, phones, etc.

And I have even transferred saves between them and never had an issue.

I have- right now, saves over 20+ years old.

Wrong.

I've used every emulator including the switch emu, and not only do you randomly lose saves, you can lose duplicates.

I've used emulators on laptops, desktops, phones, etc.

And I have even transferred saves between them and see files being corrupted.

I have- right now, saves over 20+ years old (tales of fantasia in japanese).

I just lost 10 hours of gameplay from Seiken Densetsu 2 on Emu Deck last month.

Wrong.

Sounds like you have a hard drive issue bud.

This is not correct, but there are many people making this claim. Yuzu is arguably the most popular emulator, and only around 20% of games work well out of the box (https://yuzu-emu.org/game/). A further 30% require tweaks, or operate sub-optimally. The remaining 50% either don't run at all or offer a terrible experience. The thing to remember is that even if you pick one of the games in the "perfect" category, it's still not perfect. For example, you often have to content with hours and hours of "shader" loading. This means choppy and and strange graphical glitches. Further, drivers for various systems are not perfect, and sometimes certain features utilising, for example, the gyroscope, don't work correctly.

There is a VERY vocal minority of Linux gamers who have VERY rose coloured glasses on for anything Linux. I expect some of them to respond to this comment with some variation of "well I have never had any problems with Yuzu. It's the most amazing thing I've ever used in my whole life!!!"

20% of switch-exclusive games or 20% of complete switch library? I suspect cross-platform releases aren't in high priority.

Unfortunately it's even worse if we focus on exclusive. These are the top selling Switch games: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Nintendo_...). Of the top 10, not a single one is in "Perfect" condition.

Mario Kart: "Okay"

Animal Crossing: "Great"

Super Smash Bros: "Okay"

Breath of the Wild: "Great"

Pokemon Sword and Shield: "Okay"

Super Mario Odyssey: "Great"

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet: No support

Super Mario Part: "Okay"

Super Mario Bros U: "Okay"

Ring Fit Adventure: No support

The Deck is impressive and wonderful, but it's not exactly a high end gaming device. Emulating ARM code efficiently requires a significant amount of CPU power and my experience is that the Deck doesn't quite have the CPU capacity to keep up with heavier emulated titles.

I expect the new Logitech handheld (or the many other, even more expensive competitors) to perform much better in this regard.

In a perfect world, emulators such as Skyline would be developed further. As the Switch is just a five year old mid tier Android tablet with a controller attached, I can only imagine the experience if you were to use the KVM capabilities of the upcoming Android 14 to run Switch software at near native performance on modern devices. Just buy one of those controller grips for phone and tablets and you're off!

iPhones/iPads would do even better, but I doubt Apple is going to let you use the necessary APIs to virtualize like that.

It's a shame Skyline has been killed off. With terrible games like that Pokémon game needing much more CPU power than the Switch can provide, I imagine even legitimate players would be interested in a way to play their switch games on modern hardware.

You're right (and interesting, I didn't know that about Android 14) but fwiw, Yuzu performance is vastly improved on the deck by installing the power tools (iirc) plugin via Decky, and disabling SMT. There's a bug in the OS which is due to be patched in the next major version which should prevent SMT from tanking Yuzu and various other games.

What are you talking about long load times on a PS5? Isn't it supposed to revolutionize gaming by dropping load times altogether because of it's ridiculously ( for a consoles anyways ) fast SSDs? That's what I have heard anyways, don't have PS5 myself.

It’s a lot faster than the PS4 but it’s still slow in comparison with Switch games. It’s understandable given the difference in file size/game “quality” but I don’t want to wait more than a few seconds.

IME, it depends on the game. Mario Kart 8 and Mario Odyssey load really quickly, for example. All the Lego games seem to take forever to load tho, it's quite frustrating!

It is. I don't know what OP is on about, but load-times on the PS5 are practically non-existent for me. Played the latest Horizon game, and on loading screens I can't even read the first few words of the game-tip. It's never longer than a second, if it's not instant.

Same for me, load times on PS5 are actually pretty impressive. I can't remember being bothered by load times since I have it.

In comparison I recently started my Switch again to play Dead Cells and load times really break the die & retry experience.

So yeah, praising the Switch performance over PS5 is... weird? Possibly dishonest?

That's what I was thinking. Recently got myself a PS4 because they are really affordable now and god damn those loading times are obscene. About an hour to install new game on first disc load - didn't even connect to internet to skip downloading 10s of GB of updates.

Pro-tip: install an SSD in the PS4. I put a 2TB one in my OG one and everything runs way better despite the connection being just SATA2.

Seconding. I put a 1 TB in mine up from an HDD. It's also softmodded and has PS1 and PS2 title I injects in it. Having sleep mode and resume for my favorite PS1 and PS2 games has been great.

I'm guessing they mean wake from sleep time? Since in my experience that is unparalleled. By the time my xbox has even registered the on button press I could already be playing a game on switch. The steam deck is also pretty good in this regard, but not quite as fast.

Furthermore, the switch rarely if ever forces you to update a game or the OS before play. So if you have 5 minutes spare, you can be sure you can get some play time in. This cannot be said for almost every other console AFAIK

One of the primary reasons I bought Steam Deck was because it can suspend and resume a game mid-action. Ever since life kicked in low gear after 30s I can't really find time anymore to sit at TV and power on/load game anymore as it feels like a chore. What I figured is that I will just play in short bursts whenever I have free time, which means suspending game in a must feature. So far I haven't seen deck updating a game while I am playing it, but there was such event when I launched a game after it was doing updates and it got stuck on loading screen ( mad I/O on sdcard ). Had to pause update explicitly.

Yes that's exactly why I got a steam deck too. I wanted something with a similar time-to-play as the switch. It's been excellent so far. I've had some minor issues when waking, but otherwise no problems.

Since getting it in the sale 2 months ago, I haven't turned on my xbox or my switch. It fills a neat gap. But now Zelda is out, I think the steamdeck will be having a rest for a while.

Any recommendations for games that you've enjoyed on the steam deck? I've been enjoying Opus Magnum recently. The controls were initially a bit fiddly (since it's drag and drop with the trackpad) but it's an excellent puzzle game. Refactoring your machines to optimise production rate really scratches an itch in my programmer's brain :)

Xbox Series X has that feature, you can even suspend multiple games at once

I've seen some longer load times on PS5, but mostly with PS4 games. Not sure why.

It is a super cool piece of kit. I haven't had a console since the PS2, the switch won me over with it's form factor versatility and of course the game library.

I owned a PS4, then PS4 Pro, then PS5 and a laptop capable to play games. And couldn't agree more with you.

Make sure to get also Super Mario Odyssey. This game is just such a joy. It feels like a trip to a funfair every time.

And sure, Mario Kart 8 for some multiplayer fun.

6 years in, and the Switch is still the most used console in my family with 3 kids.

3 kids you say?

Boomerang Fu. You are welcome.

It's a silly, simple, utterly un-put-downable game in our house.

Boomerang Fu occasionally goes on sale for $2 on the eShop. Even at full price it's one of the better cost/fun ratios of any game I've played with the kids.

This works equally well on a PC with controllers/ gamepad, as attested by another family with 3 kids.

This game is just perfect.

Agreed on the Boomerang Fu recommendation! "Good Job" is also a fantastic buy for 1-2 players. Just a hilarious game

Indeed. Stick Fight and Rubber Bandits are similarly fun and addictive

> and the loading speed is a breath of fresh air.

I don't know what games you're playing but my experience pretty much across the board with the switch is "frustratingly long" loading times. Metroid dread is one of the more recent games I played and the loading screens are painful. Especially compared to a PS5. Check out something like Spiderman for how good it can be.

> And tbh, I didn’t see a lot of difference in terms of graphics.

Then you're not the target audience. Look at TOTK beside Ratchet and Clank on PS5. The difference is night and day.

On the graphics point I meant from PS4 > PS5. Switch is obviously much less powerful graphically but it has zero impact on my enjoyment of the games.

Its a very different thing to say there's no difference, and that the difference doesn't impact your enjoyment of the games. I've been playing TOTK this weekend, and the graphic quality does affect my enjoyment. There are performance issues, super low res graphics, awful aliasing and shadows, and super low detail textures. It doesn't ruin the game, but this is stuff that definitely deserves to be talked about.

Switch load times are indeed long, especially after living with a PS5. In fact they frustrated me when I originally played through BoTW on release.

Coming back to this, I've been playing TOTK this weekend on my switch. The loading times on death, or entering/exiting shrines are pretty close to a minute. I'm currently playing jedi survivor on PS5 and the load times are closer to 10 seconds. It's night and day.

If you don’t have a 4K TV then you wouldn’t notice for dons games since both consoles would run at 1080

> Huge game downloads, huge update downloads

I have uncapped gigabit internet. (Like many of us, I WFH, and want the most "internet" I can get.) I recall redownloading a game I wanted to play recently. It was 40GB. I thought I would go get a coffee while I waited. It was done before I rounded up and got my shoes on. I don't think the game and update sizes really matter to most of the target demographic of a current-gen console any more. But, hey, I could be extrapolating my experience in a terribly shortsighted way.

Unfortunately having uncapped gigabit Internet isn’t an option for most people. I would gladly pay for that if I could. But I’m stuck with Comcast. I’ve lived in 4 different cities in the last decade and I’ve always been stuck with Comcast. You should absolutely not assume that massive downloads don’t matter to most people.

It may not be available in your area but even being stuck with Comcast it might be available.

With Comcast I pay $100/mo for gigabit and $20/mo for unlimited usage.

This is precisely what I'm doing.

I have comcast and I have uncapped 10G internet. I'm sorry you don't and I don't love comcast as a company and years ago comcast was definitely synonymous with poor network quality and certainly they still are in some locations, but, it's hardly universal anymore.

I'm a huge gamer across a few platforms and I wish this was consistent across all platforms, launchers, and companies. I have a fast inner city fiber connection as well and a Sea of Thieves download from Gamepass recently took multiple hours. I've had some patches for PS5 games take 30-45 minutes for a couple gigs. Many companies are hosting their stuff on fast scalable infra but some are still cheaping out.

Back in the PS4 era when I had FIOS gigabit it was incredibly frustrating to have that internet speed with a console which would download things at 10-15Mbit. There were some tweaks which would double it plus or minus a bit, but, it was fundamentally incapable of using anything close to line rate.

PS5 is incredibly faster. Sony is using Akamai CDN now (they didn't when I checked in the PS4 era) and I consistently max out the PS5s gigabit port (I have 10G symmetric at home).

The Switch is an excellent piece of hardware. Nintendo knocked it out of the park so far it's only just starting to see competition at the end of it's lifecycle.

I've had a switch for years and I agree I do love playing it, but, there are some really great games in the playstation ecosystem. It's definitively a less casual environment but I personally would not give up on playing games like The Last of Us and Horizon and the new God of War games. Really incredible gameplay with incredible story as well.

I really want to get a Switch but I can’t seem to justify paying full price for hardware that is evidently several years out of date. Released 6 years ago and still $300.

I was so used to older consoles being bundled with games after a couple years after being released

When I first got a PS4 it was bundled with GTAV and Last of Us. Pretty incredible deal.

>> I really want to get a Switch but I can’t seem to justify paying full price for hardware that is evidently several years out of date.

I thought similar but at the end of the day does it matter? Games work well on it. Sure they might be making bigger profit margins on it but it still does what it’s meant to at a good level.

Honestly, while I have a running boycott of consoles on moral grounds (Steam Deck notwithstanding), I feel like the Switch and PS4 are the best systems in quite a while, both for the variety of independent/AA games in all genres on them, and the retro arcade game ports M2 and Hamster are churning out at a steady and ever increasing pace.

I was listening to a gaming podcast last week and they were talking about how this release was pirated and available for the last week or so on torrents. That in itself wasn't surprising, but the interesting point they talked about is that the game is much more enjoyable when played on PC with an emulated copy because modern gaming PC hardware is much smoother and higher resolution than the stock Switch.

It really makes me think Nintendo has an untapped market here to sell a little box you plug into your PC that plays switch games, interfaces with their controllers, etc. They've done oddball stuff like the SNES Gameboy player and GameCube GBA player add-ons in the past. It feels like there would be people willing to pay to properly play Switch games on their gaming PCs.

Nintendo are way too control-freak for this, not to mention fearful of piracy and emulation. They don't want that money.

Like it or not apparently Switch piracy is a thing so this doesn't really change much for their current situation. But it does give people who want to do things the right way an avenue to do so.

I kind of think of it like high end CAD software and such that ships a physical dongle in order to use the software--Nintendo can sell hardware to help ensure it's legitimate use of their emulation software.

Yes exactly, this idea that piracy is lost sales has always been rubbish. The people who go out of their way to pirate always will.

Does it work on an M1 Max yet?

> Yes exactly, this idea that piracy is lost sales has always been rubbish

That's beside the point. What matters is that Nintendo believes that piracy must be opposed at all costs. It's not about sales, it's not about money, it's not about logic, I don't think it's even about the actual law. It's about attacking piracy, as an end unto itself.

Businesses don't attack piracy because of law but because of losses.

Besides,as another post mentions, Switch piracy is probably very limited. So it doesn't cost much to Nintendo to maintain pressure on piracy.

And after all, even if they don't do it for the law, they can do it thanks to the law. It's their right (and I'm a free software zealot :-)).

> Businesses don't attack piracy because of law but because of losses.

> Besides,as another post mentions, Switch piracy is probably very limited.

Switch piracy is very limited, but they pursue it aggressively because of the losses it causes them? Besides, that's already bunk; every time someone actually puts together a study it turns out that piracy is good for sales.

> And after all, even if they don't do it for the law, they can do it thanks to the law. It's their right

Well no; when I say that I don't think it's even about the law, I meant that their idea of what is and isn't okay seems to be more aggressive than the actual law. Contrast:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190329045404/https://www.ninte...

> Are Game Copying Devices Illegal?

> Yes. Game copiers enable users to illegally copy video game software onto floppy disks, writeable compact disks or the hard drive of a personal computer. They enable the user to make, play and distribute illegal copies of video game software which violates Nintendo's copyrights and trademarks. These devices also allow for the uploading and downloading of ROMs to and from the Internet. Based upon the functions of these devices, they are illegal.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230428020356/https://www.copyr...

> 117. Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs55

> (a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.— Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:

[...]

> (2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.

Now I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but I struggle to read that as anything but Nintendo very confidently refusing to consider that a person could copy a game for any reason other than illegal piracy, while the actual law appears to allow for backups. Further up the same page they likewise are overwhelmingly confident that emulators only exist for illegal purposes, because nobody could ever want to play a legitimately-purchased game on anything except for original hardware.

> Switch piracy is very limited, but they pursue it aggressively because of the losses it causes them? Besides, that's already bunk; every time someone actually puts together a study it turns out that piracy is good for sales.

They don't lose much because some difficulty is maintained by them pursuing it aggressively.

Once piracy become as easy or easier as buying the games, yes it becomes a problem for them.

The same way Napster became a problem at some point for the music industry. Before Napster, getting music for free was about copy cds or cassette tapes from friends or library, a rather slow and limited process, or wait for the tunes to pass in the radio and hit the record button quickly to record it in a cassette at a lower quality than CD. And you didn't have the full deal (with cover and lyrics and stuffs that mattered at the time). When it became easier to just look for music in Napster's builtin search engine and start playing it even before the tune was downloaded completely it became a huge problem as it was a much seamless process than both the original illegal and the legal way which involved either to go to a store and hope the right disc was available or go to one of the very few music online music shop available at the time, enter your credit card details (something very few people were still comfortable with) and wait for the disc to be delivered. I think there were already a few digital marketplace available but you usually had to wait for the full download to be completed, the UI wasn't as easy and you couldn't just browse another user shared library to discover new stuff and get suggestions.

this doesn't make sense. take it to it's logical conclusion and say there's a site that allows anyone to pirate with minimal friction with one click. Still think piracy isn't lost sales?

> say there's a site that allows anyone to pirate with minimal friction with one click. Still think piracy isn't lost sales?

Say that this site is user-funded and actually buys a copy for every click. Still think piracy is lost sales?

“What if reality were different in a way that I’ve concocted specifically for the purposes of this discussion?” is a fun game!

Sure piracy isn't necessarily a lost sale, but would there be more sales if people could not pirate the game, as with say a ps5 game? Especially in the case of rather widespread piracy in the weeks preceding release where even normal platform users may pirate because it's the only way to play. To what degree I couldn't tell you, it's most certainly not a 1 to 1 like the companies would like to argue, but there's almost certainly at least some amount of loss.

That’s not how Nintendo would view it though. The GP is absolutely correct that this would be seen as inviting people to leave Nintendos ecosystem. The only way this would work for Nintendo Would be if the “dongle” cost as much as a Switch, but then who’d want to pay that much for an emulator?

It’s also worth noting that Nintendo don’t have an issue with emulation per se, several of their commercial products are based on emulation. But I’m every instance where they support emulation it has been looked into their hardware ecosystem and the “emulation” word is never spoken publicly.

It changes the situation deeply. Switch piracy is not easy. You need to get an emulator, get a key dump for a Switch, torrent the game, setup everything. For a console you need physical modification or some tinkering shorting pins if you have a first gen console.

That’s a high bar to cross for Nintendo main market which remains families. Plus at this point the Switch is mostly a money printing machine between the old hardware and the store.

If you’re pirating you would probably also pirate the keys and you wouldn’t need to do the console exploit (as far as I understand it anyway)

That’s not at all equivalent to just plugging a box sold by Nintendo however which was the point I was making. Pirating is an involved process. The fact it exists doesn’t at all make a business case as the parent comment was implying especially considering that PC gaming is already a niche market.

It is really not that much of an involved process. Reading a wiki page and downloading a few files from the first hit of a Google result is probably similar effort to setting up whatever potential product you have in mind.

You can never stop motivated people from dumping the memory of hardware they own and making it easier for everyone else.

Piracy can never be stopped and they waste a lot of effort trying.

They should optimize for being lower friction than privacy, like Steam.

They are successfully competing with piracy, but not by being lower friction but by being more reliable and trustworthy.

Nintendo are highly focussed on a market where the person making the buying decision isn't the person playing the game.

Buy your 11-year-old son a Switch for Xmas and you know that a) it will work out of the box b) there will be a several family-friendly games with name recognition for any child that age (Mario, Pokemon, Zelda) and c) no one in his class will have a more expensive version or one that works better.

Contrast this with trying to get something to work on a PC with a 'switch emulator dongle'. You have to plug it in yourself, you will end up spending more than you planned in the computer store because each component comes with sucker upgrades, and game choices will be much wider and trickier. Then the game which looks great on your son's friend's machine will play like sh*t and you'll feel guilty for having cheaped out, without necessarily knowing what the operative constraint is.

It would be pointless: piracy already happens so dongle stops nothing ,and dongle costs extra.

