Is it really that impressive that focusing on game design results in a better game than spending a billion dollars on a thousand artists so that every tree can have ten times as many polygons and each texture is 16kX16k? Better graphics rarely actually IMPROVE a game, and can do nothing to fix a game that was designed poorly.
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
I agree with your general point but I don't think Tears of the Kingdom is a good example of it.
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.
Yeah honestly they’ve exceeded what the Switch can do at this point and areas of the game drop to 20 fps. The game wouldn’t be worse at 60. 30 is widely viewed as the bare minimum.
Nintendo is a deeply Japanese company, and in Japanese animation, frame rate can be heavily deprioritized. If they have a limited budget, and have to choose between better art/design, or better frame rate, they'll choose the art every time.
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.
The sales agree with you, but none of the art or design choices get worse by having hardware that won't drop frames to that degree. I realize they do this every console generation, but since they're no longer passing along the savings to the consumer, I'm not going to keep apologizing for them.
Sales are probably because they've sold so many switches and people don't have a choice. What could be considered a AAA game come out rarely on the switch Nintendo's biggest win was allowing indie games on the platform, without them people would realise how few games Nintendo actually makes.
They sold so many switches because of nostalgia and convenience/form factor reasons - switch is the only console in that form factor
I expect new hardware from Nintendo in 2024 or 2025. The immense sales of the Switch and the pandemic have kept it around longer than it probably was originally planned for.
It just keeps selling though. Sales have dipped, but not so much that Nintendo is in any hurry.
I expect new hardware in 2023, not because of how powerful the current chipset is or is not, but because Nintendo is very likely losing a massive percentage of sales to emulators now.
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.
They also squeeze every single drop from the switch. Look at the new cloud particle system for example, missing in botw but adding gorgeous atmosphere in this one. That is coded by people who deeply care about performance and memory usage. Not the ones slinging about electron and building apps like Slack.
No. Mario Kart, Splatoon, Yoshi, Smash, Metroid Dread etc. are optimized for 60FPS. It's just they can't do the same with an open world game, so it stops becoming a priority.
Games aren't anime. Having a lower framerate means you will be making more mistakes, especially in combat. Besides, a sudden drop in frames just looks bad.
But that's literally just the lifecycle of every console pretty much ever. Gets released and devs don't focus on optimising since it has more power than previous generation. Then by the end of the gen, devs know the console inside out and are using all sorts of crazy tricks to improve performance. Devs build on top of what we've built before.
Sure graphics gives diminishing returns, but I've played ToTK @ 60fps on an emulator. It's significantly better than a Switch @ 30fps, and personally I think the Switch's hardware is ToTK's biggest flaw
Often times better graphics make a game worse because they're at the expense of everything else, while also making the community smaller because most people can't run it.
Yes, I'm still slightly salty about the train wreck that KSP 2 turned out to be.
It never fails to amaze me how quickly the hate train starts or how fast it gets going when it comes time to blame technical artists for the shortcoming of others, even though they are arguably the best in the industry at reliably accomplishing amazing deeply technical feats that deliver joy.
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.
To be fair, I don't think anybody is undermining the effort/ingenuity some of these technical artists/engineers have. Its moreso the overwhelming focus of AAA game studios on this over gameplay.
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.
You're not being fair, you're making excuses. I was responding to a post that literally said "better graphics make a game worse."
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.
I don't think you are representing the original fairly, they said
"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.
I think you're forgetting what actually makes a game at its core. What separates the medium from others are roughly these things: interaction, objectives, mechanics, feedback, challenge.
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.
It's not odd, it's the result of false marketing and frankly very much the direct fault of publishers. They spend an untold amount on promotional campaigns showing prerendered footage, gameplay running on workstations with unrealistic specs, and buy endorsements. All together that makes people invested and makes them expect too much. It's very easy to feel lied to and betrayed when the final result doesn't even closely live up to the promises. It's even worse for sequels, as they inevitably get compared to the original by its fans.
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.
