It is impressive that a game running on an 8-year-old phone GPU will likely be game of the year.
Nintendo proved again that gameplay and art direction matter more than anything.
Nintendo proved again that gameplay and art direction matter more than anything.
AAA studios whine and cry about how expensive games are to make (completely glossing over the fact that they are 100x as profitable as they were in the 90s because videogames are no longer niche) but nobody asked them to! Linus Tech Tips water cooling a 4090 isn't the normal consumer! Most consumers want to have fun when they pay $70 for a game, not play the exact game they bought a decade ago with more detailed scenes, and more detail doesn't make a game better
Yes, I'm still slightly salty about the train wreck that KSP 2 turned out to be.
KSP didn't deserve that.
I'm glad I figured this out before spending much time going down that path, but I still know people who did, they're the smartest people I know, and it always frustrates me to watch critics line up around the block to take a shit on them, blaming them for problems they didn't cause and snubbing them for accomplishments that they did.
These artists/engineers have accomplished absolutely amazing things and really pushed the limits. But somewhat ironically... gameplay/story is still king when it comes to 'games.
I will say, when a game does blend the two, they are usually highly applauded, it just rarely happens nowadays that a game has both very good graphics, and very good gameplay.
Bad writing and bad mechanics can absolutely ruin a game far beyond the ability of art to compensate -- but it's both absurd and cruel to blame this on art.
"often ... because they're at the expense of everything else,"
Which seems plausible although "often" may be harsh. Too high a proportion of your budget on art is rarely going to end up somewhere good, unless the art is the main point. There does seem to be a bit of a AAA arms race here, which isn't necessarily a net gain.
The art department can make the feedback better, the objectives clearer, the interaction easier, but fundamentally you can have a game without any art at all (see dwarf fortress, zork, etc.) and have it be a game, whereas a bunch of art assets by themselves don't a game make.
Nowadays it's all about marketing material and lying to people, so having good game art is prerequisite for great prerendered trailers that will drive preorders. But when you allocate all your budget to art, you don't end up with a game, you end up with false promises.
It seems like the reasonable response to a product you dont like is to not buy it and then ignore it. Why do people get fixated, angry, and shit on products they dont like.
If the promotion wasn't false advertising there would be no backlash and people would act rationally, as you say. Nobody hates on something they've never seen before unless somebody tells them to expect more than they'll get.
I still don't get buying a game primarily for the graphics without looking at representative gameplay. I thought it was generally understood that promos and ads would show the best.
life, art .. is complex and you need to cultivate, nurture people caring about making beautiful complex subtle things.
A great game on the other hand cam have outdated graphics no problem. People will still love it.
Totk is your classic AAA game it just was programmed for older hardware.
>more detail doesn't make a game better
Have you played red dead redemption 2? The detail elevates the game to one of the greatest masterpieces of all time.
Saints Row 4 is better than GTA 5, change my mind.
I felt the actual game flowed better, GTA is all about playing in a sandbox and seeing all the various things you can do.
Saints Row is more of a straight up action game.
The only control stuff I don't like is fabricating arrows, notching ammo, cooking food, etc. But that's not clunky, it's just time consuming. It's also optional, so I just don't bother.
> Have you played red dead redemption 2? The detail elevates the game to one of the greatest masterpieces of all time.
Absolutely. Graphics do have their place, but most games don’t need to be that extreme level of detail. For one, I played RDR2 on a stock PS4 and the level of detail and immersion was incredible, despite the hardware already being underpowered by the time RDR2 was released. Ie you can achieve the level of immersion and masterpiece without pushing the limits of graphics.
And the most successful game ever is still minecraft.
Rockstar knows their community. They spent around $1 in marketing for every $1 spent on the development of the game itself, totalling around $500mil, and the game paid for itself opening weekend with over $700mil in sales.
The studio has managed to master this sort of high-fidelity development while fully recuperating all costs, and fostering an incredibly loyal fan base. (Personal data point; replayed every single Rockstar title last year)
You cannot criticize such a company for delivering high-fidelity projects and pushing the edge. (You can criticize their working environment, however)
And without such companies blazing ahead, we wouldn't be currently undergoing a revolutionary phase in tech history as we explore the power of massively-parallel, computationally-intensive AI algorithms.
But I am saying that it’s unnecessary for a deep immersive experience. I was equally immersed 20 years ago playing Gothic and Oblivion as I am playing recent games, graphically speaking. IMHO the differences only become apparent if you play the same game with different visuals, as you did playing RDR2 on PS4 and again on PC.
It’s also worth remembering that the vast majority of players also don’t have access to a maxed out PC.
But you wouldn't be immersed on Gothic now. By playing gothic you set a new bar for yourself and that's how the industry works. Audiences everywhere get more and more sophisticated so much so that what worked back then won't work today and what works today won't work tomorrow. Can't wait until the time RDR2 becomes an "old" game with shitty graphics.
It turns off people who want instantaneous responsiveness, but there's another style of action game genre your missing out on if you don't develop the patience to master those controls.
Aiming and shooting is far more precise in red dead. Combat controls are instantaneous. You fire your gun, the bullet comes out and goes in a straight line towards an enemy on every click. You can headshot an entire gang of people no issue in red dead if you used PC controls.
Dark souls has delay. Not precision at all. Every movement is unresponsive and the point of those games is to get used to the delays and imprecision. You rapidly press hit 3 times in dark souls your character hits maybe once. In red dead that's 3 shots with the pistol.