Just make PC ports like everyone else, it's free money (compared to risk of making new game) at this point

The dongles for high end CAD software don't work either. Iranian, Russian, and Chinese pirates are very very good at cracking them (and some even provide support contracts and bugfixes). It's an interesting side effect of sanctions. If you get a proxy in Iran, you can find cracks and even cracked updates and custom bugfixes of basically any CAD software you want.

Also Nintendo's whole philosophy is all about doing more with less. They make money on every device by not putting out overly engineered / performant systems. So they have always been lagging in terms of cutting edge hardware, but they make up for it by focusing on joyful content.

I would argue Nintendo has their priorities straight.

Joe Schmoe doesn't know and doesn't care about hardware. Ohled? Gigglehearts? Flame rates? WTF are you talking about, he'll say to you.

What Joe Schmoe does know and does care about is whether the game he's playing is fun. This is where Nintendo focuses their energy.

Joe Schmoe and me both

There is a reason why Hollywood doesn't put technical people in charge of it's films.

A successful film director needs to prove their ability to deliver powerful experiences on next-to- no budget at all before anyone puts them in charge of a $150 million dollar blockbuster.

I wouldn't say that's always been the case. Both the N64 and Gamecube featured relatively cutting edge tech during their time. Of course, those two are their weakest selling home consoles, so they've definitely shifted their strategy afterwards.

But for two generations, they did try and keep up with their contemporaries.

> those two are their weakest selling home consoles

Wii U would like a word.

Oh wow I just checked wikipedia, and I knew it did poorly, but did not know the Switch has outsold it by 10x (!!)

What a turnaround!

(My Wii U is collecting dust, though I did enjoy it)

Heads up, there was an issue a couple of months back of Wii U NANDs corrupting after being unused for a few years. Might be worth turning it on and off

It was phenomenally bad marketing, at least how I recall it.

As a huge Nintendo fan who loved his GameCube and Wii and didn't really care that it was just my 'nintendo machine', because I had an Xbox and a pc alongside it.

Somehow I completely missed the WiiU and always assumed it was a peripheral for console that I was already a bit meh about. it fit right in with their other 'accessories' that I never cared about.

Eventually I bought one with a whole bunch of games second-hand...

Switch has sold 120 million units, it has to date outsold the ps5 and then lapped it 3 more times. Oddly, BOTW has only sold 30 million copies.

Like, what did the other 90 million people buy a Switch for? There's nothing else on the console that's worth the trouble, at least up until a few hours ago.

Super Mario Odyssey? Super Mario Maker 2? Super Mario 3D World? Super Mario Party? Smash Bros? Super Mario Kart? (You know there’s this huge Mario movie that made a billion…) Bayonetta? Metroid Dread? Metroid Prime?

Nintendo kills it with first party exclusives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Nintendo_...

My sister in law got a switch just to play animal crossing. There are several other titles out there that people will buy the switch just to play that one title. And the switch (especially the switch lite) is cheap enough for people to do it.

They made some stupid decisions back then. N64 was cartridge based and didn't play CDs like its competitors.

The PS2 was the cheapest DVD player that also could play games, but GC could not play DVDs - its games were released on weird mini-DVDs that could store only ~1.4 GB.

What you call 'control freak' is just the culture of a company focussed on creating a curated experience which is a combination of software, hardware and user experience. Anything not fitting in that vision diminishes that experience and they will do anything to prevent that. Of course, they also like to get paid for their work ;)

> just the culture of a company focussed on creating a curated experience

Core product on core platform struggles to reach playable FPS at launch. A "curated experience" is waaaay different than this.

According to Digital Foundry [0], the game is a perfectly stable 30fps the vast majority of the time

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLlZBwN_-C4

"30fps the vast majority of the time" in 2023 is just laughable.

The standard in 2023 is "broken at launch" and "sub 30 FPS in latest hardware".

It's not in my opinion though. I have a Gaming PC and a Switch. My gaming PC has a 6900XT and so I expect to be playing every game at 1440p @ 60FPS at a bear minimum - some games come out and surprisingly have trouble with that.

The Switch is old hardware that was under-powered on release, therefore, I expect that I'm not going to be getting 60FPS.

Basically, it's down to expectations. The Switch is absolutely great at what it does, and I appreciate it for that reason alone. My expectations are greatly different compared to a gaming PC/PS5/etc.

My biggest gripes with Nintendo is the god awful way they handle people using their IP to make YouTube videos, etc.

But with your pc you can play at 1080p ultra and have 60+ fps, on the switch you can't

> My gaming PC has a 6900XT and so I expect to be playing every game at 1440p @ 60FPS at a bear minimum - some games come out and surprisingly have trouble with that.

You can't even compare an open market in which small teams have to cope with the myriad of possible configurations, ofthen lacking the technical skills for optimizing their software down to the bit with the supposedly top product of a trillion dollar company writing software for their own devices - and failing to make it decent.

Not when you add "on a complete system costing less than $300" to that sentence.

and "from 2017"

Sorry but I think this is exaggerated. For Zelda BotW there was sometimes a low framerate when playing on second screen with 1080p in a very limited amount of regular game situations - and it was still okay.

I really think Nintendo's games are a curated experience compared to everything else I know and have played with maybe very very few exceptions.

Yo have clearly never played the latest pokemon on the switch. Frame drops and overall poor performance all over the world

More like old people stuck in their ways

> It really makes me think Nintendo has an untapped market here to sell a little box you plug into your PC that plays switch games, interfaces with their controllers, etc. They've done oddball stuff like the SNES Gameboy player and GameCube GBA player add-ons in the past, it feels like there would be people willing to pay to properly play Switch games on their gaming PCs.

It seems unlikely they would be willing to let go of control like that. With all their oddball stuff, you were still largely within the Nintendo ecosystem. They also probably don't want to deal with the piracy problem on PC, considering they already deal with it on their relatively locked-down consoles.

For better or for worse, Nintendo also likes to really control the experience you get playing games on their platforms; It would probably not be a great look for them to have to deal with thousands of customers that are trying to run their games on hardware older than a Switch and complaining that it's a terrible experience. Yeah the existing hardware is underpowered, but its uniformly underpowered, and that's worth quite a bit too.

I think for Nintendo, the more prudent solution would be to release an updated Switch with some more powerful hardware that's fully backwards compatible with the existing Switch library. It would be very par for the course for them, and assuage most of the complaints about the Switch being underpowered.

People complaining about the Switch being underpowered are expecting PS5 level performance on a mobile device. Even if a new console would be twice as fast they still would be disappointed. It's perfectly possible to create innovative and - most important - fun games on something as powerful as the Switch.

More recently the comparison I've been hearing is against things like the Steam Deck, which are a little more fair.

> It's perfectly possible to create innovative and - most important - fun games on something as powerful as the Switch.

Of course, but there have been plenty of games released for the Switch that could seemingly do with a bit more oomph from the hardware, TotK being the current example.

I've just been playing TotK for a few hours and was so engrossed by all the little details that make the game world feel alive the frame rate didn't bother me at all. It's perfectly fine if you just want to experience the game.

> People complaining about the Switch being underpowered are expecting PS5 level performance on a mobile device.

I mean, the SoC on the switch was long in the tooth at launch. It's almost exactly the same hardware as in the tegra shield that came out two years prior, but Nintendo clocks it down to 1Ghz, about half the speed of the shield.

There's some legitimate complaints that it's a dog slow system because of that. For instance this new Zelda is frame locked to 20fps in some areas apparently.

The Switch combines lower powered A57 (a soc from..2012 on a 20nm process) with a Maxwell GPU (9+ years old at this point)

Honestly this is the time to start working on a Switch successor, they could easily more than double the current compute capabilities while keeping the same or lower power envelope.

That doesn't even counts the untapped bonuses from much higher memory speeds.

I would instantly buy this, we would be looking at mobile machines more powerful than a PS4 Pro which is imho more than enough for the type of console.

Nintendo doesn't even need to build it on the latest state of the art TSMC process, even the 5nm should be enough.

> I would instantly buy this

Why? Will it make the games more fun to play? Does it enable more fun games? I don't see it. Nintendo has always thrived on underpowered hardware.

By your logic, why move past the Wii U or Wii or any console before it?

The machine I descrive is already quite underpowered compared to Nintendo's competition by magnitude of orders.

This limits my enjoyment of Nintendo games and I prefer emulators.

Anyway hardware limits are already apparent and yes some games aren't as enjoyable due to very low stuttering performance.

> By your logic, why move past the Wii U or Wii or any console before it?

They said "underpowered", not "outdated" or "ridiculously weaker"

A lot of games get limited to 30 fps (and even dip lower) on the switch which makes them unplayable for me. I don't care about graphics at all, I'd rather play in some extremely low poly/low texture mode at 60 fps (ideally higher) than at 30 fps.

If they released a new version with a 120hz display that could actually run games at 120hz, I'd be ecstatic. I don't even mind the 720p resolution, it's fine on such a small screen in my opinion.

That's not really an issue for the stakeholders. Zelda is probably the only game that has this problem. Most hits - Mario Kart, Smash, Splatoon - run at 60FPS.

On the other hand, the 5th and 7th best selling Switch games (Pokemon SS and SV) were notorious for being unable to maintain 15fps. A lot of the workarounds made the game legitimately awful looking (downscaling shadows on the fly for demanding scenes, very reduced draw distances, slowing down and synchronizing background animations to slideshow speeds during battle).

It seems like the Switch is unable to have more than a handful of moderately complex animated objects at a time. It's a problem for Pokemon because they wanted to show a lot of different Pokemon doing different things, it's a problem in Breath of the Wild with just too many trees, and it's certainly a problem with all the Dynasty Warrior clones because the whole appeal of those games is hack and slashing through a big hordes of enemies.

To be fair, the last two Pokemon games were atrociously optimized cash grabs.

They look like Gamecube games honestly, and are generally not impressive from a technical standpoint.

I don't necessarily disagree with the overall point, but BotW and Dynasty Warrior clones are probably a better argument over all.

What makes them unplayable that a doubling of framerate would fix?

For most people there is a threshold somewhere around 50 fps that is the distinction between choppy and smooth enough.

Have you played games at 30 and 60 FPS ? I'm not one of those competitive 120+Hz gamers but try setting your desktop refresh rate to 30Hz - you can see mouse trailing and text delay while typing.

30FPS for an interactive experience is really bad. And them saying some regions are locked to 20 FPS - holly shit that's a slideshow.

I used to game on budget PCs when I was a kid, I rarely got to play at 60 FPS, but going down to 30 was just "OK I'm not playing that".

Yes. After like 30 seconds it's barely noticeable unless the animation/physics are tied to the framerate. Some genres benefit from it but I'm not sure Zelda really needs it. Ocarina of Time ran at 20 FPS on N64, not in SOME demanding scenes, everywhere. And it's still a beloved, fantastic game.

I also regularly play games capped at 30 FPS because it greatly increases battery life in the Steam Deck in a lot of titles and not everything really needs it.

The problem with "SOME demanding scenes" is that inconsistent frametimes are much more noticeable and irritating than a lower, but consistent framerate.

BOTW feels bad in certain areas because rapidly switching from 30->20 causes noticeable stuttering. Even once it settles you're likely to be aware of animations and interactions behaving differently.

>Ocarina of Time ran at 20 FPS on N64, not in SOME demanding scenes, everywhere.

And I used to find a lot of old games immersive - but I can't play them nowdays.

Things don't exist in a vacuum and my experience is impacted by what other experiences I've had to compare it to. There's a threshold in graphics/voice acting/etc. that just makes the games I spent weeks on as a kid not interesting at all (even for the sake of nostalgia).

I used to work on 800x600 CRT monitor with 256 colors and today I get a headache when I have to work on a low pixel density cheap LCD.

> Have you played games at 30 and 60 FPS?

Yes, I make games as a hobby and have done both. I agree with the other commenter about fluctuation in framerate being a bad experience. If I make no changes beyond setting fps from 60 to 30, you can tell the difference in smooth scrolling, etc. However, a consistent 30fps can be just fine as an interactive experience with some thought put into it.

I see this kind of comment on Eurogamer all the time and don’t understand it. 60fps is so much better in every case. I can’t think of a single example of a game that isn’t materially improved as an experience by going from 30 to 60. The effect is far more striking than extra graphical effects. This isn’t cinema where 24fps looks “cinematic” - it’s just plain worse.

It’s 2023. No one is asking for 120fps as a mainstream baseline. 60 is such a sweet spot. It’s time for us to admit that 30 was a compromise for a certain console era that was defined by CPU limitation. If we don’t call bullshit, publishers will keep pumping this stuff out. Look at this week’s disastrous Redfall launch. 30fps on a 12tflop, 8-core Series X. Insanity.

A consistent 30FPS experience really isn't that bad in a lot of games. I'd much rather developers push game design with stuff like big open worlds and cool physics stuff like logs from the tree you just cut roll down the hill than a no risks locked 60 FPS static environment. Poor optimization like what is seen in Redfall or Pokemon Scarlet/Violet is an entirely different problem.

And we're talking about a game running on a 6 year old handheld! Not a CPU beast.

Yeah I’ve been playing TotK with my son all afternoon and I think they’ve done a great job with it - it looks and runs much better than BotW. Pretty remarkable technical achievement I reckon, given the well-known limitations of that machine.

But my point was about where we go from here, in 2023. I’d be disappointed if I couldn’t play this - or a remaster of this, or perhaps its sequel - at 60fps on a next-gen Switch successor, whenever that arrives.

I think there's two separate issues. The first which is your main complaint is the poor performance on modern systems of games. Totally agree, it's a combo of laziness, customer acceptance, and schedule/priorities that leads to it. I'm right with you on the frustration.

Tying into that is why I don't do a blanket 60fps in all cases, which is respecting the player's resources. If I was making a tetris clone, where the block falls at a set step every x milliseconds, all I'm doing is wasting their battery with double the frames.

It's not the framerate itself that bothers me, it's when the framerate drops on demanding scenes. I'd rather have a consistent 30fps than a game constantly fluctuating between 30-60. But even a consistent 30fps is kinda a dream for the Switch, there's plenty of titles where it regularly dips down to 10fps with inconsistent frame time.

Plus the other benefit to faster hardware is decreased loading times. The Switch has a lot of very long loading screens (and elaborate animations/cutscenes to mask background loading) and the PS5 with near instant loading very much increases the fun, because more time is spent playing vs waiting on a loading screen.

> Nintendo has always thrived on underpowered hardware.

Correction, Nintendo has more specifically thrived on cheap hardware, which is often correlated with 'underpowered' but does not mean the same necessarily. The Wii's remote wasn't 'underpowered', but it was relatively cheap and added an interesting feature.

> Why? Will it make the games more fun to play? Does it enable more fun games?

These are not the only (though they are important) factors to consider. With a portable platform, battery life, size, weight, heat, all matter much more than with a stationary console. A 2x more powerful Switch with the same power envelope as the original would be able to play games for longer using the same battery due to being more efficient. If you're playing a significantly demanding game, that might mean the difference between only being able to do short sessions on battery, and being able to play for a satisfying amount of time. Or it might mean that you can play it with the screen at a higher brightness, and thus make the game accessible in more environments.

And if the games are have performance issues, having more powerful hardware can make those problems less frequent and more bearable. You can argue that gamedevs need to do a better job, but that doesn't eliminate reality where most people just want to play the game and don't particularly care about the specifics of how to get the best experience.

Nintendo calls it “Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology”[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_...

> The Wii's remote wasn't 'underpowered', but it was relatively cheap and added an interesting feature.

I'm not sure why you mention the controller or how to measure its power, but the console itself was definitely underpowered compared to PS3 or X360. Heck, it was comparable to 6th rather than 7th gen.

That's my point exactly - you can't measure it's power, yet that one feature made the Wii sell like hotcakes, and caused both Microsoft and Sony to try making their own versions.

Yes, a game that runs smoothly is more fun to play.

Nintendo has always thrived _despite_ underpowered hardware.

Always is a bit strong isn't it? Prior to the Wii their consoles tended to be similar to their contemporaries in processing power.

I certainly experienced areas in BOTW which took a heavy FPS hit and it sounds like TOTK is similar. Such an FPS drop does take me out of the game so if the console was powerful enough to avoid that then you could argue it would allow more fun games

> Always is a bit strong isn't it? Prior to the Wii their consoles tended to be similar to their contemporaries in processing power.

Yup, you could say Nintendo always thrived on underpowered (compared to competition) hardware.

  NES was twice less powerful than SMS;
  GameBoy didn't even have a color display;
  SNES vs SMD similarity as NES vs SMS;
  GBC was weaker than Neo Geo Pocket or WonderSwan;
  GBA didn't have competition (although, if we count N-Gage...);
  Wii had hardware from previous generation;
  NDS was way worse in raw numbers that PSP;
  3DS analogically with PS Vita;
  Switch isn't even comparable to PS4/X1, let alone PS5/XSX;

What all of those Nintendo consoles have in common? Being their the most successful.

Whereas when Nintendo focused more on being on par in hardware power during 5th gen. (N64) and 6th gen. (GameCube), they didn't sold nearly as much as other generations.

The exception to the pattern are Virtual Boy and Wii U. The former was poorly designed then sacrificed as "filler"; the later flopped due to bad marketing (and naming) + poor decision on betting on "casuals".

In conclusion: as we can see, there is a clear trend, not a rule, but a trend nevertheless.

The SNES wasn't at all underpowered compared to the SEGA Mega Drive. In fact, it was better in many ways.

Indeed, it had way less computational power, but other aspects were better. I should have worded it more clearly.

While their older consoles weren't as far away from modern stuff as the Switch, Nintendo wasn't often the more powerful console. Well-designed with good developer buy-in and incredibly strong first party titles, but not really pushing the envelope in terms of raw performance.

The GameCube was the weakest hardware-wise between the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and ~~Dreamcast~~ edit: guess not the Dreamcast, but definitely behind Xbox and PS2. ~~The Nintendo 64 was weaker than the PlayStation or Sega Saturn~~ edit: was wrong here, N64 was definitely the stronger console of this generation.The Super Nintendo had less computing capacity than the Mega Drive/Genesis.

Even when it came to handhelds, the GameBoy was often much weaker hardware. Compare the GameBoy to the Lynx on a spec sheet and it's clear which is better. Actually hold and play both of them and you can see why Atari doesn't exist anymore. The Game Gear was practically the current gen home console in a handheld form and could even get a TV tuner attachment before the GameBoy Color was even announced. Later, the Genesis Nomad was a full blown Genesis console in handheld form. Good games, cheaper hardware, better pocketability led to Nintendo dominating that market despite usually having the weakest hardware around.

> The GameCube was the weakest hardware-wise between the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Dreamcast.

It might have been weak, but definitely was comparable (sometimes even stronger) in power to PS2 and definitely not weaker than Dreamcast [0].

> The Nintendo 64 was weaker than the PlayStation or Sega Saturn.

What? No, no, no. PlayStation was definitely weaker. N64 was crippled down by using cartridges instead of CD.

---

Despite the raw power, both N64 and GC were crushed by PS1 and PS2 in sales.