Thanks for adding some clarity. I can understand a complain about false advertising. I thought a major part of the complaint was game development focusing on graphics opposed to gameplay, which makes less sense to me.
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.
I think I'll still be fuming about KSP2 for a long time. I don't know why I let myself have any hope it'd be good given the development history but I still bought (and returned) it on launch.
Yeah. In contrast to the creativity applied to Tears of the Kingdom that took the framework of Breath of the Wild and extended it majestically, KSP2 is a brazen & soulless cash grab that under delivers under the guise of "Early Access".
Hi-Fi Rush is a perfect example of how a game should be It had all the details you want in a game to make it look awesome but the style and art was paid close detail
Graphics don't impact gameplay, but this game really does look flat-out bad on a full-sized TV or monitor. Using FSR1 upscaling the realtime shadows (required for dynamic time of day) all "crawl", like a constant flicker in any motion, and it's really distracting. Level of detail "clicks" in when you're 20 feet away from objects, also extremely noticeable. And beyond the visual issues, it also suffers from a poor framerate in many areas. It can't even hit 30fps all the time.
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.
I play ToTK on an emulator at 60fps ultrawide, and the experience is night and day vs the Switch. Definitely an incredible game but I think the Switch is its biggest flaw
I'm not sure what your point is other than complaining.
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.
Recently I found good stuff actually sell the most in game industry, you have stuff like Elden Ring and Legend of Zelda, in indie space you have stuff like Pizza Tower, all selling huge. I wonder if big studios that makes safe copy 3As will actually think about innovation as an element to maximize profit.
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.
The other day I was playing Super Mario World, I didn't play since the nineties, and wow, they where capable to do so much with so little, from the graphics to the sound, the game feels so good, I was in love
Imagine AAA studios investing all their energy on creative ideas, gameplay innovation and fun experiences for a second. What would that do to indie developers and small studios?
What initially "wow"s me about a game is how beautiful it is. What keeps me coming back to it time and time again, is how well put together it is as a whole.
> 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.
As someone that first played it on a PS4 and then again recently on a maxed out PC, I can confidently say the immersion was superior on the better machine. In fact, I was salty that I first experienced it on such a gimped device.
Superior, sure. I’m not saying that better graphics aren’t, well, better.
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.
> I was equally immersed 20 years ago playing Gothic and Oblivion as I am playing recent games, graphically speaking.
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.
Yes, RDR2 is closer to a simulation than a game, and fidelity matters.
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.
I have the exact opposite experience when I get to play a game again with better graphics. It's like I get to experience it all over again, which is great
Good for you if have the time to replay the same game with different graphics. I don't, which sucks and which is why I'd rather play if first with best graphics.
And the control schemes drag it back down into the quagmire of unplayable mess despite all that work. An excellent example of the broader point about development focus.
I've never noticed this, but I also play on the PC.
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.
Yeah probably not. If you prefer really snappy controls and fluidity then games like RDR2 or elden ring or souls like games are not for you. That being said, in general, these games are not games that are generally considered to have bad controls.
I picked up that game and put it down an hour later because the detail of the character movement and how tedious it is to climb a ladder or do anything killed the fun.
I bet you didn't like elden ring or any of the dark souls games either. In general the clunky controls are a style of game and promotes a certain type of game play.
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.
I played Demon Souls and Dark Souls and Elden Ring. The controls of RDR2 are like the opposite of those games, clunky and imprecise and full of unneeded animation. Souls has very tight mechanics in comparison
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.
> not play the exact game they bought a decade ago with more detailed scenes, and more detail doesn't make a game better
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.
> While I've bought it and am enjoying it, its hardly some huge shift in any way (technical, gameplay or story)
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> Its 2023, if this blows you away wait until you see what else even 8 year old computers can do...
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.
That’s the secret, they haven’t played it. If someone like that cannot see the technical wizardry done to make Tears run this smoothly with its exquisite set of parlour tricks, and has the gall to believe the game is the same as Breath, it’s because they haven’t really paid attention and think the reused map is the whole story.
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!