Rdr2 movement outside of combat is built for immersion. As in the delays are variable based realistically off the environment. The combat however is by far significantly more precise then any dark souls game and as a result is actually the easier game.
Often, you can't tell what is that you're supposed to be looking at in order to advance or understand a gameplay mechanic.
I want to play a game. If I wanted to watch a movie, I would buy or stream a movie.
It is impressive to make a great game with broad appeal. It isn't easy or trivial to do and companies that get it right should be recognized with good reputation and customers. I haven't heard other Studios whine and cry, but if they do it's not my problem so I don't care or mind if they do.
Nobody is forced to buy bad games, so I don't really understand the complaint there.
They have clearly poured a mountain of design and engineering effort into squeezing every last drop of graphic fidelity and art out of the Switch. It looks really really good. Some of that is having the wisdom to choose an art style that works well on the Switch—a little cel-shaded, not a ton of texture detail. But, also, they really are getting as much detail and graphic complexity as they possibly can out of that little machine.
This isn't some cheap 2D pixel art game that spent their whole budget on game mechanics. It's a AAA game that maxed out their budget along every single axis. They just happened to target hardware with lower specs.
Nintendo also clings closely to its roots as a toy manufacturer - their primary goal is to build games that are fun to play.
It shouldn't be surprising that their focus on creating beautiful, fun games resonates deeply with the wider populace. I do notice the framerate occasionally dip during complex scenes, but it's such a wonderfully designed game that I don't really care.
It just keeps selling though. Sales have dipped, but not so much that Nintendo is in any hurry.
How many units would the game have sold if Yuzu/Ryujinx didn’t exist? It’s even more jarring when you’re a paying consumer running the game at 720p20 and someone else can quite easily download switch games for “free” and play a much better 4K60 unofficial PC version.
Those videos are all over YouTube and have been for a couple of years now. I’d always assumed Nintendo was just trying to get TOTK out the door, give it time to sell, then announce the new system with a new Mario later in the year.
Also, their own quarterly reports and expectations confirm they aren't launching new hardware anytime soon.
They sold so many switches because of nostalgia and convenience/form factor reasons - switch is the only console in that form factor
Except in the case of this Zelda sequel you sort of are playing the exact same game you bought 5 years ago, and with little/no improvement to detail, for an even higher price (69.99)... While I've bought it and am enjoying it, its hardly some huge shift in any way (technical, gameplay or story) from BOTW, and virtually all the mechanics are identical. I still think it worthy of great reviews to be clear, but it is not some genre shaking release.
So the new Zelda game being similar to the N-1 Zelda game is exactly what they do. I remember defeating similar enemies in the original Zelda game, finding shrines to build health up, wandering a forest looking for hidden stuff. Its fun but the game concepts haven't changed much.
You have got to be kidding.
The ability to build machines by connecting basically anything to anything is a very impressive mechanic both from a gameplay perspective and from a technical perspective. The fact that they built this to run this nicely on an 8 year old tablet is frankly incredible.
The fact you can jump from the sky and dive to the underworld without pause is impressive as heck too.
Even the little ability to jump through a ceiling to travel upwards to the nearest place to stand is incredible, considering you can do it anywhere that has a ceiling in range. That mechanic is honestly mind blowing from a technical perspective imo.
Why? play the two games side by side - there is a truly enormous amount of gameplay and visual overlap.
> The ability to build machines by connecting basically anything to anything is a very impressive mechanic both from a gameplay perspective and from a technical perspective. The fact that they built this to run this nicely on an 8 year old tablet is frankly incredible.
Many reviews (and myself!) find this addition to be cool but shallow? Also, while cool, its not technically mega avant garde here- "Banjo Kazooie nuts and bolts" attempted similar thing back in 2008.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banjo-Kazooie:_Nuts_%26_Bolts
> Even the little ability to jump through a ceiling to travel upwards to the nearest place to stand is incredible, considering you can do it anywhere that has a ceiling in range. That mechanic is honestly mind blowing from a technical perspective imo.
I found this to be the least impressive of all Link's new abilities personally, and fail to see it in terms of being some unreal technical breakthrough? It's literally just a jump through the surface directly above the player's head.
Implementing Jumping through one-way platforms is easy.
Implementing Jumping through anything, no matter how deep, and detecting the first safe place for him to stand, as well as having the ability to back out at any time to return to your original position, especially in a huge open world game like this? I'd say it's pretty technically impressive. Especially how fast it loads when showing the little upwards swimming animation.
You can use this ability in the underground in some places to pop up anywhere on the overworld. From the bottom of the world to the highest mountain. It's way more impressive than just jumping through things.
> Many reviews (and myself!) find this addition to be cool but shallow? Also, while cool, its not technically mega avant garde here- "Banjo Kazooie nuts and bolts" attempted similar thing back in 2008.
I never said it was some unique thing no one has ever done before. But it's definitely not shallow, you only have to look for videos showing the crazy things people are building to see how it's mechanically super deep. I never played Banjo Kazooie but Im guessing it didn't have nearly the level of physics simulation, or the number of parts that are usable, or anywhere near the size of world that Zelda has. That's why it is technically impressive. Not just the mechanic, but the context that the mechanic is in.
Its 2023, if this blows you away wait until you see what else even 8 year old computers can do...
> But it's definitely not shallow, you only have to look for videos showing the crazy things people are building to see how it's mechanically super deep.