[0]: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~meesh/cmsc411/website/proj01/main/co...

Gamecube was much stronger than the Dreamcast, and generally sat between the PS2 and X-Box in terms of performance.

Yes.

Older consoles could get away with much more. There's a Dynasty Warriors style Zelda game on switch called "Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity"[0]. It struggles with the hardware to the point that the choppiness of the frame rate makes the gameplay thoroughly unenjoyable. Even Breath of the wild is infamously laggy in certain areas.

[0] https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-games/Hyrul...

60fps in action game does make it more fun to play

>Why? Will it make the games more fun to play?

Yes. Movement in an action game feels inherently better at 60fps than at 30fps. Metroid Zero Mission (2004), and Metroid Dread (2021) both feel extremely crisp and precise compared to Metroid: Samus Returns (2017) which runs at 30fps.

The biggest complaint that Bloodborne gets, outside of not being available on PC, is that it's locked to 30 fps.

I can't think of a single reason where a game at 60fps would be more fun at 30fps.

I'm confused because the last sentence seems to directly contradict the rest of the post.

Mind clarifying?

Might've worded it poorly. Just meant that a game running at 60fps is always better than that same game running at 30fps. In the worst case scenario, they're the same game.

Not always better. A 30 fps game that you can play twice or three times as long before having to recharge the battery may be better.

Depends, some might be willing to make that trade. I think most consoles are making that option of performance or visuals these days. As an option, letting the user choose seems to be more the norm these days.

If i'm playing plugged in I would want better visuals (as the switch allows with the dock) the primary reason being more power available.

> Why? Will it make the games more fun to play?

I played Zelda: Breath of the wild through on switch. It was one of the launch titles, and it was fantastic. The slow loading times were the #1 complaint I had about the game. They really broke the immersive experience. Whenever I died, teleported between zones or entered & left shrines the loading time was long enough that I fell briefly out of the zone while playing.

I assume loading times haven't gotten any better for Tears of the kingdom, given the hardware hasn't changed. I'd probably buy the new zelda game instantly but when I think back to breath of the wild, my strongest visual memory is that black and red loading screen.

IIRC load times were improved in a later update (although that update came too late, imo)

Something to note is Nintendo makes profits on their hardware where as the other two (Microsoft & Sony) typically take a loss on their hardware, until about midway point of the console's life.

I believe the other two make up the loss on the hardware with licensing rights on the software side of things.

https://www.gamesradar.com/unlike-playstation-and-nintendo-x...

I liked playing their AAA ports like the witcher 3 on the go. A more powerfull console would make such ports easier, so I would hope to see more of them.

It rather have a switch than can play nintendo games plus some AAA games, than a steamdeck or something like it.

i would rather have a larger catalog of games that are like the 2d metroid game or the remake of links awakening. games that remind me of playing my gameboy but without the limitations of the gameboy hardware nor the limitations of user interface and game design from that time.

This isn't a matter of "rather" - nothing is stopping developers from making those very same games on a more powerful system.

yeah of course it's not either or, but if i had to choose, i would prefer a larger catalog of those kinds of games. but also i find the nintendo store to be confusing. i basically find games elsewhere then search for them there. none of the recommendations are very useful. so maybe that catalog is there i just dont find it.

>Honestly this is the time to start working on a Switch successor, they could easily more than double the current compute capabilities while keeping the same or lower power envelope.

They've been working on successor for 4+ years now. That's how long new console cycles are now. PS5 dev cycle stated 2 years after PS4 released.

I mean, that might be gaming industry standard, but they should be able to do better than that given that the Switch is essentially just a fairly standard ARM SoC-based tablet, with some joycons attached. Phone and tablet manufacturers are constantly pushing new skews.

The games are what sells, not the hardware.

People who bought a Switch many years ago are still willing to buy new games. They may not all be willing to replace it so soon however if Nintendo release pretty much the same but with better resolution and framerate and the release of a new one would probably mean the stop of new release on the current gen.

All they have to do to keep me and my kids as customers through the next gen is commit to back compat with our Switch library and build something that can run their big-budget first party titles like Zelda at 720p60 handheld / 1080p60 docked. So sort of 2.5x what we’ve got now. Spend the rest of the TDP budget on pushing out the battery life. Hardware upscaling for bonus points only. Job done.

This is Nintendo though so I expect nothing.

I 100% agree. This is what I was hoping they would maybe surprise-announce just before TotK's release, but my hopes were too high. I'm excited to play it, but $70 for a game with PS3-era visuals at 30fps while everything else has modern visuals at 60-120fps with various techniques is a tragedy.

30fps, lol. Its goes down much below that, sadly.

Yea, they also added a 20fps limiter in certain cases when the hardware is pushed to its limits. Super unfortunate, and honestly, I'd be hard pressed to believe that it helps.

Nonetheless, the game performs loads better than BotW ever did. Quite a feat for such old metal.

There is a big problem with any switch upgrade plan: Current GPU architectures are too different to the original Maxwell GPU arch, so it is impossible for Nintendo to make a better console that is hardware compatible to the switch. The games themselves include low level GPU driver stuff, so they won't run in any other GPU architecture without an emulation layer.

In the past, Nintendo either forgone backwards compatibility completely (Nes->SNes->N64->GC, Wiiu->Switch), or specially built their upgraded consoles to have a low level hardware compatibility mode were it behaves 100% like the old console (Gamecube->Wii, Wii->WiiU, several handlheld upgrades). Today it doesn't make business sense for Nintendo to build a new console without backwards compatibility, and it is impossible technically to build one with low level compatibility. So they are left with the only option of a incompatible console with some partial emulation, which must be a much bigger step that kneecaps the existing switch once announced, so they will take only after the switch starts its decline.

Would it be possible to just put an entire Switch in the Switch 2? (see: PS3)

Is that how the wii u ran wii games? The 3ds also showed the old ds interface to configure ds games. I’m not sure if either one actually just dropped a second soc in there though

> Is that how the wii u ran wii games?

More or less. The Wii U is architecturally very similar to the Wii, just with a higher clockspeed, a couple of extra cores, more RAM and a better GPU; the Wii in turn is just an overclocked overspecced GameCube. It's possible, through a homebrew application, to load and run GameCube games directly on the WiiU.

If you're interested in this kind of thing, I'd highly recommend the architecture of consoles series of blog posts[1][2].

[1]: https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles [2]: https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/wiiu/

That is an option I haven't considered. It would be possible, but a bit pricy. I don't think Nintendo would go this route because they like their hardware cheap, but I don't completely rule out either. Yes, if they go this route, will be much later in the Switch lifetime. They would wait until the Switch sales start showing the end of its life before pulling such a radical upgrade.

no due the the chip they use (more legal complications then anything else)

But also it should not be needed at all. The switch has a older but somewhat "normal/standard" graphics API (and also support actually standard Graphics APIs, especially indi games and similar likely use that one).

My guess is that due to various factors Nintendo decided that it is _financially_ the best decision to extend the Switch lifetime and maybe skip the "follow up console" instead only bringing out the OLED Switch (or change the design of the follow up console).

If you crawl back up to the top level of this thread, it's someone pointing out that emulating it on PC is a lot nicer. Nintendo only needs enough emulation to match the Switch 1's performance on their new hardware; anything they get over its original performance is gravy. Plus they have the option of zipping into the games they really care about and putting in special cases for the most performance-intensive stuff.

The Steam Deck, AIUI, more or less at least matches the Switch 1 in emulation. Haven't done anything with it myself.

I don't think emulation is even remotely impossible, and every year it gets easier for them.

Emulation is a lot nicer when it works, but it doesn't most of the time (most games have glitches, and a significant number don't work at all). It is OK for a third party emulator to not offer a perfect experience, not OK for Nintendo itself. It is impossible (not-viable) for Nintendo to create a perfect Switch emulator that works for all titles, that you can just plug a Switch cartridge on the new console and it will guarantee it will work without glitches, there is just too many corner cases.

To sum up, it is impossible for them to make a hardware compatible console, impossible to make a 100% compatible emulator, so the only option is to market it as a completely new console (not backwards compatible by default), then have a small curated list of backwards compatible titles (either thru their "virtual console", or something like Microsoft did going from the original XBox to the 360, where you could put the original game and it would download a patch for the new console, only compatible with a limited list of games). But this limited backwards-compatibility options would create a big break in the Switch lifetime, so not something to be undertaken while the console is still going strong.

I am sorry but I don't buy this. If switch can be 100% emulated on x86 hardware if given enough computing power (and in fact greatly improved with all that residual power unused), it can be run anywhere fast enough. Ie latest Snapdragon must be more than 10x faster in raw cpu power, not even going into graphics. And once you have your hands directly on hardware you can cut a lot of processing middlemen layers. Heck there could be some 'compatibility' chip just for this, literally nobody cares.

People obviously want this and would pay for this.

Its a really strange company, able to produce amazing software but horrible, terrible outdated hardware (ie joycon durability saga) that they stubbornly consider OK in 2023. Its not so much graphics details themselves, they have chosen graphic style well in this case, but ie overall responsiveness of device, FPS etc. We are talking about very well optimized phone thats 10 years old. More and more not so much up to current standards, ie low PFS puts too much strain on eyes.

How come when I upgrade my graphics card on a PC I don't need to upgrade the binary?

When compiling for Nvidia chips there's only one target. I believe all Nvidia chips despite different architectures use the same underlying assembly language. So a cuda binary should work everywhere.

It's not gpu architecture here. Nvidia makes sure that the API to that architecture remains constant. The differences that are happening are high level architectures. Consoles aren't like PCs that follow the same overall architecture. They are usually massively different each generation, with different central chips different board layouts, etc. Etc. Sony use to get really creative with this... I remember the cell architecture was extremely innovative at the time.

However I believe for the most recent generations of playstation and for all Xboxes those consoles have closely followed the PC architecture. Nintendo consoles have yet to do this though, each console is massively different from the PC and each other with the exception of GameCube and Wii u which were largely similar.

> How come when I upgrade my graphics card on a PC I don't need to upgrade the binary?

> When compiling for Nvidia chips there's only one target. I believe all Nvidia chips despite different architectures use the same underlying assembly language. So a cuda binary should work everywhere.

Because on the PC, Nvidia only exposes high level targets for the shaders. Even PTX, the assembly you might be familiar with combined with cuda, isn't actually the device's asm, but instead it gets compiled down to the device's asm using a full compiler. It's poorly named and more a compiler IR than an asm.

Makes sense thanks for clarifying.

There is one problem with your argument.

Emulated Switch games run fluently on a Steam Deck.....

In difference to previous Nindendo consoles the graphics API of the switch is very similar to "normal" PC/Console graphics APIs. Sure somewhat older ones but you can run many "switch old" PC games on modern hardware, if there are problems they often come from areas like DRM. But most switch games don't have DRM additional to what the switch provides...

I mean this similarity is one of the major reasons why there are so many 3rd party games from smaller studios one the Switch. (Through due to the switch hardware being incredibly slow for modern standards this is increasingly no longer the case as it requires small studios to better optimize their games, and while many of this optimizations are not switch specific at all they still are costly for a small studio).

Through there are some problems, one is that there was no (usable) successor for the chip they used.

My guess is:

They originally wanted to bring out a bit faster "switch pro" but due to a combination of there being no (usable) successor to the chip they have in the Switch and COVID and chip shortage and the CPU market stalling wrt. improvements (when the decision was made), and crypto mining making Nvidea not care about making a Chip for Nintendo they decided to skip it and bring out instead just the OLED upgrade. I.e. they skipped the next console directly went to developing the follow up maybe with the hope of bringing it out a year or so earlier.

But now on one hand the generational improvements in the CPU marked stopped stalling on the other hand maybe their follow up has delays due to technical challenges.

But in the end it's probably a financially good decision to just stretch out the life of the Switch. The only risk is that people will stop buying the switch or switch games because it being so slow that it isn't fun anymore. But given that people will still buy the new Zelda and the amount of money they made with the Switch and saved by cutting the development of the hypothetical direct successor that rally doesn't matter to them. It still sucks for the gamer anyway.

MVG on YouTube did a great video on this exact problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH03ht2fVqI&pp=ygUKbXZnIHN3a...

yes and at the same time many much more underpowered 8 and 16-bit emulation consoles still sell like hot cakes.

Nintendo cares about battery life above most other concerns. The Game Boy was not the most capable handheld when it was released. It was severely underpowered compared to the hardware that was out there. Atari released the Lynx a few months later. Sega release the Game Gear the following year, which was essentially a portable Master System.

However, the Game Boy ran forever on 4 AA batteries. Which is part of the reason why the original Game Boy has outsold every other non-Nintendo handheld gaming system except the original PSP, combined.

Switching to an ARM SoC and off the (basically dying) POWER architecture was a smart move on Nintendo's part, in order to take advantage of industry economies of scale, etc.

However it also potentially makes them vulnerable to being on the upgrade treadmill that e.g. phone manufacturers have to be on. Expectations and pressure will be there to be on the "next" SoC platform.

But more so it makes them less "unique" and "bespoke" and it becomes very hard to differentiate the Switch from any mass market phone or tablet. It's basically that, but with Nintendo's own OS instead of Android, and along with that their highly sandboxed environment.

Not saying you are not correct in the details, but Nintendo has long proven they don’t need to have cutting edge hardware to do quite well selling games people enjoy. See Gameboy, SNES and N64.

> People complaining about the Switch being underpowered are expecting PS5 level performance on a mobile device.

Not really. If you can get better performance emulating a newly released game on the Steam Deck, then the complaints have merit. (See Pokemon Scarlet and Violet for instance.)

There always will be faster hardware, that's beside the point. Games that are designed for their target hardware should not have problems.

Scarlet and Violet was as much an optimisation problem as a hardware problem.

I don't expect PS5 level performance, but Steam Deck level performance should be the bare minimum.

Rather, I wish it'd have closer to PS5 performance while docked. Mobile performance is totally understandable given the battery/heat limitations. Even smartphones have been thermally limited for performance for the last couple years.

What I'd like to see is a much stronger CPU/GPU that gets severely undervolted/underclocked while on mobile (or the big cores in it's big.LITTLE design being way bigger), but a dock that comes with fans that force feeds air in to allow the hardware to run significantly faster when docked. Expandable SSD storage on the dock would be excellent as well.

That would be counterproductive. Game DEVs would optimize for docked mode primarily and it would clash with the usage of the customers. Many users like the Switch for its portability. My kids only dock the switch when they want to play dance games.

They already have to optimize for docked/undocked modes separately anyway since it's rendering different resolutions using different hardware speeds depending on whether it's docked or not. There's already a mobile optimized hardware with the Switch Lite too, is it really that much of a stretch to make a dock-optimized version?

Besides, the Steam Deck has shown that even very demanding high end games designed without any consideration for mobile hardware can be sufficiently scaled down to run on mobile hardware (and mobile hardware has gotten powerful enough where the tradeoffs are tolerable).

On the other hand, the Steam Deck goes the other way with docking. It doesn't improve quality at all.

People have been asking for a docked-only/screen-less version of the Switch since it was announced, but I don't think that market is big enough to sustain itself (or would be particularly happy with the result.

> People complaining about the Switch being underpowered are expecting PS5 level performance on a mobile device.

Valve has proven that you can get extremely high performance on a mobile device with the Steam Deck.

Personally, I'd be happy enough if the Nintendo Store didn't take half a minute to load assets.

>People complaining about the Switch being underpowered are expecting PS5 level performance on a mobile device. Even if a new console would be twice as fast they still would be disappointed. It's perfectly possible to create innovative and - most important - fun games on something as powerful as the Switch.

Sure it is. But that's not what AAA titles are, most of them run at locked 30 that sometimes drop to 20 and in action game that will be noticeable.

People are complaining beacuse the "console sellers", the biggest budget titles are struggling and just play better on emulation

No one with even an inkling of what that feat would require is asking for that.

Many would be happy just to get 60fps across the board for their flagship titles like Zelda. That doesn’t require anything like “PS5-level performance”, and is an entirely reasonable ask given the current Switch is on 9 year-old silicon.

> PS5 level performance on a mobile device

PS5-level performance on a six year old mobile device, no less. It's showing its age now, but it's still a fun little device and has a few absolute bangers. BotW and Super Mario Odyssey alone are nearly worth picking one up.

For me it's simply seeing that Nintendo is the only console manufacturer using nvidia hardware. A new version of the console, 2x more powerful, on Ampere/Lovelace hardware would be absolutely revolutionary for this console space. With it they could rely on DLSS2/3 to increase performance from 720p30 -> 1440p60.

> I think for Nintendo, the more prudent solution would be to release an updated Switch with some more powerful hardware that's fully backwards compatible with the existing Switch library. It would be very par for the course for them, and assuage most of the complaints about the Switch being underpowered.

This could result in fragmentation: some games could only run smoothly on the new version.

I pretty like the idea of using old hardware and to require game dev to adapt to this.

It's happened before[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Nintendo_3DS

The piracy point is moot. If you go on torrent websites, you'll find repacks of Nintendo games with prepackaged and set up emulators. It can't really get worse than that.

The day 1 patch makes this a Locked 30 fps game without frame drops except when using ultra hand. It’s the first AAA release in months to run this smooth.

It definitely still dips regularly in heavy areas. It doesn't impact the experience the way it did before, imo, but saying that it doesn't would be disingenuous.

You're right about it being the only acceptable AAA release this year though.

Only 30 fps?

The game itself is hard coded to run at 30 fps. There is a 60 fps patch for emulated versions, but using it makes the FMV movies run at double speed due to the game's hard coded 30 fps.

Don’t use smooth in the same context as 30fps. 120hz+ is smooth

Playing Switch games emulated on the Steam Deck is pretty common. The power of the Deck does give you better performance, no doubt. The trade off is that the battery life is significantly worse than a Switch.

It would be incredibly cool if they ported their games (even just ones more than 10 years old) to PC, but they clearly want to double/triple/quadruple dip on retro game purchases from console to console so that would never really work. I have really grown sour on Nintendo over the years but that would do a lot to win me back, personally.

Yeah Bayonetta on pc was pretty good as a case in point.

But hasn't this always been the case? Like computers are always more powerful than consoles, but the draw of consoles being a "turns on and just works" system - minus blowing-into-the-cartridge-on-the-original-nes

We are talking playing a current generation console game on emulator with better framerate and resolution than on the original console, at release. So no, it has not always been the case

Well, it's long been the case that a $400 console has lower specs than a $1200+ gaming PC, even in the year the console is released. And that the performance gap gets even wider as the console gets towards the end of its lifecycle.

Part of the criticism here is that the $340 Switch is getting outperformed by emulation on the $399 Steam Deck.

I'm pretty sure it has always been the case that a PC emulator could outperform a several years old gaming handheld. At least if enough interest was there for someone to write the emulator.

It just feels different since the switch is a “home console” technically instead of a pure “portable”

I'd say that something which is portable is a "portable" even if you can plug it into a TV. It is strongly power constrained. It is just bigger than old portable consoles. (I actually don't know why they were always so small before the Switch. Perhaps large screens were too expensive. Or everyone thought of them as having to fit inside a pocket.)