Generally speaking, a lot of Nintendo's IP games are rehashing the same play concepts/stories in different ways over the last 3 decades. There's nothing wrong with that, just pointing out that this is their MO. They are in a "forever" business for gaming, company has been around since 1889.
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.
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.
> Most games coming on current gen hardware are utterly forgettable.
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.
The NES has somewhere around a thousand distinct games, if you count all markets and include unlicensed games (which there weren't that many of).
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.
nintendo's playbook: bet on withered technologies.
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.
You are wrong there. Nintendo instead been always pushing the tech.
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.
Neither the Wii, Wii U or Switch have anything powerful from a hardware perspective - the last time Nintendo released a product equally powered to the competition was the Game Cube but that was over 22 years ago now.
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.
I think the point was you are looking at technology purely through the lens of processor speed. But technology incorporates a lot of elements of the design, not just raw speed.
While processor speed may have withered, there were other innovative and cutting edge aspects of the design.
This is the the best take. When the switch was new, this was a refreshing take—and using "older" technology means proven SDKs and lower costs for volume.
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.
My first Nintendo device since the original NES was in 2015 when I bought a 'New' Nintendo 3DS XL. It was getting long in the tooth by then, but I had a lot of fun with it and still mess with it from time to time (the eShop closing made me grab a bunch of stuff before it was shut down). Just a few weeks ago I bought an OLED switch. Figured I would see if Breath of the Wild was all it was cracked up to be. I'm having a ton of fun, even if the console is getting up there. If I want bleeding edge graphics I have my PC for that.
The classic example of this from Nintendo's toymaker days is a remote controlled toy car that only turns left. It was cheaper for them to make it that way and you can still race cars around a track.
And the original DS launched with a pitiful 67 mhz ARM9 CPU and 2mb of RAM. It sold 150 million consoles. Because the games were good.
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.
You are proving their point. Nintendo switched to the "don't care about tech" strategy because they had been pushing tech for 2 generations and only doing worse as a business. People preferred the Playstation 2 over the Gamecube because it had more and better games, and Nintendo spent the n64 and Gamecube console generations losing their third party support. That's also why the doubled down on their first party games.
They did care about tech, just not the tech everyone else cared about. They built pretty much the only successful docking computer, something I've been dying for phone manufacturers to try for a decade. That was revolutionary and a huge part of their success.
This is how I feel. Nintendo carries about tech, but in a different way. For them, its not about ultra graphics, but about changing the way you interact with a console and game. Like the Wii, sure, it wasn't bleeding edge hardware or even good hardware compute wise. But it challenged the way we normally thought about how a player could play a game. The switch another example of a console that is both portable, but easily dockable. The only thing I wish they did different was make it so it was a little more performant when docked.
The graphics and power competition existed ever since Sega entered the ring. To be honest, the console wars are more nuanced than that. The N64 had superior graphics to PS1, but the lack of discs meant publishers had to spend $10-15 in wholesale costs on cartridges (vs <$1 for CDs), and due to the ROM tech at the time, they couldn't ship games much larger than 64MB (and even that size required additional expensive chips). Squaresoft famously bailed on Nintendo platforms as a result of the game size issue.
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.
> People preferred the Playstation 2 over the Gamecube because it had more and better games
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 Gamecube and N64 were both nerfed by Nintendo's insistence on using proprietary storage formats. The N64 cartridge size ranged from 4mb to 64mb (64mb being the maximum at the end of the console's lifespan).
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 main selling point of Nintendo was always their ip. They're better at making games then making consoles.
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)
>I'd have to think about it, but I might defend the NES, SNES, and Gamecube as the best consoles of their generations
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.
I do not believe calling Steam Deck a clone of the switch is a truly charitable argument or characterization of the product. The Steam Deck is an infinitely moddable PC that play your steam library on the go. It's been long needed, but exists with a different consumer persona than steam deck.
The Switch actually came out as an advanced handheld. The appeal was that it was a handheld advanced enough to play on a TV. It's just that (especially handheld) technology have advanced in the last 8 years. On the Switch, Nintendo is simply extending it's console's life.