Building things for the sake of building is not really adding depth to the "game" as such, the mechanic contributes very little to the gameplay of the game. Indeed, you can almost completely avoid it save for a handful of mandatory sections. IMO, the best mechanics add depth to the gameplay and make the whole game richer, which this feature doesn't really do, its a very ancillary feature to the game.
FWIW, the part list on nuts and bolts was pretty good, and had great physics while being a core conceit of the game.
Like what? Another generic Sony open world game? If this sort of thing was so easy, why don't other AAA studios make anything remotely as interesting?
> which this feature doesn't really do, its a very ancillary feature to the game
This is honestly not even close to true. I'm not even sure you're playing the same game as me.
You can't solve 90% of the puzzles in this game without engaging heavily with the new mechanic. Hell, there's honestly large parts of the world you cannot traverse without it either. You can't reach large parts of the Sky without it for instance.
I genuinely don't know how you could play this game and come away thinking it doesn't do anything very interesting mechanically or technically.
And the whole thing about Kazooie having done it before, keep in mind that game was a giant failure. It wasn’t fun. Nintendo managed to make building vehicles and contraptions fun!
> It wasn’t fun.
Banjo is sitting pretty sweet on a metacritic score of 79, so some folks certainly did like it.
Absolute realism is a tedious goal.
Also realistic graphic != good graphics, we need more stylized graphics like these recent 2 Zelda titles! It's a shame we already lost the great graphics of the 3ds era Pokemon (which I think is peak cell shading aesthetics) to a generic 3d look of recent titles.
It's true that gameplay trumps all, and it definitely didn't push me off the (excellent) game, but the Switch hardware really _substantially_ impacts the experience.
Most games coming on current gen hardware are utterly forgettable.
Zelda games, especially cell animation ones tend to age so well. Like WindWaker on the Game Cube. Such an amazing and fun game even on almost 20 year old hardware.
For all the amazing hardware on PS5 and Xbox Series ... most games releases are barely even an event that register in the cultural zeitgeist.
A few exceptions exist of course. But for the most part, yes the graphics are pretty but the game is not that fun.
And also, another thing Zelda has going for it and this cannot be said enough: it is a full freaking game. Not a broken game that needs to be patched up later (though there are always patches but the game isn't unplayable).
Nor is it pay to win. You unlock stuff by just playing and progressing. The Amiibo content is optional.
You get a full game with tons of stuff, ready to go. With a solid single player campaign and no online bullshit needed to experience it to its fullest. I cannot stress how much this needs to be said. But lately, broken or partial game experiences at triple A prices is a thing that people tolerate.
I don't make any strong claim that the proportion hasn't shifted, but that has absolutely been the case at every point in my awareness of games. Flip through an old Nintendo Power or Game Pro.
Meanwhile, some very interesting games are coming out these days - some of my favorites are from the past 5 years; time will tell how well they hold up, but I am optimistic.
Maybe 200 of them aren't total trash. Perhaps 100 were genuinely good at the time. Low-tens of them are still at all worth playing for someone without nostalgia goggles—though, in some cases, that's because an entirely-superior remake exists; like, if you want to try the first three Final Fantasy games, you probably shouldn't play the NES versions, in 2023, unless you're aiming for some kind of "I want to experience them exactly as Old People did" sort of thing.
which means their focus is only on gameplay mechanics, story and art direction. not focusing on bugs that are well not known cz of using something too new, expensive etc.
not fancy graphics, or other modern fancy things - that don't really add anything to the game.
wish the software industry would learn to bet on old technologies and develop novel experiences on those.
not the current - move to the latest framework, hardware etc. while presenting shit.
Their [Nintendo] art-books are so cool - while a game-art-book isn’t necessarily unique to Nintendo I do appreciate the value in them being so well done and expansive. Don’t have the time to play Zelda sadly but the books have been a really neat thing to page through.
As a kid, going to Barnes and Noble and grabbing the Emerald/Sapphire/Leaf Green official strategy book was, and still is, one of the coolest “books” I have.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Breath_of...
The NES, SNES, N64 and GameCube were part of the "bits race" and kept pushing forward in hardware power. Mario 64 is credited along with Wing Commander for creating the AAA graphics race at all costs behavior in the industry.
The Wii wasn't entirely a direction change, Nintendo felt competing on CPU power now was not interesting and went for motion controls, that later all other consoles imitated.
Then we had the Wii U that tried to mix TV with handheld. Wii U kinda sucked so they just tried it again with the Switch and made it portable. This again is spawning clones (steam deck for example).
I am not a Nintendo fan (I was on Sega camp during console wars and currently I prefer the Playstation) but Nintendo hardware always is impressive.
PS4 and 5 for example are boring, just mostly normal x86 computers with custom OS.
The NES wasn't—it was an 8-bit machine in a time where 16-bit processors were available. I don't really know if the SNES pushed the envelope at all, but you're right that the N64 did.
Can you imagine putting the video card in every copy of a game now? What a time that was.
I remember Star Fox (which included the SuperFX graphics chip on the cartridge) going for $90 on release in 1993.
That's $188.95 in today's dollars.
This is the 'withered technologies' playbook in action - use underpowered/mature technology in new and fun ways rather than relying on cutting-edge graphics technologies. As an example when the switch was launched in 2017 the CPU on the SoC was from 2012.
Nothing in the Wii was cutting edge in terms of the technology - it was just well implemented. The motion controls were 2 IR dots and a cheap camera, and that wasn't a new concept.
Similarly nothing in the switch was actually cutting edge technologically, just assembled into a great product.