For the last few generations Nintendo has been happy to be slightly behind Playstation and Xbox in terms of graphics so that they can be the lower-cost alternative.

And based on unit sales, that strategy seems to be doing pretty well.

Yeah, and parents love it too for that reason. People really seem to underestimate the market for children (and parents / family gifting and indulging said children), not just with gaming but also with e.g. youtube.

To add, people also underestimate mobile gaming; westerners still look down on it compared to console and PC gaming, despite the financials telling a whole different story.

Well I’m not a parent and switch is perfect for me. Would I want 4k? Ray tracing? Yeah sure, but it’s nowhere near a deal breaker. As long as it runs smooth I care orders of magnitude more about gameplay. Botw gave me so much joy, simply because it’s an amazingly well made game.

In my experience, graphics upgrades feel amazing at first, but if it’s a good game, you mostly forget about it after just a few minutes. But yes, sometimes you have very scenic environments, like in RDR2, but even then I feel like it’s 90% making good composition, color, lighting, and 10% is the actual GPU doing real time lighting etc. At least to me, this obsession with cutting edge graphics is just an expensive hobby of moving goal posts. I’m the same with TVs, I care much more about the movie or show than the TV specs.

IDK, mobile games don't tend to have a spending cap. On most PC/console releases the most you can spend on a game is few hundred for the game and all the DLC bought day 1 and usually goes down as time goes on. Mobile games will have one gem bundle or whatever that costs more than the complete package of a PC/console title. So you can easily get whales spending thousands on one game. The financials tell me mobile games are better at extracting money from their audience or a subset rather but that's kind of how they feel to play! Everything is geared towards extracting money.

Optimizing for microtransactions isn't free either! The devs increase discomfort and grind to encourage paying extra, making games worse for effectively all players-- in time or money.

> To add, people also underestimate mobile gaming; westerners still look down on it compared to console and PC gaming, despite the financials telling a whole different story.

Mobile gaming makes money because companies put slot machines into people's pockets. Actual games are a drop in the ocean.

It's not really a lower-cost alternative due to cartridge prices and no sales.

I chose Steam Deck instead of the Switch. Yes the SD is more expensive, but it already supports most of my existing Steam library and I can buy new games on sale.

On the Switch? The Nintendo eshop has new sales running every week.

Do their first party games also get those discounts? Another thing is that I can play games that I bought 15 years ago on my Steam Deck. Nothing like that is possible on the Switch. Even if you owned, say, Mario Kart 8 on the Wii U - you have to rebuy it again on the Switch.

I think it's a really smart strategy. They avoided the raw-power hardware arms race and are thriving because of it.

It seems like Nintendo picked up on what makes video games so fun early on while a lot of studios struggle with it even today: The gameplay comes first and it has to be fun. Art/style comes next, then way down the list is graphics. Graphics are the only thing about a video game that get worse with time. If you focus on making fun games that have a distinct style, they will remain fun forever. Importantly to a corporation, they also remain sellable forever.

Nobody talks about crysis 1 anymore, but people definitely talk about wind waker.

Totally agree. And Zelda is maybe the best example of this? The graphic style of the two recent games are distinctive and effective but are a long way from realistic by modern standards.

> They avoided the raw-power hardware arms race and are thriving because of it.

I would argue that they're thriving in spite of it.

Great gameplay and great art/graphics are not mutually exclusive. They're not even going to be handled by the same teams.

How can they compare with something that hasn’t been released?

It might be true, but at the same time it feels disingenuous to compare unreleased games on switch to a pirated PC. “Much more enjoyable” can’t be a thing until you compare, right?

You can compare all the other releases, including Breath of the Wild, why should this release be any different? Especially when the emulator keeps improving and PC hardware keeps getting better

Specifically because they said the experience is better without knowing the other unreleased version they’re comparing it to. Bringing up other releases is irrelevant.

Presumably they can run the pirated version on actual hardware as well (via custom firmware etc.), and therefore compare?

You were downvoted but you are right. The podcast was released last week, but the game came with a day-1 patch to improve the performance on Switch which they would not have been able to try.

Obviously it will never compete with emulation on a PC, but it runs just fine on Switch. 99.9% of players are not going to think "wow, this would be much more enjoyable on a PC!" The gaming podcast crowd is not exactly representative.

The best way to play Breath Of The Wild, is at 4k 60fps on Cemu (the WiiU emulator).

Can also play at ultrawide 21:9 if you have a monitor like that.

This. It works very well on Cemu, except for the parts where you need gyro input.

They can't control the experience you will get on your PC. PCs vary so you could get a bad experience and blame it on Nintendo.

I think it would make more sense for Nintendo to make a more powerful console on a compatible platform that isn't handheld, kind of like the Sega Master System/Game Gear or Sega Mega Drive/Nomad consoles.

So you can enjoy the same titles on the go as you can on the TV, and you could still use the Switch on the TV, but there would be an alternative for people who want a more high fidelity, fluid experience on a TV or a monitor.

It doesn't even have to be that much more powerful. Even when sticking to the same vendor, a 2018 Nvidia ARM chip had roughly 3-4x the CPU power and 10x the GPU power of the Switch, in a 15-60W power budget. This would be fine for a console that's always plugged into the power mains.

Going to more midrange vendors like Rockchip or Mediatek, or - and this is a long shot - striking a deal with Samsung for using their Exynos chips would probably yield a lower cost device but still net a 4-5x increase in gaming performance.

Emulation has proven that the games are not tied so tightly to their hardware platform for switching to a more modern architecture while maintaining compatibility to be an issue. Even without first-party involvement people have been running Switch games on mobile Android devices with a good processor.

> striking a deal with Samsung for using their Exynos chips

The fantasy world where they do a deal with Apple for M2 SOCs (or even just get bought wholesale by Apple.)

> (or even just get bought wholesale by Apple.)

This is a crazy idea but... it might end up becoming reality. I don't see Nintendo selling any time soon though, it's been very independent for a very long time, to the point where it was huge when they released some things for smartphones (pokemon go, super mario jump, etc).

That said, Apple's been trying some things with gaming (they pushed gaming as one of the use cases for the Apple TV), but then I realize they already have one of the biggest gaming platforms in the world with the iphone.

Apple seems very uninterested in gaming on Mac.

You just gave me chills. That would 100% be the thing that would push me to piracy so I never give Nintendo money again.

Making a deal like that would probably cause the singularity, and Japan would never let Nintendo be bought by an American company.

That sounds more like a nightmare to me.

Is Switch emulation on PC that good? Maybe I should try it if so. I imagined it would be fairly janky due to the difficulty of emulating currentish hardware, and only old consoles could be emulated with good performance.

It's excellent for some popular games, decent at many others, and garbage at some.

That's good enough, thanks!

I already bought the game from Nintendo, but stumbled on this thread this morning. I'd be willing to play it on an emulator instead of my switch if the performance was better, but some quick skimming online isn't convincing me.

To wit, the consensus opinion on reddit is that BOTW is still a buggy mess on the main switch emulators, Yuzu & Ryujinx, and that people should play the Wii U version via the CEMU emulator instead. If BotW isn't a polished experience many years after release, I'm pessimistic about TotK being a good experience so soon after release. You can skim the bug reports on the emulator sites; there's lots of stuttering and invisible walls and all other kinds of jank.

I think I'll stick to playing it on my switch :-)

I've been playing the leaked version of TotK at 4K 60 fps for several days, and with only extremely minor visual bugs (example: when switching abilities, the background turns black rather than out-of-focus). It's honestly less janky than many AAA PC games.

Huh, that's very encouraging, thanks! Which emulator have you been using, out of curiosity?

I've been using Yuzu with a couple of patches (that I think have now been merged) with Vulkan, which can be touchy with hardware, but runs fine on my machine other than minor visual glitches. The game runs nearly flawlessly and with apparently great compatibility with Ryujinx, but is dramatically slower (~20-25 fps compared to 50-60 fps with Yuzu).

Ah, thanks!

The below video would not be the typical experience but it should what it's possible when you throw hardware at it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fscwp3RkEvM

> It really makes me think Nintendo has an untapped market here to sell a little box you plug into your PC that plays switch games

Games that are more locked down and walled than Apple products, that run 30fps on the oldest hardware possible in 2023, made by a company that actively alienates its own fanbase with aggressive copyright claims over the silliest things?

No thanks. Really, you can keep them out of the PC market.

It seems the fault is less with Nintendo than with parts of the "fan base" which defend piracy. I bet much, much fewer people would play Zelda on an emulator if they a) had to pay for it and b) had to wait until it comes out.

It’s Nintendo. Plenty of people have a hard time doing reviews on YouTube

I stopped my BOTW playthrough recently after seeing game being rendered in 4K RTX. I'm usually not a stickler for visuals, but swith is getting a bit too dated.

I doubt Nintendo would be willing to open up like that, but who knows. Nowadays there are barely any exclusive games on Xbox and Playstation. Most games are made available in every platform.

Maybe Nintendo will buckle under the $$$ figure they could earn by making their games available on other platforms.

On the other hand, Nintendo could make a killing releasing a "Switch 2" with beefier hardware and backwards compatibility.

The PC version also let you mod the game. The weapon durability mod (removing the extremely quick destruction of your favourite equipment in the normal game) was excellent.

You can already connect switch controllers to a PC and play any switch title, legally, on your PC right now.

I have legally purchased all my switch games but I make backups and play on PC sometimes just because it is a better experience.

This doesn't seem unambiguously legal - it seems like the backup part is the legally grey bit.

The legally grey bit is that there's no method to make a usable backup without circumventing the DRM.

Nintendo has never been about High Res or State of the art graphics at all

I have katamari reroll on the switch and the steam deck and I vastly prefer the experience on the steam deck. It loads the levels faster, has a smoother experience, and it’s easier to do the acceleration of the ball with the steam decks analog switches or extra buttons on the back.

The game is nowhere near tears of the kingdom level and the experience is better. So I understand why people want a better switch

Or sell a Nintendo "emulator" of their own for PC. Just for Nintendo releases like Zelda, MarioKart, etc. They wouldn't even need to produce any hardware in that case. I'd be first in line to purchase such a piece of software.

I tried one of the popular Switch emulators, and they work great. But, I'd rather just pay Nintendo, and not have to fiddle with it. Really does seem like an opportunity for them.

A great example of this is Sony with Playstation exclusives.

In the past few years, they have broken their longstanding rule and made PC ports of many of their previously exclusive Playstation titles to play on PC. This includes Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, and The Last of Us.

In the most recent earnings call, Sony said that these titles sales on PC have dramatically outperformed expectations and that they will be putting additional effort towards PC ports in the future as a way to supplement Playstation sales.

Microsoft has figured out the same thing, by not really making Xbox exclusives anymore. Granted, they were always much more closely tied between PC and Xbox than companies like Sony were, but they quickly embraced this "play everywhere" mentality many years ago, and released a Ultimate Gamepass which basically lets you play the same games (with some exceptions) on PC or Xbox and even switch between the two with cloud saves.

Point being, other publishers have discovered that locking yourself down to a single hardware device is not good. PCs are the most universally owned and flexible hardware devices out there and have the biggest market. I'd love for Nintendo to do the same thing. But knowing Nintendo, they will never do such a thing. They are a very stubborn company. They often do not act in their own self-interest (market share, revenue) in order to control things like hardware or create false scarcity.

Nintendo is extremely resistant to change and compromise, there is probably zero chance they will do it. Remember that, even as they make excellent games, they reject a lot of modern aspects of gaming. Like they used to ban Twitch streams and YouTube let's plays of their games.

> Nintendo is extremely resistant to change and compromise

Are you sure? The company the brought us…

- Color TV-Game

- Game Boy

- Nintendo 64

- GameCube

- Nintendo DS

- Wii

- many, many others [0]

… is resistant to change? They have always been at the forefront of hardware innovation/experimentation, I'm sure they wouldn't be against it.

I'd suggest listening to the 2-part Acquired podcast episodes about Nintendo [1] if you haven't already.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_video_game_consoles

[1]: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nintendo https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nintendo-the-console-wars

That would cannibalize their switch sales no?

I doubt there's much, if any profit margin on the consoles themselves. I think it's pretty typical for consoles of all brands to be sold at a loss in order to capture customers for their ecosystem where they will buy games and other media which have very healthy margins.

Nintendo's biggest concern is probably controlling the experience. While it might not be a marvel of gaming technology on the Switch, it is consistent. Allowing it to run on any old computer hardware means a lot of it will be poorly optimized as a rule. non-technical people will likely have no idea what that means; to them it will just be a shitty gaming experience and they will then associate that experience with Nintendo. Technical people will probably not even bother and they'll just emulate it for free instead of paying $70 for a game that isn't going to have any official support on their platform. There's really no upside for Nintendo in this plan.

Sure, but they probably make the majority of their profit on sales of games.

I think Nintendo wouldn't want to do this because it would make their primary platform (the Switch) feel second-rate by comparison.

> I was listening to a gaming podcast last week and they were talking about how this release was pirated and available for the last week or so on torrents.

https colon slashslash thepiratebay DOT org slash description.php?id=68303898 (slightly broken for inadvertent link click)

And https://github.com/Abd-007/Switch-Emulators-Guide/blob/main/... for a howto install Ryujinx/Yuzu Switch emulators.

But yeah, games arent my cup of tea, but I did try it. And it's BUTTER SMOOTH on real computer hardware. And yeah, we pierats had it before legit purchase. Again, pirates get the best experience and legit gets meh.

> It really makes me think Nintendo has an untapped market here to sell a little box you plug into your PC that plays switch games, interfaces with their controllers, etc. They've done oddball stuff like the SNES Gameboy player and GameCube GBA player add-ons in the past. It feels like there would be people willing to pay to properly play Switch games on their gaming PCs.

I guess they could do that, but that would cannibalize sales of their consoles. And then, what makes them any different than Steam?

The biggest benefit of a Switch is it's handheld and portable. The biggest pirate downside is that it nearly necessitates a desktop with significantly better equipment. I've heard some work being done with the Steam handheld.. but subpar at best.

> The biggest pirate downside is that it nearly necessitates a desktop with significantly better equipment

For me personally, the biggest downside is that I don’t feel good about myself when I take things I know I don’t have the right to take. YMMV.

In that case I would consider buying a copy on switch, even if you don't own a switch. if you buy the copy and then decide to play it on your PC instead of Switch then you don't really have any reason to feel guilty. This is similar to buying a BluRay and then ripping it to watch it on your personal Plex or Jellyfin server because you prefer that method instead of using a BluRay player.

I understand and share your ethical dilemma. The goal is to support the creators of the work. If you do that, then there is no reason to feel guilty because you enjoy their work in a different way.

>For me personally, the biggest downside is that I don’t feel good about myself when I take things I know I don’t have the right to take. YMMV.

Once I put in enough work to both have some spare money in the bank and to empathize with the people who made the software and music I could so easily "just download", I had this transitionary period where, if I possessed a copy of something available commercially without having paid for it, and found that I enjoyed it enough to keep using it, I would buy a legitimate copy. For music, if I really liked it, I'd buy, for example, the deluxe vinyl edition - hopefully kicking some extra money over.

With software (including games, though it's rare that I play games) I'm now at the point where I won't give it a second thought, and will just pay for it. I bought an iPad app on sale, years before I had an iPad, knowing that one of these days I'd pick one up - it worked out.

Laws don’t determine rights. You’re infringing on copyright, not stealing something. And we all know IP laws are horrendously broken. And I’d argue that your rights from an ethical perspective are extremely broad and you can basically do whatever you want with intellectual property as long as you’re not harming the actual creators (not owners).

I would argue that taking something I’m supposed to pay for makes me feel bad about myself.

First, I'm not "taking". I'm copying. And the person providing a copy is 'giving'. And nowhere is anyone deprived of any physical thing, save an ethereal possibility of buying this game. Then again, I have no switch and no intent to buy one. In this case, it was curiosity.

And frankly, I don't feel one bit bad, copying AND providing copies free of charge. I've paid enough to content, media, and game companies, and screwed over on rentals that were sold as sales.

But you do you.

Totally understandable and I'd encourage you to not do anything that makes you feel bad.

You can separate them out and get best of both worlds. Buy a copy from ninetendo and give it to some kid who wouldnt have been able to have it otherwise and play the pirated version for the technically superior experience. No need to wring your pearls on this one.

Many of us (myself included) have still bought the retail release, even if I plan to play "elsewhere".

Personally I wouldn't feel good giving money to Nintendo, or supporting their business practices. YMMV.

You can play it at 120 Hz, 4K, ultrasmooth, what have you, when you buy the next gen Nintendo console for 350+ eur/$. Not using a small cheap box... Knowing Nintendo.

> the game is much more enjoyable when played on PC with an emulated copy

Neophyte question here, but what's the 3d engine used for this game? can you just change a parameter to make the game more realistic if the hardware supports it?

It's a custom engine by nintendo, also seems to be user by other games like super mario odyssey.

Changing graphics settings would be accomplished using patches, more or less the same idea as making cheats in older games. Find the value somewhere in their code that corresponds to render distance and change that, as an example.

Emulators for older systems can do more impressive things. Graphics pipelines tend to be a certain shape and use certain data types, so once you're already emulating at the GPU level you can do things like upscale old textures (works great on cell-shaded games like megaman legends). For 2d games you can use a dedicated pixel art scaling algorithm.

Pretty much all 3D games can output at a higher resolution than the original hardware allowed, just due to how the hardware is set up. You're game isn't responsible for deciding the output resolution, the GPU is, essentially. Changes aspect ratios is much harder and often requires patching the games themselves to make it work properly.

Other common patches are things like higher FPS. By default the new zelda game plays at 20fps, but there are patches to play them at 30 and 60 fps for a smoother experience. Those are once again actually reverse engineering and patching the game files though.

I've a really good pc under my TV that I pretty much only use for emulation. So I'm not anti emulation by any means (it's allowed me to put all my real hardware in a cupboard and not have a big mess of wires in my living room)! But what these videos never show is that emulation is a pain in the ass. There's always a nagging feeling that game isn't quite right. I end up spending more time tweaking settings than playing the game. If I get stuck I end up wondering if there's a bug in the emulator.

I don't own a switch but I'd much prefer to play a fully tested game the way the developers intended. My pc could run it no problem (rtx 3070 etc), but if I ever do play it, it will be on a switch.

Anyway your point is a bit differen, that Nintendo could make money on this etc.

Out of curiosity, what is your setup? I'm guessing windows 10/11, hdmi plugged into your TV? I have a windows box in my home office but and an Nvidia shield attached to my TV but it has always been a pain to play games via steam link. I mean, it's doable, I just figure there's a way to make it as convenient as console gaming and I'm missing something.

PC, windows 10, ryzen 3600, 16gig ram. A few mayflash controller adapters: snes,gamecube, n64, ps1. Also use a usb Saturn pad for six button fighters etc. And god help me I've ordered a sinden light gun!