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.
The next console will be a follow up to the Switch. It probably has some kind of added gimmick, but I think the form factor will largely stay the same.
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.
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.
> The NES, SNES, N64 and GameCube were part of the "bits race" and kept pushing forward in hardware power.
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.
The impressive part of the NES was its picture processing unit, which among other things finally delivered on an arcade-like experience at home and gained mass appeal in the process. For the time it was considered quite an advanced chip in its price range. The other extremely clever thing Nintendo did with the NES was to put the video bus on the cartridge, and this enabled them to expand the console's apparent capabilities by adding new features to game paks. This helped to keep the NES competitive in the market for many years.
> The other extremely clever thing Nintendo did with the NES was to put the video bus on the cartridge, and this enabled them to expand the console's apparent capabilities by adding new features to game paks.
Can you imagine putting the video card in every copy of a game now? What a time that was.
I don't think we have to reduce it down to a boolean choice. Nintendo has altered their strategy over time, as all 100 year old companies have. It's definitely true that for quite a while now they have not attempted to complete on raw specs.
There's pushing and pushing. Nintendo vs Sega in the early 90s showed this. The Genesis had way more CPU power and MHz but it wasn't balanced (less colors, worse sound compared to SNES chipsets).
The N64 was a bit like that too, they waited quite a long time to release it to get special SGI capabilities.
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...
Nintendo's credo of "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology" was originally framed by Gunpei Yokoi in regards to the Game Boy. The N64 is the only real stand-out exception.
> PS4 and 5 for example are boring, just mostly normal x86 computers with custom OS.
Well, PS3 wasn't boring and where did it get them?
Boring is good.
Eh. They don't push in the classic ways. I don't think Nintendo has ever put out a console that was on the cutting edge of technology.
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.
Always blows my mind when I see the install size for Nintendo games. Super Mario Odyssey was under 6GB. That’s smaller than the patch size of most games.
Weird take because of how much they have experimented with entire consoles in the past. I don't know how the Wii could be called betting on withered technologies.
The wii is basically a slightly more powerful GameCube with novel controls. It competed with (and outsold) the ps3 and xbox360 which offered HD visuals and integrated online play.
So it was outdated tech except for the parts that weren't? If you add in "outdated graphics tech," sure, but saying it's just outdated period does Nintendo a big disservice.
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.
Hmm maybe it's a bad term. I was trying to convey the fact that gamers that enjoy something like fallout or Diablo or Mass effect or RDR2, those types of gamers lose out when they lock themselves onto nintendo.
I for one like every genre but I find it unfortunate nintendo has a wierd focus on casual age friendly games.
The Wii is actually a perfect example of that philosophy. It was built using outdated, underpowered tech, but in spite of that, was a huge success because they did something unusual and innovative with it.
Specifically CPU. The Wii's internals weren't much more powerful than the GameCube's.
... 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).
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.
The withered technologies idea was Gunpei Yokoi’s vision for development, explained in these terms after he had left Nintendo. Yokoi has been dead 25 years at this point, and more recent strategies, like the Blue Sea idea, have a far more influential impact on Nintendo’s design ethos.
Actually I would say this is yet more proof of how awesome breath of the wild was, and the incredible strength of a good franchise. 10 million people instabought it just in the hope it will live up to its predecessor.
That's what I did. I'm apparently in the minority. though, because I HATE it. But since I bought it digitally, I can't return it so I'm counting towards those 10M sales. I guess I'll just go back to my Game & Watch Zelda and keep playing Adventures of Link.
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.
Yeah, I was surprised at the direction they took with this. Adventure + crafting is... Well, it's Minecraft's killer recipe, but those two modes of gameplay are different pacings. I think it was risky to assume Zelda fans would enjoy hitting the relative brick wall of strategic structural building.
I don’t know if you’ve discovered this, but you eventually get plans for your constructions. So you don’t have to constantly build stuff. You just need to build one very good car once.
Now that I've hit that part: yes yes yes they cracked the nut. :)
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).