Contrast this with the PS5, which launched in 2020 with an AMD Zen 2 CPU which launched in 2019.
If you care about tech specs, consoles are a losing battle. Even if they are a good price-performance when they release, the length of console cycles will inevitably cause them to be underpowered and outdated by the second half of their existence, and yet many great and generation defining games come out closer to the end of a console's life cycle.
In what sense did the X1 cpu launch in 2012?
i.e. The X1 is a chip which contains lots of stuff including some processors from 2012.
It's just sad that the switch has become long in the tooth. Great for many, but now limiting. The problem is that Nintendo has tried and failed to succeed with spec bump consoles (see, the new Nintendo DS and the new Nintendo 3DS), so the fact that they haven't followed up the Switch with a spec bump makes gobs of sense.
While processor speed may have withered, there were other innovative and cutting edge aspects of the design.
It was innovative and a great product, but I'm not sure anything in it was cutting-edge from a technology perspective.
Something doesn't have to be cutting-edge though to be innovative, fun, well designed and a great product.
What they like doing is taking common components and milking them for all they're worth. Or optimizing for what's really important in a system. Like for the Game Boy line, they focused on energy consumption rather than raw horsepower.
The NES used a modified 6502, which was used in the Atari 2600, Apple II, Commodore 64, and others.
I think a Switch 2 is likely from Nintendo, but they are also likely to release some other idea. Nintendo console releases are highly variable. They have had a lot of major hits. They've had some flops. They are just making hay while the sun shines, and delaying a console release that might change the weather. I do wonder how many bad console releases Nintendo can get away with. I also am beginning to worry they don't have a great console concept prepared for the next generation.
Emphasis on the backwards compatibility. I'll wait 2-3 years if that's not there.
Nintendo is not willing to lead the charge this time around (leave that to fools like Zuck) so they'll just wait to see which parts work and expand that.
When Nintendo has a hit console they try to extend and expand on the idea for their next console and even the naming is typically very similar:
NES -> SNES
GB -> GBC
DS -> 3DS
Wii -> WiiU
When they have a flop they usually pivot hard, which is how we got the Wii. Hopefully they can avoid the terrible naming of the WiiU. I remember at the time a lot of confusion regarding if it was just an a tablet accessory for the Wii.
The GameCube used minidvds that had only 30% of the storage space of standard dvds.
The result was a generational game like FF7 was only possible on the PlayStation.
The only reason I have a switch is Nintendo ip otherwise everything else beats it hands down.
With aging Nintendo hardware now all of it can be emulated in a pc. I barely use it anymore.
I'd have to think about it, but I might defend the NES, SNES, and Gamecube as the best consoles of their generations, if we're just looking at the consoles themselves. The first two do even better if we consider the games, too (though the GC is plainly not its generation's frontrunner, if you add that—the lack of 3rd party interest really hurt it, its library is tiny, and consists mostly of few great Nintendo games and a bunch of terrible shovelware).
I'd put the N64 at a tie with the Playstation. The N64 looked better and had four-player support out of the box, which made a big difference in how many games supported four players. The analog stick on the controllers was a real problem, though, as was the storage size. Then again, the Playstation launched without any analog sticks. Call it a draw.
It's only really with the Wii that they stopped credibly trying to keep up (and IMO the Wii's various gimmicks don't make up for its deficiencies, among which I count some of those same gimmicks)
NES yes, it's competitor was atari and atari had games that weren't that great. The NES launched games as mainstream, there was no competition at the time... it was the best.
SNES was also the best but it was only a slight edge over sega. The genesis was comparable.
Gamecube was not the winner. PS2 ruled this era. Starting with the gamecube and maybe you could say the N64... nintendo became more and more reliant on it's IP rather then a platform all developers wanted to work on.
>I'd put the N64 at a tie with the Playstation. The N64 looked better and had four-player support out of the box, which made a big difference in how many games supported four players.
No playstation wins this one hands down. N64 graphics had blurry textures and lack of digital media. Squaresoft switched their entire nintendo led RPG line (Final Fantasy 7) to the playstation because nintendo hardware couldn't handle it. Nintendo came out with some heavy hitters but overall in terms of game selection Sony won.
>It's only really with the Wii that they stopped credibly trying to keep up (and IMO the Wii's various gimmicks don't make up for its deficiencies, among which I count some of those same gimmicks)
I wouldn't say they stopped trying to keep up. Nintendo took a risk, and in the end for games that are less casual they sort of lost the market. But in the end it was the right choice in terms of sales.
GameCube's proprietary "micro-DVDs" also meant limited game sizes compared to PS2. And PS2 could play DVDs, which was a strategic advantage at the time. With both Sony and Microsoft now competing for hardware dominance, however, it became a tougher position for Nintendo to hold, plus the company was not willing to sell consoles at a loss (as I believe both Sony and Microsoft did at first, to gain adoption).
So both N64 and GameCube were limited in significant ways, and it cost Nintendo its market dominance. The Wii was an example of Nintendo taking the console tech in a totally different direction than its peers, explicitly focusing on motion controllers and casual gamers. It was a smash hit, but eventually the novelty of the Wii wore off. The Wii U was a flop. The Switch successfully blended their portable and console offerings.
PS2 was barely more expensive than a decent DVD player, at the time, and came out before most folks had a DVD player. And it played DVDs. Gamecube didn't. This made the Gamecube a second console for most people... which meant they didn't get it at all, if they only had one console. PS2 also played PS1 games, which meant some gamers had a large library that could be played on it on day 1. GC didn't play N64 games.