Breath of the Wild (Wii U version) on PC is the ideal way to play the game. Gyro is kind of a pain to set up, but 1080p 60fps more than makes up for it. I highly recommend it, even if it’s a second play through. It’s a beautiful and elegant game.

I’ve heard TotK is still pretty glitchy under Switch emulation, but I expect it’ll be resolved in less than a year or two. Yuzu and Ryujinx have a healthy competition between the two of them.

Why is Wii u version the better version to emulate?

I'll try this out

Absolutely, the worst feeling of being stuck on a puzzle is not knowing whether you simply haven't solved the puzzle, or a bug has caused this door to not open and having to run online to check.

Like Apple, Nintendo is a hardware company that makes software, not a software company.

They’d never do this in a million years.

Nintendo makes very confusing business decisions very often. They seem to succeed despite all their business decisions, largely due to having IP that people love, and people are constantly thinking about how great they could be.

I've tried this and I have a monster machine. The experience is overall better on the switch. Not everything has been emulated correctly and the frame rate is still higher on the switch overall.

I play a lot of emulation (of older titles mostly), and i really like the cheats functionality. I'm not 15yo anymore, I don't have the time to grind, but I really like the adventure part of a game... so playing a game with some kind of invincibility is great for me.

I understand the concept of games needing to be "hard" in some parts, and that making your grind to get stronger to win is a thing... but sometimes I just want to mess around and play through the story, and games like zelda ones (and GTA series and many others) are one of those.

Sadly, cheats have turned into microtransactions (be it crystals, gems or amiibos).

It might just be a gigantic support burden for them: They then would have to care about thousands of hardware configurations, and people complaining "doesn't work on my PC". It's probably not worth it. Also the market for it is likely small. Most Switch users seem children, casual games, families, etc. Those usually just want to buy hardware which "just works", compared to enthusiasts who actually want to fiddle around with tons of settings.

Sega tried something along those lines - with proper PC hardware you could play Saturn games... I don't think it worked out for them.

According to reviews so far this game would be a Top 5 on the Nintendo Switch and Top 50 game on any platform. (https://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/all/...)

That’s an impressive achievement for a team that had to beat the high bar they set with Breath of the Wild. Kudos to them!

Funny, related to your last paragraph, I saw a review of the new Zelda were the only downsides they found were "the switch hardware can't do more than this" and "this sets too high a bar for the next Zelda game" :)

Well, looking at the time it takes them to make a mainline Zelda game, the next one will not come out on the Switch, so it'll be easy to overcome that technical bar.

good to know, cause honestly the trailer looks.. kinda boring. I really liked Breath of the Wild though, so if this is similar in quality (or better) I'll probably get it.

IGN: 10/10 which is pretty rare. "It somehow makes the original feel like a rough draft." "It makes the original feel like a tiny world."

That's kinda crazy.

https://www.ign.com/articles/the-legend-of-zelda-tears-of-th...

That's a weird comment because botw seemed huge to me, and this uses the same map.

Either way, picking it up today!

Breath of the Wild impressed with how vast everything was, but there was lots of empty space. It worked for that game don't get me wrong, it's one of my favorite games of all time. TotK is so dense with content and creativity that it does make the original feel empty and small in comparison. It's a lot like Elden Ring in the sense that you can just pick a direction you've never been in and you'll just stumble across interesting things within 30 seconds.

It's not exactly the same map. They did a lot of improvements to it and added a lot of depth, even ignoring chasms and sky islands.

It uses the same map, but with more depth — there are at least two layers I've discovered so far — original Hyrule and Sky Islands — and I suspect at least one more :)

The game is supposed to be boring. It's a walking simulator.

true. that franchise is doing consecutive home runs and that's an rare fact in itself.

Well, apparently they went the safe route (feature-wise) of adding more interesting mechanics (specially turning the world into a sandbox) and polishing existing ones. Pretty much like GTA after GTA 3. My guess is that they'll continue this trend by making the game richer and bigger...until they get a Zelda online game like GTA.

Has Nintendo ever talked about how they do software development? Can we all drop the thousands of books that have been written about software engineering in general and just figure out what they do?

Game aside, the reviews have been pointing out how the game performs well (after day 1 patch) and is not pestered with bugs, which is an impressive feat for such an open world game where most things are able to interact with everything else.

I would put a lot of it down to Japanese craftsmanship coupled with relatively experienced engineers (average age in their Kyoto office is 40 IIRC). Their selection process is notoriously rigorous too and goes far beyond the usual LeetCode questions you'd get at a FAANG company.

> I would put a lot of it down to Japanese craftsmanship

This is such an orientalist and borderline racist view it’s crazy. If it were true then it would also imply the other japanese game devs also affected by it. There countless bad games from Japan, don’t even have to walk far from Nintendo just look at the Pokémon games and how GameFreak release them with 0 optimization. And then the countless misses from Square Enix, Bandai Namco etc.

I think you're missing the point. My family in Japan, and their social/business networks, are exactly like this. Detail oriented and loyal to a fault. While they are not software engineers the expectation is to do your best. Some of it is done through company policies or implied in a social context. That is not true for all Japanese people but it is true of a large majority. I have first hand experience.

I guess it depends on the company and what it produces also.

Japanese are also extremely attached to their past and culture, which shows up in the game how its almost like a modern mythical representation of both old japanese myths and an obsession with technology.

There, is that racist too?

The result is beautiful, I love the whole "ancient technology" concept in it, which is not something we have in our world (except for pyramids perhaps).

> If it were true then it would also imply the other japanese game devs also affected by it.

That's a pretty racist argument, to generalize this way. Not all Japanese are the same, not all share the same mindset, education and philosophies.

It’s weirder to suggest everywhere in the world works exactly the same and culture has no impact.

I haven’t worked with Japanese companies but Chinese companies work couldn’t be more different than western.

the director aoji aonuma has to be the oldest looking salaryman i've ever seen. i think that says a lot.

long hours, very high level of expectations, fine tuned attention to good gameplay design, and the protection of higher ups execs like miyamoto from bean counters.

Very tired of people saying something is 'racist' when in actuality the comment is just a generalization of a certain people.

Racism is hating a cultural group or having a prejudice against them, not making a comment on it.

If anything, OPs comment is a compliment on Japanese work.

No one minds attributing the wild spunk and ambition of USA startups to “American exceptionalism. I think it’s pretty reasonable to say that a certain trait is broadly associated with a culture without implying EVERYONE in that culture has to exemplify it.

Grow up man, this is some elementary stuff that you shouldn’t need explained to you.

I don't think it is racist to highlight an aspect of a culture and how it might at a group dynamic level causally influence the outcome of something.

The claim that Japanese culture causally leads to better craftmanship might be wrong. As you've mentioned, there are plenty of counterexamples that argue against Japanese culture having the claimed causal influence. But this doesn't make the original claim racist nor even borderline racist.

> coupled with relatively experienced engineers

I disagree. Nintendo has good engineers but so does many of the other studios. For me what sets Nintendo apart is not their code or technology, but their game design and game direction. The way they seem to craft their game-play and game mechanics to have everything it needs but nothing more, and then couple it with the perfect match for game aesthetics with unmatched consistency.

Do Nintendo keep their teams together longer?

You usually can’t get a great engineering team by throwing a bunch of good engineers together, it takes time and work.

I don’t know much about the game industry but from what little I have heard it seems there is a lot of churn.

This is a Japanese company so most of their engineers will be hired directly from university and typically stay on until retirement. Based on what I've heard they build large groups of engineers who'll stay together more or less permanently. Then they'll rotate these groups between different projects. Sometimes they'll be on a game, other times they might be doing something with hardware. So the groups end up multidisciplinary.

That’s basically ideal for a lot of engineering work, so long as you keep fresh ideas coming into the group somehow so it doesn’t stagnate …

It would be like figuring out what Steve Job, Usain Bolt, or Killian Jornet do. It would be interesting and helpful, but you will not be able to replicate it by following a recipe.

Being exceptional is, by definition, exceptional.

Easy, with proper algorithms and data structures thinking about a single kind of hardware, instead of developing on a octacore with 32 GB and SSD with a RTX GPU and then expecting everyone else has the same setup.

Basically by doing development like we used to do in the 8 and 16 bit home computer days.

I think they have a couple advantages: 1) Zelda on Switch has very basic graphics compared to modern AAA titles on other consoles and only a 30 fps framerate. 2) The last Zelda game came out in 2017 so they've had tons of time.

I know people say this, and of course the art style is stylised. But playing it last night and watching the day-night cycle, the grass moving around on the first sky island, the physics simulation as I dropped my clumsily-made creations and I thought it was pretty impressive. I do think it's a wonder this runs on a low power tablet computer from 2017 but if I open up Teams on a brand new machine it can be a laggy mess. I do think we have lost track of how much computing power we have and how poorly it is used.

See, pretty visuals / moods don't need high performance hardware, it's what you do with the tools given to you. I'm sure plenty of kids have just sat in Minecraft for a while watching their world go by, and it's using 1x1m blocks and 16x16 textures.

I wish there were better crossplatform native desktop development environments. Teams made / is making the switch to React at the moment, but it's still a web application.

I've recently gotten into the early access program for Beeper, which promises to be a native cross-channel chat app connecting things like Slack, Teams, Whatsapp etc into a native app. I like the native app part, but the downside of one-app-for-all is that it's lowest common denominator in terms of features and visually it looks like none of the other apps. Still uses 130-140 MB of memory at the moment though.

> I do think we have lost track of how much computing power we have and how poorly it is used.

I think this is the real lesson to take away from the Switch. The device is woefully underpowered, but developers know there's a huge market out there so they just have to Make It Work. The end result is that many games, especially first party ones, are super well optimized for their hardware. You could see this with the 3DS too, the things those 285MHz could pull off were definitely very impressive.

On PC and other amd64 platforms there's so much raw CPU and GPU compute available that it's possible to get away with performance impacts. Doom Eternal is one of the few well-optimized big games that just seems to play well on any device with a GPU you throw at it. Compare that to some recent releases and you really wonder how bad things must've gotten.

Of course, highly optimized game development takes time, effort, and skill, and that doesn't come cheap. As long as gamers accept the inefficiencies on other platforms, games will continue to be released in a subpar state. Nintendo cares more about the quality and reputation of their brand (in some areas) than it does about making money so it goes the extra mile; I doubt EA or Bethesda care as much as long as they keep making money.

2015 actually!

There is no big secret to this. They just don't go all out. They don't take big risks. They just see what works elsewhere and polish it until it shines brighter than everything else. And they only add (or take away?) until they have the necessary minimum of gameplay. For example, Zelda BotW is by far not the best survival or crafting-game which was around at release, but it was the most pleasant experience for casual gamers and Zelda-fans, because it left out all the unimportant grind which is not relevant for a Zelda-Game.

Notable in that regard: Apple did the same under Steve Jobs. Focus on the important part, and don't play around.

Personally I think BOTW wasn’t “seeing what works everywhere else and polishing it” it really felt like a new game nobody had ever done before.

I don't think it had any new mechanics or concepts, but it def felt new. Do you feel like there were new mechanics or concepts?

I would invert that question and ask what, to you, would qualify as being sufficiently new that it doesn’t have? To me, there are tons of things. The death / checkpoint system, weapon durability, the massive non-linear open world, the recipe system, the puzzle dungeons, the fact that, if you want to, you can essentially go challenge the final boss immediately. If these things aren’t new enough, I have to wonder what is.

Most of those things have been fairly common elements of games for decades? For example "puzzle dungeons" is just a staple of Zelda as a franchise, there's a whole genre of games designed around being able to rush the final boss as quickly as possible even though there's plenty of other content to explore (Metroidvanias), and I can't even think of anything particularly remarkable about BotW's death/checkpoint system other than that it's fairly generous with the autosaves.

I'm surprised to see "Metroidvania" described as a genre where you can rush the boss quickly. Neither of the two defining games that name the genre, (Super) Metroid or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, allow you to reach the final boss without having explored a substantial amount of the world map and collected the majority of available upgrades. Both games do have low% and any% speedruns that skip a lot of stuff, but those require the use of glitches. Do you have an example of a game you're thinking of?

Neither low% nor any% speedruns of Super Metroid or Castlevania: SotN require the use of glitches. From personal experience, Super Metroid is beatable with less than 20% completion without using any glitches at all. Sequence breaking is not a glitch (which is an actual bug).

But also Hollow Knight, Salt and Sanctuary and Axiom Verge are some pre-BotW games that I've personally played where you can rush the credits without experiencing a significant portion of the game once you've gotten out of the early game.

shout out to Chrono Trigger and Super Mario World which, while not metroidvanias, have the same "rush the final objective once you can with minimum exploration" vibe that many of them have.

I see what you mean, but in order to win Super Metroid you still have to beat all the bosses to open Tourian, and the same with the five bosses you need to beat to get to Dracula in SOTN. In BOTW, once you're off the Plateau, you can literally walk directly to Ganon. And, like you mention, being able to skip a substantial chunk of the game to get to the final boss is as present (if not more so) in other genres; it's been in Mario since the NES!

My point is these are new for a Zelda game, and they've put them together in a complete package in a way that's not been done before. If the bar is "something no game has ever done before," it's rare that anything in life is ever going to reach that bar.

Even if you take a completely different profession, like music, revolutionary artists still have their influences and build on instruments and techniques that are 99.9% the same. It's not like they are suddenly playing flutes made out of loaves of bread. And even if they were, most of the time those sorts of things just come across as gimmicks to me.

> what, to you, would qualify as being sufficiently new that it doesn’t have?

I don't understand the question, like what's a game play mechanic that it doesn't have?

Are you talking about different things?

Those all sound like things I've seen in lots of games, but not necessarily in Zelda games.

Most good things in life are like this.

Execution. Not originality.

In 2017, Breath of The Wild developers shared a lot of details of the process at the game dev conference CEDEC.

Nintendo made blogs take down the pictures of the slides afterwards, but here is a good summary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZzcVs8tNfE

It 100% has to do with retention of key talent and knowledge transfer. It seems the model for most western studios is to make one or two big successful games, then layoff all the staff and/or be acquired by EA/Activision/Microsoft. Then their next games flounder as they're milked dry. Western companies are only worried about the next quarter and treat talent as a bottom line expense.

I guess it's not only about what the studios do. Japanese also have a different kind of loyalty from employees which rarely ever change change. It's probably 20 years of average tenure, compared to 2 years in the US. And that's not because these companies pay so much more: They probably pay less for their most experienced stuff than what an employee with 2 years of experience gets in the US. It's just a different culture.

It might be worth listening to the Acquired podcast episode on Nintendo. They are very far from perfect, and have had a good number of serious failures, along with some very strange decisions that clearly hurt them. Nintendo has a die hard stance on modding that is definitely net negative. Just a few weeks ago they went after some giant Twitch streamers for playing modded content. They also consistently ship technology that is generations behind.

One big thing they pointed out is the type of gaming they target. While the Playstation and Xbox general aim for very serious, high "skill" players, Nintendo often launches just above the seriousness and skill level of mobile gamers. It's easy for me to sit down with my extended family and play Mario Party or Mario Kart, but they'd hate me if I had them play Elden Ring. They also are strongly against much of the free to play content.

I left that episode questioning how much of Nintendo's recent success is due to them outcompeting versus the competition making a series of unforced errors.

Sakurai (creator of the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. series) has been running a youtube channel about his game design/development philosophies.

https://www.youtube.com/@sora_sakurai_en

I second everyone to watch this channel, his insights on game design are deep and goes through detail explaining what is a good gaming experience

Zelda is great because it doesn't rely "software development". It uses game design and art.

Yes, it's rare, but they have.

Game maker's toolkit has one on how they solved their open world problem for BotW:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZzcVs8tNfE

And at GDC, they talked about their Chemistry engine for BotW:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyMsF31NdNc&t=2354s

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk5swSyJ5zQ

Game historian has some tidbits of how they made certain design decisions for their successful games

Mario Kart:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDHZKYETDyU

Super Mario World:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2bTQK6vbKI

Super Mario Bro 3:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxT6IwUtLSU

GMT, Snowman, and Extra credit does analysis of how Nintendo designs their Mario levels.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBmIkEvEBtA

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_KVEjhT4wQ

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwj3On5o58U

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fI9pfDf60g

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH2wGpEZVgE

Generally, it follows the ramp up and down of the Hero's journey in storytelling.

1. Introduce a new mechanic in a safe area where it's impossible to die.

2. Increase the challenge with the mechanic by adding variations

3. Ramp up challenge even more by combining with previously learned mechanic

4. Have periods of rest inbetween the challenges.

I have tried to figure this out myself and found two facts that stood out: 1. On BOTW game designers did not allow polishing within two thirds of the game dev process 2. The executives do a lot of play testing.

To implement both at the same time is quite something if you ask me.

Apparently the game is just 16GB and runs seamlessly on a decade old hardware with no loading screens between game areas.

How does Nintendo pull it off?

Kind of a spoiler for people trying to play the game fresh.

Noted. Edited my comment

The better question you should be asking is why does everyone else need 300GB of disk space that transfers at over 7GB/s, 32 CPU cores at 6GHz, a video card worth $3000 dollars, and RAM sizes measured in gigabytes with 3 digits just for a fucking game?

At some point I have to wonder if the reason we have so much computing power is so we can use that computing power.

Gaming has been a massive driver of hardware for a very long time in a way that can always be looked at as unneeded. We surpassed more compute for the sake of compute a while ago. The neat thing is that there are still new things to do with it. Real-time path tracing will be the next thing as well as moving more compute over to the GPU. We don’t need it but it will open new possibilities. And it seems less wasteful than running ten copies of Chrome to support a few desktop apps.

The new Zelda demonstrates something that’s been true of every console generation. They are a fixed platform and the later games are always considerably better at utilising the hardware.

Yeah, just look at FromSoft's output for the PS4 for example. Bloodborne came out very early, and while it looks great, it doesn't hold a candle to Elden Ring.

Though gameplay wise I have to say I prefer it. Elden Ring has too much stuff in it(crafting, gathering, tons of cookie cutter dungeons, and too many easy boss fights) for me. Bloodborne is very stripped down and devoid of fluff. I can sort of keep the whole game in my head and I love that about a game.

Furthermore, why does a 2023 released game, in development since 2018, run like utter garbage on said spec hardware that is orders of magnitude more performant than last years specs ...

If you are serious (I do game development for a living and work on graphical assets daily so that seems evident for me, but I totally understand it can be arcane stuff) it's simply that they choose a stylized graphical style avoiding a lot of costly details you generaly find in hight end games.

They use low poly models, as far as I know there is no baked lightmap (these are pretty expensives but are mandatory in a lot of engine if you want realistic shadows on higtly detailled environment) and their shader materials probably use very simple and low resolution maps.

All these thing decrease the asset footprint by orders of magnitude.