> gameplay and art direction matter more than anything.
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.
Minecraft’s art direction is very cool and was, at the time, pretty unique. Arguably it was one of the most striking things about the game at the time, and definitely what got me interested back when it came out.
It was also objectively "stolen" from another block based game that was super niche. Minecraft did well because "go out into the wilds and modify it to your will while you build a home at your own pace" is crack to the human brain. Plenty of other games tried the art style and it doesn't really add anything on it's own.
Art direction doesn’t have to mean a complex art style. It’s more about consistency — making your assets all feel like they’re part of the same universe.
I do think this 8-year-old GPU really pretty out-of-date. Even if Nintendo did a lot of optimize for TOTK, it really has a low reslution and low fps(sometimes 540p and 20fps).
Of couse the gameplay and art direction is the best part of a game(compared to Sony games, they has a great performance, but it's totally not fun).
However, I saw some screen records in simulator, I think that is the best which game maker want people to play: 1080P and 60FPS.
Whatever, Nintendo Games is good. But we really need a better console.
It's incredibly easy to emulate, and at much higher resolutions than the switch. There are also patches to unlock the FPS (and to fix the occasional 20 FPS throttling that the game forces) though I haven't tried them yet. I've had a few minor graphical issues, and had occasional crashes until I updated the firmware and game version, but it's working amazingly well overall.
Your GPU won't matter too much, so long as you have a decently powerful CPU you should be fine.
I keep hearing that GPU doesn't matter, but I don't understand why. It uses Vulkan and OpenGL behind the scenes–wouldn't those rely heavily on the GPU?
The only one that's difficult to emulate is the N64. Last I checked there wasn't an agreed upon project like there is for the GC/Wii and other Nintendo consoles.
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.
What? I've been playing emulated N64 games with sixtyforce on my Mac without issues for years, easily since I was a kid in high school.
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"?
>What? I've been playing emulated N64 games with sixtyforce on my Mac without issues for years, easily since I was a kid in high school.
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
Let's check back in a few months, the Yuzu devs have been making incredible progress improving performance in general, and it is not unfathomable to think that in a few months Steam Deck will be at or above locked 30fps while playing in Switch docked mode. (I already get a solid 40fps in Shrines, but those are comparatively undemanding, including on Switch)
There's a Game Maker's Toolkit video [1] that does a good job explaining how Nintendo focuses on play first.
"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. "
It’s true. But the actual hardware doesn’t offer anything particularly unique (which is a win for me: Nintendo is settling down with the gimmicks.)
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.
Well the Switch has a big gimmick: it is a desktop & mobile console at the same time. It's in the name.
This is why they had to compromise on GPU power and basically skip 2 generations compared to the PS5.
Yes. And it’s one of the most useful gimmicks from Nintendo.
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.
The latest Zelda games have all used motion controls, while not all contemporary consoles have the hardware for it. Sure, it could be argued that not everyone requires/enjoys motion controls, but Nintendo has never been the kind of company that designs gameplay experiences for the lowest common denominator.
Part of what makes Nintendo, Nintendo is that their games target their hardware, and vice versa (Their game roadmap influences hardware design).
I played 200 hours of BOTW and 100% of my time with TOTK using a PS4 controller. Using the controller’s motion controls to aim my bow is possibly my favourite non-mouse style for aiming ever.
Yeah Zelda's motion controls are great for what they're used for — but that's kind of my point. Even without using a first party controller, you're still enjoying controls that were designed for their own hardware.
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.
Yes, and seeing the Steam Deck makes me excited for whenever or if ever they finally make a Switch 2. Surely 6 years and multiple GPU generations is enough to let me play the Zelda games in 4k.
Don’t get your hopes up. Nintendo is probably not going to tolerate the low battery life the Steam Deck has, which means they’re probably looking at a device far less powerful than the Deck.
I mean, I hate to break it to you all, but all y'all obsessing about FPS are the minority. By a lot.
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.