Nothing else is really needed to explain the GC's weak sales relative to the PS2.
The N64 was a bit like that too, they waited quite a long time to release it to get special SGI capabilities.
Calling the steamdeck a switch clone feels really weird to me.
I had a sega game gear as a kid, and it was effectively the same form factor...
The 5 though? Now that's interesting hardware, the thing is so fast, smooth and silent, I am always impressed everytime I turn it on. Feels like an Apple product, if only it wasn't so damn big...
I for one like every genre but I find it unfortunate nintendo has a wierd focus on casual age friendly games.
Almost any gamer who has played a fallout, diablo, mass effect or RD game also owned a wii.
One of the issues with the Wii was that the controller tech was too immature, hence the later addition of the MotionPlus stuff, and how the Switch versions of "use it like a pointer" games are so much more robust.
... but as peer threads have noted, this is a relatively new vector for them in terms of value brought to the marketplace. They were competing on grade-A computing and graphics tech in the console space, but did the math and (IMHO wisely) concluded they weren't going to win that fight against Microsoft and Sony (and the manufacturing deals MS and Sony could cut and the manufacturing they could do in-house). So they instead noted those two firms were competing on making the same kind of game and pivoted to providing a platform to make the kinds of games they couldn't put on those consoles (but were starting to show up in arcades, where the inability to compete with the home console market had led to the need to incorporate more interface gimmicks).
https://medium.com/@adamagb/nintendo-s-little-known-product-...
I also bought the Dragon Quest Builders game and hated that. It turns out I like classic RPG and action puzzler games but I don't like crafting and sandbox games. Now I know.
The addition of that game mechanic creates for the player a new type of puzzle in addition to the raw crafting puzzles: pattern recognition. Coming up on a jumble of nonsense, mentally parsing it out, and recognizing you have a template that can be applied to it is actually really fun (and even more exciting when you're doing it in realtime because some monster is bearing down on you).
Nintendo knows how to lure in casual gamers.
I would argue gameplay. Look at how insanely successful Minecraft is. It needs to be accessible to anyone who plays the game, nobody cares that you can emulate a fighter jet perfectly, you'll get your niche crowd, but if you want everyone, it needs to be adoptable by everyone.
Quick Edit: Remember Flappy Bird? It was simple graphics, a rip off of old old browser game from the 2000s (idr name) but everyone was hooked overnight.
Also to some extent 2048 though I felt that was niche to geeks.
Your assertion of a social requirement for an "agreed upon" project is false: every emulator is valid, though some have their pros and cons. If it plays the game you want to play just fine, what makes it "difficult"?
And all those emulators use the same graphics plugin system, which only had TERRIBLE plugins until a couple years ago when angrylion and PareLLEI showed up. The RDP was always poorly emulated.
Compare to Dolphin, which is an open source emulation masterpiece, and has things like ubershaders to give you both performance and emulation accuracy.
For over a decade, you couldn't play through perfect dark with just a single graphics plugin unless you were cheating your way through a mission.
Even Nintendo's official n64 emulators for VC are mediocre
That is a software emulation of the RDP from the n64 that runs in a shader on your GPU. No more visual bugs, no more artifacts, no more perfect dark missing a visual effect that kills an entire mission, and accurate upscaling, and it actually runs very well even on cheap GPUs.
You've absolutely made my day! Going to have to try this out later, maybe try out some Blast Corps!
Your GPU won't matter too much, so long as you have a decently powerful CPU you should be fine.
"That's how we make games at Nintendo, though: we get the fundamentals solid first, then do as much with that core concept as our time and ambition will allow" - Shigeru Miyamoto
They also take into consideration the limitations of the hardware from the very beginning, and not just the engineers, but the designers as well.
"...Although I am not an engineer, I have always included in my designs consideration for the technology that will make those designs a reality. People have paid me a lot of lip service, calling me a genius story teller or a talented animator, and have gone so far as to suggest that I try my hand at movies, since my style of game design is, in their words, quite similar to making movies. But I feel that I am not a movie maker, but rather that my strength lies in my pioneering spirit to make use of technology to create the best, interactive commodities possible, and use that interactivity to give users a game they can enjoy and play comfortably. "
This game would be an objectively better experience if it ran on a PS4/5 or Xbox if you don’t care for the handheld mode.
The game is an absolute masterpiece despite hardware, not because of it.
I think Nintendo should be lauded for experimenting with hardware, but ultimately they’re a games company and I almost wish they’d get out of the hardware business. I gave my kid my 3DS last week and showed him how the 3D worked. It took him no more than 30 seconds to ask me to turn the 3D off.
But imagine if the game was also sold on other consoles.
What I’m saying is that the game doesn’t directly benefit from console lock-in. It’s not like that yielded any special opportunities, like, say, how the Wiimote provides an entirely different experience from what a PS3 could offer.
Part of what makes Nintendo, Nintendo is that their games target their hardware, and vice versa (Their game roadmap influences hardware design).
If TotK was released for the "Big 3" consoles + PC, motion controls couldn't be relied on, as not all platforms have the hardware for it. I'm not saying that they couldn't make it work without motion controls, but just pointing out that what makes Nintendo special is that their software is made for their hardware, and both are better for it.
So in conclusion we have found a way to blame this all on Microsoft. :)
It's the IE6 of controllers.
It looks fantastic for the compute budget
Single digit fps at times when using ultrahand.