If you want to look in more detail in can look and compare a similar rendering in unity. Taking two unity exemple you can compare :

- 'chop chop' a game using a similar rendering style : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGTTHOpUQDE, if you take the pig and its environment showed in the video and go in the github repository you can see they only use one texture map : an albedo one. All the models (pig + environment) weight about 6mB of textures and 350kB of models. and are sufficient to have the full main character and an environment.

- a 'realistic PBR workflow gun asset' on asset store (choose randomly but seems nice, realistic and containing only the gun so we can see download size) : https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/guns/free-fps.... The workflow need 6 maps (there are 7 here but you generaly only use either a normal map or a heightmap) The pack weight 35MB. It's only the gun, you lack a full character handling it and the environment.

While I really like zelda, even with stylized graphics the game look a bit outdated for me. The cellshaded characters are fluid and pretty but the 'low resolution texture and low poly models' bother me a bit especially on environments. The artistic direction is really good but technically I can only think they are held back by the hardware.

As a game developer, I totally want to use all the resources i know i can find on the target hardware. Trust me even today they are lots of features game designer dream to put in game and cant because computing resources are still limited ^^. Do game NEEDS them to be fun ? Of course not, but COULD they be fun experiences ? I think yes :)

>If you are serious

I absolutely am serious; a lot of games and software in general today demand far more system resources than they have any reasonable right to.

Don't give me "but the textures!" and the like either, optimize that stuff better instead. Whether it's Windows 10/11 or Call of Duty or Elite: Dangerous or Chrome or whatever strikes your fancy, software today has no business demanding the resources they do.

Lest we forget, the hardware we can buy today would have been considered supercomputers just a few years ago. You want to tell me that will choke and croak just doing mundane stuff like playing games or browsing the internet?

Well they were given theses right by the users who spend lot of money on having these system resources and are asking games to be as beautiful and complex we can (not all the users, i'm not the last to spend time in oldschool games, but a significant and heavy spending portion of them).

Business is exactly why most games dont spend an enormous budget on optimization today. It's not a requirement by the great majority of customers, it's quickly time and cost heavy, so the return on investment is pretty low.

Yes, i think even with infinite optimization budget a today triple A realistic rendering could simply not be possible on a too old computer in realtime.

I also think while it would really add value if background application like teams/slack/discord would be less resource heavy because they are open but not the main focus, when you play a high end video game it make sense to consider it's your main reason to use your computer at that time :)

If simulating and rendering a complete complex intractable realistic but imaginary world with today achievable level of detail seems mundane to you, it's far to seems like to me :)

No opinion about browsers and OS, today games are doing lot more of stuff valuable to most users than those of yesterday. I don't know enought about modern value of os and browser, exept empirically they do seems to crash a lot lot less than 20 years ago, but also syp a lot more on me :)

When's the last time you played a pixel-fest from the 90's? Games are like interactive movies now by comparison. Of course that takes a supercomputer!

If you don't like that, nothing stops you from playing the older games.

The priority of an AAA game developer is to provide as much graphic fidelity for a specific compute budget, not to consume the least compute for a specific graphic fidelity. If they "optimize that stuff better", the outcome wouldn't (and shouldn't!) be a lower usage of system resources but rather fitting in even more graphic details while still capping out all resources.

They do obviously have the reasonable right to demand all the system resources that are available, because a game is usually an immersive experience that is the only important thing running on the system at that time, and the only purpose of those greatly increased system resources is to be used for gains in visual quality - there's no reason to not try and use all of that compute power of what would have been considered supercomputers just a few years ago.

> You want to tell me that will choke and croak just doing mundane stuff like playing games or browsing the internet?

The fact that you're comparing browsing the internet with playing AAA games speaks volumes. Browsers are capable of making insane amounts of optimizations because the "geometry" of a website is (mostly) completely static, there's no physics, there's no sounds, there's no AI running client side, there's no game logic, etc. This means they get to cache 90% of the view and only update the changed portions of the screen.

Contrast that with a game, which has the entire view of the 3D world changing every 16ms when the user moves their mouse, has thousands of physical interactions happening (most likely at a higher framerate), is buffering and mixing sounds in a 3D world, is animating and loading large 3D assets in real-time, is creating photo realistic lighting in real-time, is handling all game logic and AI client side, etc. It becomes clear that the two fields, while both difficult in their own ways, don't overlap very much. Of course AAA games take a super computer to run. It's doing all that in 16ms, sometimes 7ms!

Plus, if you don't care about all the visual fidelity and stuff, most games allow you to turn a ton of that off. Games have never been mundane, whether we're talking about the original tetris or the remastered version of the last of us, they are pushing the boundaries of the hardware they run on to the limit to achieve incredible immersive experiences.

Not only that! They also have increasingly helped improve the state of the art rendering in offline renderers! We're seeing the improvements that games have been able to make to achieve real-time photo realistic rendering slowly make their way to large Hollywood studios. This allows the movies we watch to have higher fidelity CG, because the artists have quicker iteration times. And it reduces the compute load required for these massive CG scenes since they are using more optimized rendering techniques. Saving money, and our environment.

Lest we forget, these "mundane" games have led to huge breakthroughs in all sorts of fields because of their willingness to push the boundaries of our machines to see what's truly possible. As opposed to 90% of the software created today which runs orders of magnitude slower than it needs to because people can't or don't know how to write efficient software.

I know, right? PDP-10 could do NAND, and a video game is just a pile of NANDS.

We need this power because companies need to keep selling us new stuff and also because developers nowadays can't optimize their games too much since their managers make them do ten times the work, in half the time, and for one third of the pay they had on the 1990s.

Definitely written by someone who wasn't alive in the 1990s.

I actually was.

Because this hardware is for a different experience. Zelda is nice, but the style has its limits. It's kinda like asking why Disney invests hundreds of millions of Dollar into Marvel and Star Wars-Movies, when you can also make a cheaper but polished animation-movie with a fraction of that price. It's simply not the same.

I doubt anyone is asking that question since none of what you said is true. This just seems like rant of someone wanting to play recent games and not wanting to upgrade their computer. If that's the case, just say that instead of whining about a trend that's been going on for 40 years.

Not even that. The games are playable on low end computers, with lower details.

It's just content-free ranting.

Mechanical sympathy. Rather than designing a game on a PC to take arbitrary advantage of modern tech and then trying to cram it down onto a more limited console platform, Nintendo ask, at design time, what the most interesting things they can do are that would work perfectly within the constraints of the platform — and then do that.

(And Nintendo engineers can have perfect knowledge of "the constraints of the platform", because 1. they built the platform; 2. it's the only platform they ever code for, never porting to anything else; and 3. for late-in-generation titles, they have been developing for it for years already, while also doing platform-SDK support for every third-party development studio.)

Oh, and besides that, because they design each platform initially specifically to work well for the types of games they want to make. (This goes all the way back to the Famicom, which has hardware PPU registers that were specifically implemented clearly to make the launch-title port of Donkey Kong extremely easy to code.)

And also Nintendo has a long history of developing games for outdated hardware, their consoles were never that powerful

With exception of N64.

Even that had limitations regarding textures.

See the third paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229447

All hardware at the time had limitations.

So, n64 wasn't an exception ? Got it.

It appears I have to do an 5y old explanation.

1 - In the product line of Nintendo consoles ever produced, the N64 by being an SGI Onyx in a box, was the exception in regards to IP before technical specifications.

2 - In 1996, when the N64 was released into the market, ALL game consoles had hardware limitations of some sort. This includes Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar, 3DO, and Playstation 1.

> 2 - In 1996, when the N64 was released into the market, ALL game consoles had hardware limitations of some sort. This includes Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar, 3DO, and Playstation 1.

So, N64 wasn't an exception since it's a console with hardware limitation ?

In the product line of Nintendo consoles ever produced, the N64 by being an SGI Onyx in a box, was the EXCEPTION in regards to IP before technical specifications.

Oh, so it's about IP, not technical specifications or hardware limitations ? edit: Quite frankly, comments like With exception of N64. throw me off in the long run.

An exception to being outdated or significantly less powerful than the competition... Like the original comment said...

I dunno, on paper maybe but in practice N64 look no better or worse than PS1, textures were very low quality (I think it was a texture cache size problem). Games like MGS or Vagrant Story looked better than anything on the N64 for me.

N64 also had the advantage to not suffer from the "wobbling walls" effect of the PS1, at least to me

N64 limitations came in cartridge size — 64MB vs 600+MB for CDs. Voice acting and cutscenes were largely nonexistent.

As someone who hates cutscenes, that was fine by me. Cutscenes rip you out of the game to present a story in a different mode, and often it could be completely done by using the game mechanics directly. Not to mention until quite recently they would also take large loading times.

Even if you take cutscenes out of it, there's simply almost 90% less space for a game - and cartridges were more expensive for the publisher to boot.

There's no denying that there's great N64 games, but Nintendo crippled the console outside of first and second (Rare) party development. The same trend continued with the Gamecube (despite it being more powerful than the PS2, the Gamecube disc held 25% of the capacity of a PS2 DVD).

If their portables hadn't dominated the market, the mid 90s to mid 00s would've been a terrible time for the company.

Of course Nintendo is doing great now, so you could say it's all a moot point.

I know that there’s been activity in the emulation scene around “extending” the SNES emulators with features the SNES never had during its lifetime, like CD-quality audio aka the PSX, or hi-res texture packs, or faster + higher-resolution poly rendering for games using the SuperFX chip; and there have been ROMhacks and home brew that take advantage of these extensions.

Has anyone tried doing the same for the N64? Seeing what would be possible for an N64 game given an emulator tweaked to allow an unlimited ROM and VRAM size budget and (effectively) zero DSP DMA delay?

Gamecube was also arguably more powerful than its peers (PS2 and original Xbox).

I wouldn't say seamlessly but it run okay yeah. There is a digital foundry video already on the technical side of thing, apparently it's using AMD FSR1

I think it's great that it maintains a solid 30 and seems to have very few issues.

Another interesting perspective is that it—a game made at the end of the Switch's life (we hope)—is only marginally prettier and more polished than BOTW—a launch title. I would still hold BOTW as one of the prettiest Switch titles, including third parties (I realise this is subjective). I'm not sure of another console where you don't make graphical progress in 6 years of it existing. I don't know why this is, or even if it's a failing, I just think it's interesting.

> I would still hold BOTW as one of the prettiest Switch titles

+1; I don't usually care much about graphics (I play ASCII roguelikes for crying out loud), but there have been several moments in BotW where I found myself soaking in the scenery because it was gorgeous.

I think sometimes we conflate "graphical fidelity" with "beauty". I agree that BotW is one of the most beautiful games I've played, and that's an artistic achievement not a technical one. They do of course go hand in hand to some extent - sometimes you need technical tools for artistic vision, but you don't need high-tech for beauty.

I guess they don't think optimization is evil

Nintendo games are like well crafted watches, they may not show the time perfectly but they are damn well optimized under the hood.

Perfect analogy.

How does that work? What are these watches optimized for then?

I think the commenter means that mechanical watches don't keep time as well as digital watches. So, I guess they are optimized for mechanical beauty instead of timekeeping.

That you never see? So a piece of software might be amazingly-engineered but doesn't do the main function well - is that the analogy?

The graphics are pretty basic (like 2006-era) compared to modern AAA titles on other consoles.

Is there actually no loading screens?

While not a deal breaker, BOTW with zero waiting 5-10s for fast travel or shrines or loading saves would have been a MUCH smoother experience.

There are loading screens. It's basically same as BOTW.

Look at the latest Pokemon game, it runs horribly on Switch. Even they don’t pull it off…

Pokemon games are developed by Game Freak, not Nintendo's in-house studio (Nintendo EPD).

Pokemon-Games are not from Nintendo itself. They own shares of the franchise, but it seems they are overall not directly involved into the game-development, unlike with Zelda. And Pokemon in general has different problems regarding quality. They are more time-constrained, stressed, and seem to have some internal struggle in the last years. While Zelda seems to had the liberty to develop peacefully for years on their own.

TotK has also basically been in development for a decade. The game represents peak Switch optimization.

Not even close. It's a BOTW expansion pack writ large, there's little performance or graphical difference between TOTK and BOTW, a game that released six years ago.

This is apparently incorrect. I'm avoiding detailed tech reviews right now so as to not spoil myself, but reports are that the original BOTW held itself back in order to accommodate the Wii U. Draw distances appear to be higher, objects are more detailed and there are more of them, there are more LODs, and the framerate is now reliably 30 FPS in all but the most demanding scenes (which sounds like faint praise, but if you've ever played the original, is a definite improvement).

It helps that the original game was utterly gorgeous, thanks to inspired art direction.

Same engine, slight retune, not six years-worth-of-dev-new. Much more of an iterative upgrade. Compare, for instance, Ocarina of Time (1998) and, Windwaker (2003), vs Ocarina (1998) and Majora's Mask (2000), and you'll see that BOTW/TOTK is much closer to the latter than the former.

That's definitely down to the developers; it doesn't look visually advanced, and they know exactly what hardware constraints they had to work on.

It's using proven technology and they didn't push any boundaries, graphics wise; Breath of the Wild also came out for the Wii U, which is nearly 11 years old now and even at the time didn't really try to push any performance boundaries.

Same way they pulled it off for the original game - BOTW, considering it's the exact same engine with little to no graphical changes.

no offense to nintendo and fans, but fidelity wise the game looks like an early ps3 game and runs at 30 fps with dips in certain areas and very regular dips when using certain game mechanics.

I can count the triangles on a lot of geometry visibly, and the textures are so blurred it looks like you take any modern PC game and only render the lowest available level of detail of all the textures. I can count the pixels in the shadows on the floor and lighting wise the game is extremely basic (it doesn't need to be more because of the art style). most effects you see in the game are literally blurry billboarded (but granted alpha blended) sprites, including the clouds that are so important in this games visuals.

and to top it off we're in 2023 with half the people or more on 4k screens and the game doesn't even manage native 900p most of the time.

the art design of the game is just designed well around those constraints. very well. but the devs likely did nothing super special to make it run well.

yeah none of that matters, if the gameplay is amazing. BOTW was amazing and this one looks to have surpassed it from reviews.

Original comment:

>Apparently the game is just 16GB and runs seamlessly on a decade old hardware with no loading screens between game areas.

>How does Nintendo pull it off?

Because it looks like two decade old game. No one is arguing that it can be fun, but it looks awful.

> it looks like two decade old game.

Yeah, no. https://static.kinguin.net/cdn-cgi/image/f=auto/media/catego... is what a two decade old game looks like.

Zelda looks extremely close to this with a different art style. 15 year old game for sure, on par with God of War 2/3.

GameFAQs tier trolling here.

Have you seen modern video games? Take a look at The Last of Us Part II, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Red Dead Redemption 2, Hogwarts Legacy, Horizon Forbidden West, etc. The difference in fidelity, animations, audio, and just overall depth and immersion is astronomical.

Zelda would make for a great game on my phone though.

Priorities. For Nintendo, size matters. Time also matters. In an old interview, Someone from Nintendo says that the time to put the disc in the Wii and be able to play Zelda needs to be less than 30sec.

A great example is the size of Super Mario Odyssey being 5.7GB and a save file from NBA2k18 being 5GB. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/09/super_mario_odysse...

Apparently the save data was really only 75MB. I'm not sure what could use 5GB in save data... dynamically generated FMV?

Nintendo save: bit-optimised tightly packed binary

NBA savegame: json encoded in xml, run through a base64 because < in team names was breaking saves, all packed in YAML because the new summer intern couldn’t find a parser library for anything else

Note that all Switch games have to be small, out of technical necessity. The Switch only comes with 32 GB of internal storage, and that also gets used for your game saves, your screenshots/videos, and the OS itself. If Nintendo wants to offer digital downloads, and if it doesn't want to require users to go out and buy an SD card to expand their storage (which, to be clear, you should anyway for convenience), then they have to keep game sizes small.

HN audience may appreciate the "Ask the developer" series in the News section: https://www.zelda.com/tears-of-the-kingdom/en/news/

My god. This almost brings tears to my eyes. I haven't played games for years. Small children and adult life kind of came in the way... I don't miss gaming that much, but I miss Zelda.

The sheer perfection of the Zelda games are just mindblowing to me. I replayed The Legend of Zelda many years ago and it was obvious that the gameplay was still holding up. They got it right from the absolute beginning. And not only that, it is basically the same gameplay still used (at least up to Twilight Princess which is the last major Zelda game I played. They are so consistent.

Breath of the wild was probably the largest change in the original Zelda formula since ocarina of time (which introduced 3D for the first time)

Based on the trailers I've seen of tears of the kingdom(and I've been trying to avoid that because spoilers) this game walks even further down the path that breath of the wild set out!

We're kind of alike you and I,I think. While I don't have kids that keep me from gaming, I could do without it all, except for Zelda. My switch is currently downloading totk.

It could just be that we're trained on their mechanics due to their consistency over the years

Only been playing for an hour, but when you first jump off and start flying into the garden... yes basically had tears in my eyes. Perfection.

I just played it for an hour. It's like a remix Breath of the Wild, which isn't a bad thing considering BotW might be the best game I've ever played. But because of that there's no initial mind blowing experience of learning the mechanics for the first time, understanding how you can go anywhere, climb anything, etc. Hard to replicate an experience like that I suppose. But it still seems like a ton of fun, and I'm sure I'll enjoy it plenty.

I didn't play BotW, would it be ok for me to jump right into this one?

Why would you want to?! If I could go back in time and play BotW again for the first time I would

It probably would be fine but you should consider just playing BOTW. I don’t think this game will be a huge technical leap ahead given it’s a switch title anyway. BOTW holds up very well imo so you would be doing yourself a disservice to skip it.

Probably even better, as the overworld will be completely new.

Playing TOTK it's a drastic improvement over BotW.

I started playing a week ago, though I’m not super far in.

You could, but I’d definitely suggest playing Breath of the Wild first if possible. TotK is a sequel, so characters already know you, part of the fun is seeing how the map changed, etc.

Also, they’ve added quite a few conveniences that would make it hard to play in the reverse order.

Yes, there's a recap on Nintendo YouTube. Zelda games aren't know for the story.

And....no. BotW is still arguably the best game ever. Missing it might not be a great idea. Tough choice :)

Any reason not to try it?

It’s actually excellent and if you have a kid it’s great to play with them on a rainy day.

I handle the monsters and Yiga, and heckle during the puzzles.

It would be totally fine from like a plot standpoint, but personally I would play BotW first. Or at the very least get like 50% of the way through. I think that game does a better job of introducing the open world Zelda concept and it's a really fun experience the first time.

This game obviously has the same open world but it's not introduced in quite such a spectacular way (probably because they know most people have already played it).

If you didn't play BotW, then by all means, play one of the best-reviewed games of all time, which is probably a little bit cheaper by now. It's not like you'd be going back to 8-bit era and the technological whiplash would ruin the experience - they're basically the same in terms of quality, scope, and tech experience.

Sadly, at least on switch, it isn't cheaper. Exact same price as the brand new release.