I'm finding that as I play this game, the frame drops from 30 to ~15 really do suck. It's not just the abilities that do it - it'll happen in the overworld and when walking around villages. In most parts of the game just spinning the camera is enough to tank it and it just feels bad. Though maybe performance varies between earlier and newer switch models.
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.
FPS is a fair criticism of these games. They are fundamentally enjoyable games, so you look past the flaws. But low FPS in sections is still a flaw.
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.
Who says I'm obsessing about it? The comment made an exaggerated statement about the visual aspect of a video game on a community known for being sticklers for detail and spec because they're technical as a demographic, their jobs are also technical. You cannot bullshit this demographic and ass-pull subjective hot takes on something measurable.
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?
There are no gacha mechanics in this game. There is a mechanic where you throw some dropped monster parts into a device in order to receive random building materials, but monster parts and device parts are already abundant, drop rates are basically equal for all parts, and, most crucially, there's no way to spend real money on any of this. It's not there to facilitate gambling, it's there to incentivize creativity in your builds by giving you parts that you might not otherwise go out of your way to acquire or use.
> So you're just going to ignore the gacha mechanics?
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.
TotK's in-game mechanic literally operates like a gachapon machine. You insert something (a facsimile of a coin), out comes a capsule with something random in it. Softening kids to the mechanics of gacha isn't good. Furthermore, you completely dismissed the rest of my comment and what I was responding to.
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.
Nice way of completely invalidating all your arguments in this thread. I hope this will be a lesson for you next time you go on a toxic and obnoxious rampage.
Anyway, time to go back to the most beautiful game I've ever played. A game that looks fantastic.
You sound like a 90's mom complaing about GTA's violence.
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.
I'm not asking for 60fps. I'm asking to not go down into single digit fps when using ultrahand or being in crowded areas. A stable 30fps isn't an unreasonable ask in 2023. To claim it's running at 30fps is to not understand the problem.
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?
The way the capsule machines actually work in-game is that the probabilities of getting each potential item are roughly equal, and you get around 10 "pulls" for an extremely common currency, where each capsule is from a predetermined pool per machine of around 4 items.
Which makes pulling nonrandom given the law of averages. It's effectively a joke.
The Minish cap had a gacha machine, it was cute. The important part is you can't use real money on it, which means it HAS to be designed as an actual in game reward.
Nintendo's actual microtransaction garbage is the amiibos, which are shameless and often explicitly pay to win.
Minish Cap was 2004 before we had a better understanding of what is and is not a good thing to expose people to.
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.
> 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.
I hate it when people just cut off quotes and then proceed to argue based on that, so I will not be engaging with you any further as you are arguing in bad faith. The words after "gambling mechanics" are not incidental flourishes that could just be cut off.
And yet that's exactly what you did to me; ignored the majority of my comment to hone in on one little thing and go off at a complete tangent to what the rest of the discussion is about.
Have a good day and enjoy the average performing modern AAA title.
I don't think it is fair to hand wave away the performance issues like this. Frame rate drops down to 20 and below are very noticeable to the untrained eye. We're not talking about the difference between 30/60/120fps where you don't really know what you're missing until you get used to the higher frame rates.
The "Digital Foundry" tech analysis found that it's mostly stable 30fps, with occasional dips in villages but nothing that meaningfully impacts gameplay. My experience matches with that, so I'm inclined to believe their analysis. It isn't perfect, but I think a lot of comments in this thread are overstating the issue.
FPS drops throw people off. Just like TV that drops signal, car that sometimes doesn't accelerate, or maybe a website that sometimes loads 10s. It's perfectly fine to care about it.
>I mean, I hate to break it to you all, but all y'all obsessing about FPS are the minority. By a lot.
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)
Yes, and every subsequent generation. I still play, I've even IPS-modded the display on my DMG-01 to appreciate what the console could actually draw in terms of frames.
Same, although my collection is a GBC/GBA and PSP all clear shelled and with IPS screens. Gadgets don't have clear shells anymore :( hopefully it'll come back, was kinda cyberpunky
And the Switch has a 60hz display too and people can connect it to whatever display they have. It's just Nintendo hellbent on the 30fps. Even though there are games with perfect 60fps gameplay on the Switch from Nintendo too not just 3rd parties.