While it has by no means killed the XBox or the Playstation line, I think they've obsessed over that segment of the market more than they should have to their own detriment, particularly due to the expense of keeping up with it. As a side effect it has also convinced that segment that they're bigger than they actually are. Most people don't care.
My kids don't care. My kids were lined up with allowances and/or birthday money in hand on day one. They're loving it.
I am too. It's not a skinner box designed to extract the rest of their money from them. It's a complete, quality product. No subscription pass. No seasons. No loot boxes for money. No gambling mechanics designed to secretly back to real world money. They made a good choice.
I'm sympathetic. I care at least some; not obsessed but I do understand what you're getting at. And even that position + total obsessing is clearly in the minority.
Nintendo knows what they're targeting, they hit it, and while you're complaining about the fps not being very good they're rolling in dough. I mean, if I had to choose between satisfying the fps obsessives and making more money than I even know what to do with, I know which I'd choose.
Address the point at hand, don't go off on some tirade about how much someone else loves it, that doesn't negate the fact that it runs very poorly on existing, released official hardware.
Who says I'm complaining? You are projecting so much of your emotions onto what I had to say and completely ignoring what I'm responding to.
It's a fact. A fact is not a complaint, it's an observation and measurable spec. Are scientists just obsessing?
> No gambling mechanics
So you're just going to ignore the gacha mechanics? https://kotaku.com/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-switch-gacha-g...
> So you're just going to ignore the gacha mechanics?
I am certain that the parent poster was referring to the toxic microtransaction "loot box" style of in-game "gambling" that involves real world currency.
Unless I am extremely mistaken, that is not what's going on in TOTK.
Even those mechanics barely qualify as gambling imo.
When you find one of the dispensers, if you throw 5 charges in you'll get several of everything in the dispenser. The charges are easy enough to get that the only time I've _not_ thrown in 5 is in the tutorial where they tell you how to use it.
Nintendo's actual microtransaction garbage is the amiibos, which are shameless and often explicitly pay to win.
Pokemon Masters is literally a gacha game. The Nintendo theme park will probably have gachapon machines in it now kids are softening to the mechanism of it.
Which is what you were asserting. Gambling with fake money is a lot more fun to non-addicts than real gambling, especially because the system is usually rigged in your favor so you enjoy it instead of optimizing for tickling a broken reward system in your brain so you give a billion dollar corporation every dollar you have.
As others have stated, those machines are designed to give you the stuff, not to take your resources. That's not gacha.
No money involved. It's as much gambling as going to random.org and guess a random invocation. It's as much gambling as random encuonters on JRPGs, or quest/mission rewards, or really anything else in gaming with random chance. Is catching a pokemon in any pokemon game a gacha mechanic? You use a pokeball and might or might not get the pokemon. What about any game ability with a miss chance or a critical hit chance? D&D is peak gacha.
Really, it's just "drop some common stuff and get some random util back"
Gaming nowadays is full of "games" that are actually just live services trying to extract as much money as possible from you. This mechanic is completely unrelated. Your comment seems an over reaction from someone that never actually tried the game, or doesn't know how bad current big budget or mobile games are.
Pokemon Masters is definitely a gacha game, so maybe there's a progression there in terms of where this is heading.
In the spirit of gambling, I bet you fifty bucks that the Nintendo theme park has gachapon machines with capsule toys in.
Anyway, time to go back to the most beautiful game I've ever played. A game that looks fantastic.
Educate me about this lesson, o enlightened one.
Which makes pulling nonrandom given the law of averages. It's effectively a joke.
You don't add a facsimile of a coin—you add batteries and/or blades.
The article you posted clearly came out before the game, because it was incorrect about most of the stuff it stated.
Let's go back a hundred years or so and ban gumball machines and half of the machines in arcades, then...
In this case you're describing a randomization game mechanic as gambling. How deterministic must a game be to avoid that, then?
Gaming world full of actual gambling and even worse practices, and what what should we complain here about? A single payer game that can be offline only and never asks for a credit card has very minor random feature that looks like a gacha machine...
> Pokemon Masters
Mobile game. But please ignore every random mechanic in every game since gaming dawn that are no different.
> In the spirit of gambling, I bet you fifty bucks that the Nintendo theme park has gachapon machines with capsule toys in.
Missing the point. And I'm sure they do.
> Furthermore, you completely dismissed the rest of my comment and what I was responding to.
Pot calling the kettle black? your gacha comment and link did not even address the paraghrah which i quote:
> I am too. It's not a skinner box designed to extract the rest of their money from them. It's a complete, quality product. No subscription pass. No seasons. No loot boxes for money. No gambling mechanics designed to secretly back to real world money. They made a good choice.
but let's go back to your tech stuff.
I will state: I agree that game looks good. It has frame drops ocasinally in docked mode or just by using ultra hand. It is capped at 30fps
But it looks good.
No i am not one of those that think 30fps are enough for gaming, I have gaming PC , i have owned a low latency monitor for decades.
But this is a fucking switch, and this is a puzzle and exploration game. With the crazy phisics and amount of things (plus particles) that this game interacts with, the fact that it can run on 30fps is amazing by itself. Making this kind of game on this platform run better for sure it's very hard work, obviously it can always be better, just look at any demo scene stuff, but this is still a masterpiece, and there is no other game on the console which shares such good looks.
Would i prefer if it ran at 60fps? obviously. Would I want it to be uglier or have less features for that? No. The resources required to jump from 30 to 60 are big, i don't think it could have the same ambience on all those environments and all things happening around on a switch and keep a consistent 60fps.