Nintendo can be very, very cruel with their prices.

lol, okay, guess I shouldn't be surprised at nintendo at this point, they're certainly consistent.

but that's just the digital download - the cartridge can be had at used game stores for probably about half.

My first mind-blowing moment in BotW was peeking down from from the top of a hill and seeing a deep valley with a river to the east and a ridge with a forest to the west. They blended gorgeously into a single landscape but I understood that each option would be a different adventure. It was like choosing the north or east exit in classical Zelda, except this was totally organic, not instantiated, operating over perfectly continuous space. I was ~30 at the time and had been playing open world games since the early 2000s. It blew my mind regardless.

Having played so many games, and having even worked at Nintendo for a good time, I’ve lost my sense of wonder somewhat and I only expect to have a few more moments like that in the rest of my life. Nintendo is nevertheless possibly one of the few companies still capable of pulling it off.

For sure. When you first play BotW it's somehow like, oh yeah, I get it now, this is what Zelda was supposed to be all along. More than that even, it's like the platonic ideal of a video game.

For me BotW is what Skyward Sword was trying to be but could not on the Wii.

YouTube critic Nerrel argues quite the opposite, that SS emphasizes a completely different set of the Zelda core values— it's about story/characters, elaborate dungeons and bosses each bursting with unique personality, and classical, linear item-unlock progression paths. Whereas BOTW isn't any of those things and prioritizes freedom, exploration, and emergent gameplay.

See: https://youtu.be/P_Q2wREAwRM

BOTW was almost perfect, but the weapon breaking system left me so tired of managing it. What a constant distraction! I get that they wanted to encourage experimentation, but they overtuned it, and it became a chore.

If TOTK has the same system, I'm returning it.

I just rushed the Master Sword and lived with the cooldown. Been a while but don’t remember being too frustrated about it.

How can you rush the master sword? It requires a ridiculous amount of hearts and even if you have it it breaks so quickly.

There's a method (speed running glitch) to get the master sword w/o the heart requirement. Do a search for "botw get the master sword early" and you should have lots of step by steps if you ever want to do it.

There's the statue that allows changing stamina for hearts. Once you have ~10 hearts, you can get the last 3 or so by temporarily switching them with the statue. That helps.

Also, the Trials of the Sword (expansion optional adventure) make the master sword do more damage. It should last longer, as you need to use less strikes with it.

I actually liked that system, and yes it's also present in TOTK.

I'm worried about something else personally - the whole system of building things with random parts looks extremely janky. I was hoping it's only going to be required to solve a few puzzles and that's it, but according to some reviews the entire world is designed around you building this stuff. Well, I'm going to have a try this weekend, but it might end up on eBay by Monday :/

Yeah, I’m really hoping TOTK isn’t half BOTW and half Minecraft.

Same. I finished BOTW, but while I'm slightly curious about TOTK, I really have no appetite to return to the same combat loop, especially due to weapon durability preventing me from just picking a style and sticking with it. Maybe if the Master Sword is easy to get...

The sandbox stuff sounds amazing in a Minecraft/Garry's Mod kinda way, but those never caught me so I hope it brings joy to many others.

TOTK has the same system but the weapon durability is greatly increased. My stash has been full the entire game so far and I regularly throw weapons away just to try new ones.

On its own, it's arguably probably worse. There are a few improvements, you start out with a larger inventory and you are showered with parts to use with fuse.

I do not see what Nintendo sees that this system added to the game.

There's fusion now. Makes durability interesting.

The game design analysis was that it ties in to the open-world system. If you're good/lucky enough to pick up a powerful weapon early on, it still won't carry you for the rest of the game.

As it is, I still end up buying ever more sword slots because I always have more than I can really use.

You can buy sword slots in BOTW? I thought its only through the seeds?

That's what I mean. "buying" them with korok seeds.

Yes! It also means privileging exploration over combat and discouraging min/max type character builds. I think it's a really great addition and ditching it would make BOTW a very different (and IMO much worse) game

It does have the same system so I guess you should return it/cancel your order.

Like BOTW, even from the very beginning of the game, you never run out of weapons/always have more weapons than slots, so for anyone else, I'd recommend not worrying about it. There's a new modding mechanic that makes swapping around weapons even more fun now.

(talking from the videos alone, I don't own the new game just yet)

It does have the same weapon breaking system. A video showed a stick breaking after hitting an enemy long enough.

But

You have a new "combination" power now. The same video showed that you could combine the stick with a stone. It was mentioned that "this is more durable". Perhaps one can keep combining stones to a weapon in order to increase durability? We will see.

I completely disagree. The master sword is the most boring weapon.

Yes, it does suffer from the “never use my best item cuz I might need it later”-issue that you also have in final fantasy.

I just ended up storing my best weapons in my house on display.

There’s mods[1] for the Cemu version that removes the weapons breaking system

[1] https://gamebanana.com/mods/49493

It took me forever to figure it out and I only recently noticed it after I put the game away shortly after its release, but: if you perform a shield parry, the enemy will drop his weapon. You can then pick it up. This means you can go into a fight with no weapon and only a shield and end up being the one with the weapon fighting an unarmed enemy.

You can also use shock arrows IIRC to stun enemies and make drop their (metal) weapons.

My preorder (the first game I preordered in 20 years) came one day early. It was the closest I've come to that childhood feeling of a birthday or Christmas present. Spent a few hours on it after putting my kid to bed and it's definitely succeeded in drawing me into that world again.

I'm somewhat amazed how each Zelda (or Mario for that matter) title is essentially exactly the same story over and over, but still with enough changes to make it feel totally new again. Sure, a lot of the mechanics are the same as in BOTW (the good and the bad), maybe more of an evolution than a revolution, but critics saying it's like a DLC for BOTW are wrong.

That's probably because in both cases, the story isn't as important as the gameplay (more-so in Mario than Zelda)

I slowly grinded my way through BOTW over the last years, every few months a few steps forward, then getting bored. Left the plateau, tamed a horse and have now the full picture of the princess and a long sleep. Nice, but still little curiousity what happens next. I wish I could feel what everyone else seems to enjoy…

The game is sooooo boring as a casual that’s only playing on commute. It feels like no progress and only grinding. I really wished there was an option to disable grinding/breaking of stuff.

That’s been my problem with Zelda games since maybe OoT… well, maybe not exactly my problem.

My problem is mostly that if I don’t play it for a week or two, and come back to it, I can’t remember what’s going on at all and it seems like too much of a chore to re-build my context.

They do such a good job with Mario odyssey on showing you what to do and letting you teleport between worlds… there is no grinding at all I feel like. I wish they’d adopt that paradigm for Zelda too.

I have been stuck on the Lynel in the castle since last year.

I am afraid of picking it up again because I absolutely cannot remember where I was and what I was doing.

Yeah this is why I never picked BOTW back up, I'd no longer remember anything. I keep meaning to, I just haven't done so, and each time I consider it, it seems like too much to take on that weekend. I did beat 3 of the 4 Divine Beasts before that. I know I never tackled the Castle or the DLC.

At least with the sequel it's kind of expected I start fresh.

I do agree that progression is slow, but I never felt it was grindy. Stuff broke, but my inventory was always full of other stuff so it hardly mattered. I guess if you felt like you needed to complete all the shrines it could feel grindy? They’re all different at least.

Inventory was always full with sh*t. Nothing really helpful. Sure you had to collect some stuff in OoT too, but at least the sword was always available and mostly enough to get around. The shrines are fine for me, it's just annoying to spend time to have meaningful weapons, not just sticks. I stoped playing it and wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Would rather tell them to play TP or OoT.

Did you just play the tutorial and stop when you didn't have a master sword half an hour into the game?

Weapons are literally everywhere. You kill a monster, it will generally drop it's weapon. They're scattered all over the ground. They're in chests. There is never a lack of weapons, and that is one of the core points of the game.

Literally the only way you could be stuck with tree branches is if you stuck to the opening part of the Great Plateau or intentionally pretended all the weapons didn't exist.

The isometric Zeldas on 2DS/GBA are all much superior experiences, especially for a commute imo. Link Between Worlds is one of my favourite games of all time.

The 3D Zeldas have always been kind of meh in my experience. Although I did love BotW for the first 20 hours or so.

Same, I've been playing it for about 4 years. I had a tonne of enjoyment just creeping around the map and figuring out how to get onto each tower to unlock that area of the map, finding the portals and doing those challenges. Story wise I'm way behind though!

Same, I've been putting in baby steps of progress in the game over several years. The story is quite boring and once you've been introduced to the main gameplay mechanics they get old fairly quickly. Feels like a chore more than anything. I used to love Zelda games like OoT and Majora's Mask. Maybe I've just gotten older and my tastes have changed.

No, BotW is more like a theme park than a game, and I don't understand the love for it.

The game is sparse and sterile, the characters are boring and generic, the story/dialogue is cringe inducing, the world is empty and plain, and there's nothing to do.

It borrows heavily from open world game tropes, and it doesn't add anything. Once you've played about 5-6 hours you've seen the entire game, just not all of its permutations.

This is the first game where I've had a real disagreement with everyone else about its fun factor. Previously I was extremely disappointed in Diablo 3, but there were plenty of people who understood and agreed with my sentiments quite vocally.

With BotW it's like people are playing a different game, or they're somehow mentally wired differently. I sincerely don't understand what happened there. I'm usually very good at acknowledging high quality games, even if I don't personally like them... BotW is not a great game, it's mediocre at best.

Very well and consicely put.

The people who liked BotW the most are likely people who never really played many open world games, or none. To long time PC gamers it's nothing new of course.

I liked the style, I generally enjoy world exploration and that was fun in BotW, and there were many cool experiences scattered around, but it does end up feeling a little empty.

I still played it a ton mind you, but I don't consider it an important or ground breaking game the way many seem to.

I have played plenty of PC open world games and I think BOTW is better than any of them.

I think it's done fairly well, but the novelty isn't there for an older PC gamer.

I have heard plenty of people talk about how new the open world is to them in BotW (in a way that clearly suggests they've never tried it before). The novelty factor of any (to the user) new game genre amplifies the positive reaction.

I don't know any prior open-world game that makes the physical exploration of the landscape feel as natural and enjoyable as BOTW. That felt like a new experience to me. The closest I could identify would be Just Cause 2, but movement on the ground in that game feels much more clunky. There's certainly an aesthetic aspect to it as well.

I was SHOCKED reading BOTW reviews. So, so, sooooo many of it's supposed "strengths" had been touted as failings of other open world games. Like the big but empty world, or the grindiness, or the "sameness" of the different things on the maps (like shrines, towers).

Zelda and MegaMan were always two franchises where I always thought the characters were interesting but just never could get into the majority of the games.

With a Zelda I've only ever played the original NES one and liked the time I spent. With MegaMan it's always been the off shoots. MegaMan Soccer was constantly rented growing up and Battle Network was great.

But what's weird to me is that I've never enjoyed any of the 3d Zelda games, but still consider the MegaMan Legends series among the best games I've ever played. I'm still bitter I bought a 3ds specifically in anticipation of the third game and it was then cancelled.

Try Links Awakening

I’ve been playing since it came out here and there, probably at least 100-200 hours by now, and haven’t even defeated a single main boss. It probably tells you something positive about the game that one can get so much enjoyment just from running around and exploring! But I do sometimes wish the world felt a bit less empty of characters… and it doesn't sound like the new one improves much in this regard.

There are loads of characters...they're all in the villages near the divine beasts

Try riding a bear or a stag instead of a horse to mix it up a little.

I feel the same. Don't get the hype around BOTW. Super boring game.

That new Zelda seems to be very inspired by Ghibli's aesthetics. It's definitely a void in the video game world that was begging to be filled. A few elements that pop out:

- Flying islands and robots remind Laputa's castle in the Sky

- Villains with lots of tentacles look like demons in Mononoke

- Small villages have a Nausicaa feel

- The music borrows a lot from joe hisaishi.

I wish I had the kind of time I had when I was a kid... That stuff looks amazing.

I can't remember where I read it, but someone at Nintendo admitted that Breath of the Wild (the previous Zelda game) was directly inspired by Ghibli movies - and Skyrim.

I don't feel this is specifically Ghibli. A lot of it seems common to a wider range of Japanese media, of which Zelda is a prominent instance.

- Flying islands: also featured in several previous Zelda games including Minish Cap, Twilight Princess, and Skyward Sword. It's become a fairly common anime trope, though Laputa is definitely the oldest instance I can come up with.

- Villains with lots of tentacles: That's a very common thing in Japanese media and seems to go back much further than modern anime.

- I haven't watched Nausicaa yet (though I do have it in a Ghibli collection box that I've been slowly working my way through with my family). However, I feel the Zelda villages are basically just picturuesque Japanese countryside.

- I am really looking forward to hearing more of it than I did through the trailers. So far, though, it sounds very much like a riff off of the soundtracks of earlier Zelda games. It makes sense that they're similar. After all, Koji Kondo (who wrote the music for many of the earlier Zelda games) is also Japanese and started his career shortly after Joe Hisaishi. They likely had similar influences.

Haha I still remember seeing "A Link to the past" the first time, watching my big brother playing it. Immediately fell in love and the whole series is still one of my favorites ever!

It has aged incredibly well. A Link To The Past is still almost as fun to play as it was back then.

It definitely is, but if you are looking for a challenge, I think the randomizer is pretty fun https://alttpr.com/ There are even races and tournaments, often with the more difficult variations like keysanity

I also think it still looks great

Me too. Their ability to create art that ages so well is inspiring. Other developers have done it too, but Nintendo has done it with incredible consistency.

And sounds great! The soundtrack contributes perfectly to the overall vibe, didn’t notice that 30 years ago. It really is a work of art.

As an early SNES game looks quite weak compared RPGs later in the SNES life cycle, which often had amazing pixel art, e.g. Seiken Densetsu 3 (Trials of Mana). They really should have made a second SNES Zelda.

I think it's also important to point out that Zelda games since the 80s have been one of the best pieces of software humans have ever invented. So many classic titles that have enthralled generations of gamers. You wouldn't get an immersive experience if these games were buggy or didn't have compelling stories and art.

I don't think I've ever heard of someone describe a Zelda game as having a compelling story before.

They have great storyTELLING, I guess, since it's presented fairly beautifully, but "man wants to take over world, hero must stop him, princess also involved" is not... particularly revolutionary.

Successful stories are seldom revolutionary. What matters is, if it is well done. And Zelda was very well done all around. Graphic, music, sound, characters and yet unique enough, to create that franchise.

(I only played the gameboy version ages ago, but I still remember the atmosphere).

I've attempted to play through BOTW a couple times and ended up giving up due to weapons breaking, endless shrines, generally rather boring gameplay. The hype here is fascinating. I guess nostalgia and liking what everyone else says they like is a powerful thing. I just finished Horizon Zero Dawn, which I found to be a far superior open world game, the graphics alone are jaw dropping, the gameplay is exciting, quite an incredible production. I'm curious if any of The Zelda fans here have played it?

I have yet to complete it but I fully enjoyed the game though that said the weapons durability always felt way to low and that admittedly did end up being very annoying

I did see a good video on why they have the weapons breaking; it's so that there's always rewards to be found when you go exploring. If you keep finding a weapon you already have, it won't be rewarding to go exploring.

This video was IIRC comparing it with Elden Ring, which has so many weapons, spells, armor pieces, summons, weapon skills, etc etc that it is able to fill up its world to a satisfying degree without having to resort to breaking weapons so you need to find a new one.

But it also pointed out that a lot of the items you can find are asset reuse; weapon skills were already present on certain weapons, but now you can find the skills separately as well. Most, if not all of the summons are also existing enemies or bosses, just with different AI. And a lot of enemies' animations and behaviours were lifted / borrowed from previous From Software games.

I've played both, and liked BOTW much more, although I also liked Horizon Zero Dawn. I also have the 2nd part of Horizon Zero Dawn (don't even remember the name) and tried to start it twice, but I guess I didn't get hooked into it and dropped it in favor of something else. I guess they're two very different games. Even though both are "open world", I feel Zero Dawn is much more "on rails" than BOTW. I felt there's much more exploration and finding out by yourself on BOTW, while in Horizon is more about "go there, do that. Then go there, and do this other thing. etc".

I’ve played both and I’ve also enjoyed Horizon more than BOTW. BOTW’s world felt more organic and I loved that the game encouraged having curiosity and rewarded them (Can I go there? Can I solve this puzzle this way?).

But in the end, I enjoyed Horizon’s tight combat system much more than BOTW.

Played both, and they have their own quirks and irks. I agree Horizon's story is much more interesting, but the constant backseat and marked objectives are a bit of a turnoff for me. I've yet to finish it but I'm the kind of player who rarely finish the games they start.

Zelda, I just had to drop. The weapons breaking alone was just so annoying, and most of the shrines feel like a chore. I liked the exploration, but it felt like every game mechanic the game had to offer was here to get in the way of me progressing.

Yes I should have mentioned the story in HZD is quite well thought out and reveals itself to you well over the game. Whereas Nintendo has the eye rolling save the princes from the baddies, again.

The weapons durability bothered me at first. I kept thinking I'd eventually be able to repair them or something. Eventually I realized it was kind of fun because it forces you to try new weapons constantly. The only mechanics that I find tedious are buying/selling and cooking. I'd way rather a Skyrim style interface to set up a transaction with all the items you want and then confirm it. BOTW is exhausting when you want to unload a bunch of junk or cook 100 hearty durians.

> or cook 100 hearty durians

I also really don't like the BotW cooking mechanic, but mostly because it's so tedious to sit through the mini cooking cut-scene.

Cooking and crafting in Stardew Valley have zero ceremony, you just click on the recipe and boom you're done, it's exactly as fast as any other inventory operation.

I don't know why certain cooked foods in BotW stack and some don't. Searing meat is a good way of stacking up a huge amount of cooked food, because it stacks.

The cooking mechanic was kind of broken because there were a tonne of in-game guides and quests leading you towards the "mix and match different recipes, experiment and find the best buffs for a situation" when it became basically "four bananas" was the only one I ended up wanting to use.

it's a little bonkers that there were so many recipes in that game, but cooking a single yellow-heart item was more effective than any healing recipe, and there was no bonus effect for mixing or being thoughtful.

I kinda like the charm of the cooking animation. I feel like it's more fun than other games that turns crafting into "just press the button in the menu". Especially with the environmental cooking methods, why shouldn't I be able to cook my meat on the ground with a flaming sword?

If I was designing the Zelda cooking system:

- definitely some sort of bookmarkable known recipes book that gets brought up from the cooking pot instead of paging through the inventory

- asynchronous cooking; I don't mind the cooking animation, just give me multiple cooking pots and let me move around while it (quickly) cooks

- holding more than 5 items at a time, like hold 50 drumsticks to throw all at once onto a firepit to sear

- big batches (upgradable cooking pot sizes), why not throw 100 apples into the pot for 20 servings made at once?

TOTK added a recipe system where once you cook a meal, you can select an ingredient to view all meals containing it and automatically select all the ingredients for a specific meal. Which is at least part of what you want. I would definitely agree that things like cooking 100 hearty durians gets really painful after a while though.