So, yeah game looks good.
It's capped at 30fps. That isn't the problem. The problem is that the framerate is wildly erratic, and it can hit single digits, and fall down into the teens not uncommonly.
It's OK to criticize something, and it's OK to not pretend that something is perfect. It's a $70 product. Criticism is healthy. As is not going with the groupthink and denying measurable objective fact.
Game might look good. Game performs poorly, but so do most AAA games these days, so there's that. Jedi Survivor or The Last of Us on PC, anyone?
Have a good day and enjoy the average performing modern AAA title.
Sure but once you play a game on high refresh rate (+120hz) it's soooo smooth that after it everything below that looks like a PowerPoint presentation. Even doing coding or just browsing the web on a 60hz display looks terrible. And playing a game on 30fps with occassional drops to 20... just terrible no matter what.
(And yes it's not just shooters and competitive games there are countless good single player games with high frame rate gameplay)
It's just Nintendo hellbent on the 30fps
TOTK is clearly very very ambitious in terms of physics simulation and interactivity -- it very clearly feels like a case of "we are stretching the limits of this hardware and we just can't pull it off at 60fps" and not "lol who needs 60fps."
Are there 60fps games on Switch that are actually doing this level of ambitious interactivity?
That said, it definitely feels like there's some room for optimization e.g. the Ultrahand effect. I wonder if Nintendo will address this in a patch. This game was clearly a large and ambitious project that surely had an internal deadline to meet. As engineers we know how that goes... you have to balance completeness, correctness, performance, and actually hitting your deadlines.
We still loved it though.
Haha, me too.
Dropping from an average of 60 to 30 doesn't feel anywhere near as bad as that, which is one of the key benefits of a higher framerate. If you check out TOTK with a 60fps mod on an emulator, it really is a much, much nicer experience (emulator caveats notwithstanding).
Nintendo often does focus on framerate in several of their other major games. And they have done so as a selling feature for rereleases of past games (including Zelda titles) that were previously locked at 30. In this case I think they just really can't accomplish their design goals with TOTK on the Switch hardware without sacrificing the frame rate. But I bet it would be a major feature of any "next gen" patch for the game if they were to release, say, a Switch 2 any time soon.
If you let your kids play a version that had a smooth 60+fps throughout, then play a version with 15fps stutters, then asked which one they enjoyed more, they'd prefer the higher FPS one. Stutters are immersion breaking, but it's not going to make you put down the game until it drops to the single digits.
I'm not stranger to loving flawed games, so I get it. I played this shit out of Pirana Bytes games, and managed to finish an early build of Cyberpunk. I've loved many flawed games; but I just wish they didn't have those flaws.
The game looks and plays great. Most people won't notice framerate. You don't have to either.
The point addressed was the visuals, not how fun something is or is not.
In typical Nintendo Zelda fashion, it will probably get released on next-gen hardware in the future and run a lot better.
It's OK to say it is below expectations for the price point, publisher, developer, and competing product. It's just a performance spec.
If you make an actually good game, people will cross broken glass to play it.
I think a sparsity of sky islands could be partially attributed to performance issues. Those need to be visible from almost everywhere, so cannot be really culled out from the drawing pipeline. Even with aggressive LoD, this will take a considerable performance budget if you put hundreds of islands given a high level of drawing distance requirement in TotK.
I also noticed that TotK has lots of unusually aggressive performance optimization which seems to be done at the very last moment, and even with that a considerable level of frame drops on specific areas. I suspect this to be likely due to the reported delay of the Switch successor. They would still launch it on Switch with possibly worse visual fidelity but that would be fine if they got the successor at the launch time.
So yeah "how to use it" is what really matters, but having more performance budget can allow more freedom for developers. It's a really nice time to have the successor platform for Switch, possibly with backward compatibility.
Nintendo’s games _work_, and, even though many would say they can overlook glitches, I believe that maintaining a “seamless” experience - not breaking the flow - is an much, much, more important part in maintaining the subconscious ‘this game is great!’ feeling than people give it credit for.
“It just works” is just as important a part of gaming as it is of other things.
Absolutely. I'm sure the PS5 has great graphics but some of the game creators don't pay attention to this enough, it's basically like throwing heavy computation at an average directed game and to me that's not appealing at all. "Look at how realistic the water looks" is not enough for me to play a game.
If you really want to be all "gameplay matters most of all, therefore we don't need to improve on anything else" then tetris is still being bought even to this day. Doesn't mean we should stop pushing the limits in new games.
More like- Nintendo proved that in spite of barely listening to the fan base over literal decades, a solid brand will still get sales with just bleh content.
They barely caught onto the open world concept and sandbox - and it took years and years.
Like I get that they aren't anywhere close to as detailed or sophisticated as the graphics available in other games, but they appear to facilitate gameplay quite well.
Like "poor" has a connotation of "bad", where in this game they just weren't a focus and clearly are good enough to not be distracting, at least in the videos I've seen.
Sure. The WiiU was around in that year, BotW ran on it. Indie games for powerful platforms could definitely have better grafics.
> It would have not been ground-breaking in 2003
This is biggest bullshit I've heard. This is Xbox/GC/PS2 era. Not only there weren't any games with 720p or 900p resolution on those consoles, PC capable of those were very rare. Games were still very cubish. Even games like FF that spend most of their budget on visuals and were not very interactive were just so bad in comparision. You don't really know how expansive it is to have small details like hair, light small objects and things like that rendered. Also add all the particles the game generates for all its possibilities.
go to a top 2003 game list, and you will notice that there is nothing that comes close visually, specially with these resolutions, moving interactable objects, etc. None of them would require one tenth of the processing power a game like TotK.