Opposite experience for me, I preordered Horizon Zero Dawn and was really looking forward to it but quickly got bored and never went back to it.

I’ve played Breath of the Wild for many hours. I agree on the weapon breaking thing, probably one of the most frustrating parts of the game and I still don’t understand why they did that.

This new game looks even better too from what I have seen.

The low weapons durability encourages the player to use all the weapons instead of a small set of his favourite weapons. Notice how even though your weapons break all the time, you (almost) never [1] run out of weapons. You can steal weapons from the enemies or pick up whatever is around and use it as a weapon.

Initially, I did not like this mechanism, but I have come to appreciate it. It reduces your comfort, but you experience more of the game.

[1] Fighting a Lynel and "consuming" all your weapons before he even reaches half his health has happened to me a couple of times.

Yeah, I remember binging BOTW until I got to the part in the castle where the Lynel is.

I still haven't picked up BOTW again because of that.

Lynel are a "skill wall" where you have to learn dodging to pass them. Once you can dodge and hit back reliably, they become much easier (still hard, but not impossible)

Lynels are intimidating but aren’t unmanageable after a few encounters. Mostly they’re just annoyingly consuming weapons. On defense, upgraded armor, stasis and actually USING the shield is good enough. For offense, urbosas fury + mount and strike gets most of the health down. Bonus points for flurry rush.

Hope you pick it up again, if you’re at the castle you probably don’t have too much left.

Using the glider to chain critical arrow shots is a great way to take out a lynel quickly, too. There's only a few places where lynels appear where you can't use that tactic.

Lynels really annoyed me because there was such a big skill jump between them and everything else. I saved close to a Lynel and practised for several hours to get the hang of dodging. Once I nailed that, they became much easier. Then you just keep the weapons they drop to kill the next Lynel, since they're so powerful and durable.

No lynel is mandatory. The castle ones (there's two) you can skip by climbing the walls instead of entering their "arenas".

Think of fighting a Lynel as if you were fighting a challenging opponent in Punch-Out!, it's all about timing, and once you get it done not particularly difficult

Played both. I played Horizon first, Zelda second. Both were enjoyable.

I found horizon to be visually beautiful but the open world aspect not all that interesting personally.

Zelda, I came to it after hearing people praising it as the best game ever made. For me it’s a solid 8/10 game but definitely not all that incredible. Some of the mechanics are frustrating like the breaking weapons as you mentioned. I found the open world lacking in life. You can explore, sure, but there’s not much to do.

Vast parts of it are just empty stretches with enemies here and there and nothing really happens in that world.

I think both are excellent games but neither of them made me want to immerse myself in the worlds they were set in and neither made me want to come back for more.

   I guess nostalgia and liking what everyone else says they like is a powerful thing.

This is a cognitive distortion you should be very mindful of.

e.g. If X is true for you, X is true in general, and therefore what else is "true" must be so given X.

In this case X is Breath of the Wild being "boring".

By failing to correctly recognize that there can be things about the world other people experience, that you do not, you are forcing yourself to assume others must be

     liking what everyone else says they like

Which paints an unnecessarily bleak view of your peers and incorrectly orients you to them.

When something is true for you... that's it. You can't draw many conclusions from that single data point. You necessarily need to include the perspectives of others to properly triangulate what might be before attempting to draw any conclusions.

There are so many infinite ways the video game Breath of the Wild could be popular without that negative and misleading worldview needing to be the reason, but you limit your capacity to understand those other reasons, and empathize with others, if everything you subjectively experience must also be objective fact.

Having played and completed (though not 100%'ed) both, I did like HZD's story more - though Zelda has never been known for the stories - but disliked/hated everything else, to the point of going from somewhat hyped for the second game to having absolutely no intention of ever playing it. The gameplay is just so... like everything else. It's a competent game, that's it.

BOTW, on the other hand, has the usual Nintendo good-vs-evil story, but everything else is basically perfect. The gameplay is incredibly fluid, the world is immersive, the soundtrack is great. Even "bad" mechanics like the weapon durability one have their place - they force you to experiment in the sandbox and try out more stuff instead of just killing one lynel and keeping his sword.

One day Nintendo games will be free of the shackles of Nintendo hardware and we will all be so much better for it.

Tears is an absolutely brilliant game that suffers from 20-30fps and incredibly conspicuous pop-ins.

I’ve been using a PS4 controller which really helps with avoiding cramping on tiny controllers. Though I’ve heard the Pro Controller is great too. But in general I find myself enjoying the game despite the hardware.

They will rerelease this game eventually on a future console and it will play at 60fps easily. They have done this with almost every Zelda game.

I really wanted Mario Sunshine on the switch earlier this season. They stopped selling the software on purpose.

Limited-time-only software is completely against Nintendo’s core philosophy of fun. It’s quite shocking.

Software generally isn't released forever. Can you buy the original Metroid Prime for Gamecube? Nope. Same with pretty much any old game. It was a time limited release for the anniversary. If you still want it you can buy the disk version on Amazon for $100, no?

Super Mario 3D All Stars was released on September 18, 2020 and was available until March 31, 2021, when it was discontinued. Six months.

I’ll get the popcorn for the Nintendo apologist responses. But this is silly, foolish, and absolutely anti-Nintendo when it comes to it games being about fun and not about collecting or scalping. I’m not paying $159 for it. I’ll just pirate it.

yes, it was a limited release and said so when it was released:

https://www.polygon.com/2020/9/3/21213766/super-mario-3d-all...

you're acting as if this was some sort of rug pull.

again, if you want it you can still buy it - just not from nintendo directly. I fail to see the issue.

Nintendo nailed it again. Almost every single outlet gave it a 10.

And the fixed the performance issues too, even Digital Foundry was impressed at how drastic of a change the day one patch was compared to the cartridge version.

I should be playing but this, but do not own a Nintendo Switch. As usual will be behind 3 years and will probably play it in 2025/2026.

For people wanting to see details of the game with minimal spoilers: https://old.reddit.com/r/tearsofthekingdom/ (0)

For people wanting to see spoilers and the cool craziness that can be achieved in the game: https://old.reddit.com/r/TOTK/

(0) Not sure if this is going to change immediately after release

Nintendo proves over and over that it's not the computing power of the system, or the "realism" of the game, or blood and guts that makes a game fun.

Has anyone else here taken the day off to play this? I have taken a rare day off to play this all day.

"But why are you here on Hackernews idk1?"

Well let me tell you, according to a text message, Terry from DPD is delivering my game between 9:53am and 10:53am so I'm currently perched in my front window waiting for it.

(I'm not a digital copy person for all the normal reasons, I can't lend it out, I can't re-sell it in a year, I lose it if I lose my Nintendo account, etc.)

Mohsin from DPD is delivering mine around 2pm. Enjoy

A lot of people think Link is the hero today, but the true heros are Mohsins and Terrys from DPDs.

I wish I have the time to sink 100+ hours on this game. I still haven't finished BOTW after playing it on and off for a few years. Hoping the next Zelda would be more brief like the old Wind Waker.

I have a similar relationship with gaming. BOTW and Dark Souls are my favorite games of all time, but I've never gotten around to finish them.

On an off for a while too but I'm hoping it keeps this way and it never finishes. It's not the destination, it's the journey

I think I feel sick today.. probably need the day off.

I'll buy it once it's playable on Yuzu/Ryujinx. Not going back to 1080p 30-ish FPS like BOTW was on the switch.

It likely isn't even 1080, the Switch itself is 720 and games MAY upscale to 1080p when docked, but that will affect performance as well.

The Switch was underpowered at launch, but that kept it affordable I guess. I hope they do a revision, they tried that with the "New Nintendo 2/3DS" but I don't believe that was very successful - only a handful of games came out targeting the hardware refresh. No games company wanted to leave the millions of regular 2/3DS consoles behind.

For those of us who have never played a Zelda game...how does this compare to Pokemon, Fallout or Knights of the Old Republic?

Not very comparable IMO. Especially to the latter two which are pure RPG.

I think it’d be hard to describe. Maybe you could watch gameplay videos on YouTube?

One quote from a reviewer that I remember - “I didn’t know other games had me in shackles until Breath of the Wild set me free”.

The world feels almost real, every hill, wall or tree is climbable, every crevice has something interesting, if you just swing your sword in a field you'll cut grass and lizards will pop out. It's hard to try to go on a mission and not get lost going after something cool that you find along the way.

Don't forget the weather! A nice surprise for me was when I had several iron weapons and a lightening storm rolled in!

Not being able to climb in the rain is a real pita too

Zelda games are generally considered in the action-adventure genre, rather than RPGs (though this is controversial). Unlike the RPGs you mentioned, there are no explicit stats that you can choose to level up. There is no min-maxing of numbers. Progression is your own gameplay skill improvement and items collected that assist either giving abilities you didn't have before, or are stronger than previous items.

Haven't played TOTK but its predecessor BOTW is one of the best and most open immersive open world games of all time. All physics mechanisms work with other mechanisms and if you can see something, you can go there/interact with it. The map is also big enough thats its in top 10 largest open world maps and from what I've heard TOTK has more than doubled that in size.

The reviews claim that TOTK has only improved in the immersiveness aspect as well.

The fact that it runs on the switch (and they managed to fit it in 18 GB) is a huge feat.

The thing I liked about it was how beautiful the puzzles are, really simple but fun to solve and figure out, often teaching you a new skill as you go. Fighting is also quite fun.

The thing I didn’t like was its easy to get off track and laborious to get places super quickly.

Also I didn’t really get the food/items/combinations system at all, it’s quite unexplained as far as I could tell.

I think Zelda games are in a league of their own, and always have been at every generation. The general mechanic is being able to initially explore, yet running into obstacles that prevent you from going many places. Then you solve the necessary puzzles and kill monsters to acquire tools. Finally, you must figure out where when and how to use those tools to overcome those obstacles to travel to previously unreachable areas. Its a very gratifying experience the first time through, and there is a lot of replay value in the games too.

I find BotW quite similar to FarCry or Horizon.

I can't really draw a parallel to those games, probably the closest would be to fallout, the open world 3d ones specifically. BotW & now TOTK have a massive focus on it's world and it's pretty immersive to clamber over mountains and discover things. It has unique systems to interact and traverse the world, improved further in TOTK.

It’s not really like other Zelda games, nor really an RPG. It gives you lots of freedom and bodily autonomy, but personally I found it very hard to piece together an interesting experience out of the (admittedly very flexible) constituent parts. It’s an extremely good physical simulation of a world I struggled to care one iota about, and there were so few ways to express yourself as a character that you can’t really tell your own story in your head. I sometimes feel similarly about the Assassin’s Creed games - what a lovely engine, that gives you this unique feeling of freedom even within a huge, teeming city, but I wish somebody would make a different game with it. I don’t think you’d enjoy it coming from western RPGs, with slightly meatier worlds and a more developed sense of self. It’s more like Minecraft, if anything.

If you've played any open world game, it's pretty much the same, just a little more formulaic. Characters, story, world are all incredibly basic and predictable. You'll stop finding truly new things after a few hours, making exploration more of a chore than anything else.

I'm maybe a bit nostalgic but I think the Nintendo Switch from a form-factor standpoint along with the tiny game cartridges is the best console made to date. Of course others are more powerful, etc. and I think Nintendo needs to up it just a little bit (1080p on the Switch screen, etc.) but it's just such a pleasure for me to play.

I also like that some games like Disco Elysium, Neverwinter Nights, etc. - these older PC games which work fine on Switch are being ported over. Happy to pay a little more to get the physical cartridge and play it on the Switch - though paying $55.99 for Skyrim seems a little steep to me so I'll continue playing that on Gamepass.

Waiting for my copy of Tears of the Kingdom to arrive today. In the meantime I'm finishing up Metroid: Dread and enjoying that quite a bit too!

> Happy to pay a little more to get the physical cartridge and play it on the Switch

Maybe we are not looking at the same games but the ones I’m looking at are significantly cheaper as cartridge than download (Zelda and Mario, fx)

Sorry I wasn't clear. I was thinking of/comparing to Steam in my head.

I genuinely enjoy the cartridges themselves, the very act of inserting them into the system, they're really cool and nostalgic to me.

Despite being 50yo and much more of a PC guy than a console gamer, I actually pre-ordered TOTK. Even though BOTW was my first Zelda game and also my first open-world console action/RPG, I really enjoyed it and was impressed with what they were able to accomplish.

What makes the Switch fun to play is that it's a handheld that you can dock.

I couldn't care less whether the graphics are hd, 4k, hdr, dolby whatever, 120fps.

The game is fun on the Switch.

Was part of a midnight release at GameStop today with my son, it was packed. I don’t get the wooden cutting board preorder promotion though.

The only game I'm genuinely excited about its release, and the only exception to the "no preorders" rule.

I really hope they invested in storyline/novel gameplay. BOTW set a really high bar; hope this one can match it.

BOTW did not set a high bar for storyline imo. Gameplay yea.

From the reviews, the gameplay seems like its even more fun. Particularly looking forward to the weapons and vehicles system.

Uh-oh, vehicles? The worst part of BotW is the bike, it's jarringly out of line with the whole feel of Zelda, for me. They may as well have put a gun in it.

...ok, I've owned BOTW for 2 years and I've never come across a bike.

It's in the DLC after you rebeat all of the blights and a new super boss.

It's a DLC :)

I do get that it felt a bit out of place initially, but BOTW has 4 massive mechanical laser-shooting beasts, along with a whole fleet of spider-crawling laser robots and helicopter laser robots... The motorcycle doesn't feel so out of place in that context. But I'll admit, I haven't played many previous Zelda games.

Also, the bike is only unlocked after all the divine beasts, when the game is already "over" and you're just trying to complete all the shrines and quests. I'm so happy to have it in order to help me get around faster for those things.

But yeah, I can't deny it felt weird at first :)

To be fair, the bike in BotW so late that it has no real meaningful impact on the game. It's just a fun little reward for practically beating the game so you can now run around and do stupid stuff.

The "vehicles" in this are more like platforms and scraps that you string together to create something that moves by itself.

I'm so upset that I'm really sick right now and can't play it. I mean I guess I could, but I wouldn't enjoy it, my throat is in so much pain. I'll binge it next weekend I suppose. To everyone already playing it, enjoy.

I'll give you what you're asking for:

Why are you upset/sick?

For me 'Zelda' will always be the gold NES cartridge I purchased used from my neighbor after two weeks saving from doing yard work. It endures as my all time favorite game; the legend of 'The Legend of Zelda'.

For anyone not owning a switch but still wanting to experience BoTW esque gameplay and world, I cannot recommend - Immortals: Fenyx Rising - enough .... It's probably the best game ubisoft has made in a long while.

I haven't found any info on how it runs on the 1st gen Switch.

All of the reviews, including the Digital Foundry one were playing it on the OLED model, which - including the 2nd gen one, have higher clock rates and improved many FPS dips in BOTW.

I think all Switch revisions have the same speed - only battery size or SoC efficiency differ.

Where can i find more information about this? I thought the CPU clock was 1.02Ghz and the GPU clock was 307.2-768 MHz for all models.

As far as I know that's the case. You can overclock a modded V2 and Oled Switch higher, but stock they should run at the same clock speed.

I messed up, it's not the clock rates but memory bandwidth, which leads up to 10fps more in Kakariko and Korok forest.

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2019-new-nintendo-s...

The 2019 Switch has better battery life.

The OLED model has the OLED screen, more internal storage, Ethernet port in the dock, and a better kickstand.

That's it — they are all equally powerful.

That's not the case, although it's not the clock rates but memory bandwidth.

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2019-new-nintendo-s...

Site seems to have 403'd, so here's a video:

https://youtu.be/3E2PZ5-IVDw?t=725

Correction, it's memory bandwidth, not clock speeds:

https://youtu.be/3E2PZ5-IVDw?t=725

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mik-AAu0glo

Suspicions confirmed. It runs a bit worse.

Here I am waiting for another top-down Zelda like Link's awakening, since my nostalgia is really for the NES game. Or Tekken. Looks like I'm not getting either.

Nintendo delivered. I'm only several hours in and know that I will be spending hundreds of hours on this game.

This plays on my machine, with a 3080 and recent I can't remember which i7 (I'm out and about), at 4k60fps solid.

Nintendo's ability to make games is undeniable. Their raw numbers hardware though has been lacking for every generation starting with GameCube. I just don't get it.

This and breath of the wild are completely different games when played at 60fps and a reasonable resolution.

GameStop - Dying brick and mortar. This reminds me when GTA came out and there were lines everywhere at midnight to get the game. Digital downloads are nice but half the fun was waiting and not knowing if you'd get a copy lol

is there already an emulator for it (like Cemu for BOTW) ?

Yes, it works on Ryujinx out of the box, and also runs really well on Yuzu if you install several fixes

what’s the best way to start with zelda, if you’re on iphone or mac? i can’t reallly get a console.

The emulator? If you really have no other way around to buy/play it, then it is somewhat ethical.

If they weren't going to buy it anyways, it hurts nothing to emulate it.

If you can afford an iPhone and Mac, I would suggest that you can probably stretch to buying a Nintendo Switch. And honestly, it's worth it. Pick up "Breath of the Wild" and start there.

Download a SNES or GBA emulator and play Link to the Past

Did not expect full frontal Mipha.

Was waiting for this for a very long time

Runs great on PC, eheheeh

Why is this on HN?

It's a game and games are nice. why can't it be on HN? HNers shouldn't play games? This is a great AAA title from a famous franchise of a famous company. Ofcourse everyone is excited about it!

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

It's not that I can't find this news elsewhere, and how does it gratify my curiosity? It's the most discussed news item today.

It doesn't gratify your curiosity but it does for others. They're curious about how this game is going to be, is it going to live up to their expectations, what do other people feel about it. If you need every conversation to revolve around software engineering, there's even a sub-thread about how they manage to keep this series so high quality.

Demanding that things should justify their existence to you is a symptom of main character syndrome.

Since when is your curiosity the only one that matters?

Shockingly, different people have different experiences and as a result different curiosities.

Many HN readers grew up with this franchise so they're invested. And surprisingly, the devs managed to make a game so good that it would be considered top 50 of all time. This thread is mostly just a bunch of excited fans looking forward to playing the game.

HN just likes some games more than others. Will we see a thread for Horizon Zero Dawn or Last of Us? No. Will we see one for a Factorio sequel? Definitely.

This marks the highly anticipated release of a new piece of consumer software for one of the most widely-adopted FreeBSD-based operating system.

It really shouldn't be, but large events that a lot of people on here are interested in is always gonna make a splash.

Especially since a lot of people here who are interested in it are probably not interested in participating in gaming-related social media.

Same goes for huge news events where loads of people here who usually don't pay attention to news suddenly all want to pay attention to one item; it's natural to do so on the only news community they usually engage with, even if it doesn't actually make sense for that community as a whole (as this community is largely defined by NOT having that content.)

Can't wait until AI has a chance at playing it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com