BotW and TotK push the swith to its max potential. Obviously that is nothing compared to what can be done today, the switch is based on a nvidia shield which is a SoC for a portable for 2015, obviously it is not very powerful. But that doesn't mean that the game doesn't have a lot of effort to make it able to run on such a system. Sure the Switch can handle 1080p, there are nintendo games with 1080p 60fps on both switch and wiiu, and nowadays PC games aim to 4k and 120fps, but this is a Switch, and this is a beatfiful game with a level of interaction not easily seen, this is much harder to make than a lot of 4k/120fps games on PC.
Well, not TotK in particular as that's BotW 2.0, but BotW is out of the ordinary, expanding is still not an easy thing.
There's a great video out there on the history of Mario Kart, where they detail how they set out to make a two player version of F-zero and wound up with Kart after balancing the technology capabilities and existing character IP.
BoxBoy, Astral Chain, Mario + Rabbids.
Not to also discount how they have done new things with their existing IP like the AR Mario Circuit.
Nintendo is also innovating on their existing IP. So the idea that Nintendo can't do anything "New" is just not true.
When a new Zelda game sells this well of course the team that makes Zelda games are going to make a new Zelda game. It still feels fresh after 20 some odd years.
BotW was completely different than the zelda before. The only similiar enough zeldas mainline were Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, and these Switch Zeldas. And still both MM and TotK changed enough things from the previous game they they feel very completely different.
Same applies for mario main games for example. Check 64 -> Sunrise -> Galaxy -> 3D world -> Odyssey. They are all very different games.
Formulae changes, that something that most companies don't risk with their big IPs. And still, nintendo does occasionally comes up with new IPs like splatoon or arms.
Meanwhile, other ignorant people: WHERE's THE NEW IP???
Nintendo has a significant chunk of fans on that cultist level where they go ballistic and come for your throat when you point out they’ve been making the same games literally for 40 years. They have like half a dozen totally distinct IPs. LOL at the people bringing up side projects like BoxBoy, which could have shipped on all those old Nokias along with Snake. Mario + Rabbids is a MARIO game crossover and sells on name recognition. Literally nobody in 2023 would know what “Rabbids” even is let alone pay for a game centered on them without the “Mario” part.
The only thing that changes is technology, but they’re always behind too. Zelda is still using N64 single button combat and just sold 10 million copies of a copy/paste of BOTK with 20 year old Banjo and Kazooie Nuts & Bolts creation physics, and the vast majority of critics have to bow and praise. There are some real reviews with actual people out there unafraid to give BOTW/TOTK the 5-6 it deserves, but they’re too few and far between.
None of this is even getting into the gross superiority complex and behavior they show in their treatment of any third party studio even willing to port anything over to their systems, how they hold them hostage if they had ANY kind of involvement on any level financially (RIP Bayonetta 2 and 3), how they treat their own customers with crazy aggressive lawsuits and threats, etc. Just go look up their entire history - even that gold Nintendo label they put on boxes was for monetary and control reasons. Yes, companies do things to protect themselves and profits and blah blah blah, but nobody else does this stuff to the level and in the anti-consumer manner they do. The control and manipulation of Nintendo is even beyond Apple and Marvel/Disney levels, on par with Tesla. It’s literal insanity.
I know this is already way too long, but just a couple other interesting things you’d learn by reading up on their history - neither Sega (who positioned themselves and became a household name as the anti-Nintendo) nor PlayStation (Sony and Nintendo originally were working together on a CD-based system but their draconian behavior led to the partnership being called off by Sony and them going into gaming alone) would have existed in the way they have the past 3 decades if it weren’t for Nintendo being a POS company. Another interesting story involves Square Enix (then SquareSoft) at the end of the SNES generation, basically declaring they’re never making a game for Nintendo again (which didn’t hold up obviously but they still don’t release mainline Final Fantasy on them) and jumped to PlayStation for FF7. There is a two page advertisement for FF7 from back in the day that straight up makes fun of Nintendo by claiming the game is too advanced for them and would have taken up like 20 cartridges lol.
So, for their behavior resulting in these things and others, I do sincerely thank them (and anyone else who somehow got to the end of this)! :D
Just like the Mario movie I think it's less of an artistic feat and just shows the sheer power of Nintendo's franchises and very, very, enthusiastic fandom.
Nintendo know what HBO does too, which is how to make exceptional content. That override absolutely every other value.
(I also suspect that part of the success is the mythical aspects of the Zelda games, and the reaching into the historical and religious past and traditions. Western companies seem to actively want to avoid this, but it’s extremely good for building content. Archetypes are archetypes for a reason, it’s evolutionary)
No. That is a western view point of someone that did not play the core nintendo games. It feels like projecting what is happening on every streaming service out there, or on every AAA western studio.
People are not praising new Zeldas because they are new games with the Zelda title, BotW was a complete revolution, it did open world like no other game did before it. It combined really well a huge a amount of features and fun things that no other game was able to do so before. Games like these are very rare.
Saying that is nostaligia when these 2 zelda play like no other Zelda. Saying that's it's because of brand when i've seen so many friends and colleagues that never gave a shit about nintendo buying a switch or emulating it and praising the hell out of this game.