Maybe this is just comic exaggeration that's flying over my head, but I find it very strange to interpret Nintendo's intentions this way.
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.
Well, you can't run TotK at 60fps on the existing Switch hardware, even if it was unlocked, it's just not got enough grunt. The only alternative is make a less-demanding game, optimize it better, or release better hardware than can support the ideas adequately.
Yeah, there have been so many times during gameplay I've said "man, this crazy scenario I somehow concocted by tossing a lazer cannon glued to a fan into the middle of a group of bad guys sure is fun—but if it were just running at 10fps more I could really enjoy it."
The game looks and plays great. Most people won't notice framerate. You don't have to either.
Dude, someone said it looks fantastic, a purely subjective observation. And then you disagreed. It seems disingenuous for you to start disputing someone's logic.
Subjectivity versus objectivity. We can measure framerate and resolution, and for a 2023 title, it's really not ticking the boxes on what "fantastic" visuals are in modern gaming from AAA. The hardware struggles to run the game, let's be real.
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.
Millions of games on the playstation and n64 were sold despite running at 12 fps, having horrific graphical artifacts (stupid texture mapping on the playstation, god awful smeary "filtering" on the n64), and everybody has fond memories of it, to the point that it's currently popular to emulate those artifacts.
If you make an actually good game, people will cross broken glass to play it.
It actually could be benefited from improved performance, for instance the introduction of the sky and the depth was only possible because of performance improvements from Switch (note that BotW's target platform was Wii U, so Nintendo intentionally limited the game's scope to the overworld).
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.
It's also more than capable of running on other platforms via emulation, and there are visual tweak mods (increased draw distance, LOD tweaks, etc) that don't change the art style but make it far more beautiful than being limited to the underperformant Switch hardware.
Also polish. So many AAA titles have come out with so many bugs and performance issues they’re arguably just unfinished.
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.
> Nintendo proved again that gameplay and art direction matter more than anything
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.
Nintendo knows graphical superior games is mainly to draw in gamers to look, but Nintendo franchises will draw regardless. The graphics just need to be good, also cartoonish graphics will look the same if you are on a PS5 or 6
I also upgraded to new Zelda-edition OLED Switch and case and snatched two Zelda-edition controllers from local Walmart. They will have huge bump in hardware sales as well.
Nah, it's Stockholm Syndrome. It's seems to basically be the same game as the previous one with a few small extras such as the building/gadget system.
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.
> Nintendo proved again that gameplay and art direction matter more than anything
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.
That graphics would not look out of place in a 2013 indie game from a well-established but not rich studio. It would have not been ground-breaking in 2003, but would grab some attention for sure. I bet they will use same level of graphics in 2033, maybe with some AI tricks slapped on top if they manage to get cheap hardware for that.
> That graphics would not look out of place in a 2013 indie game from a well-established but not rich studio.
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.
The graphics are rather poor, you can literally count the triangles. The art style saves everything. This is an excellent collaboration between engineering and design that give an amazing end result.
You know that just because it's the same franchise doesn't mean it's not innovative.
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.
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.
Splatoon is an amazing franchise. Advanced Wars also has real potential. I'd buy a sequel to Arms.
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.
Let me preface this by stating I have owned every piece of Nintendo hardware other than Virtual Boy, up to and including the Switch. I have played through BotW and other modern iterations of the usual IP. Also, yeah, this is really long and goes into a bunch of other stuff completely unrelated to TOTW. Sorry xD
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
I think it proves that nostalgia and brands matter more than anything. I find it very hard to find much novelty in the art direction, the world seems empty, not unrelated to the technical limitations, and the gameplay seems just okay.
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.
> I think it proves that nostalgia and brands matter more than anything.
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.
It’s both, but your theory doesn’t explain why breath of the wild was so good. I hadn’t played a Zelda game for 15 years before that, and it had no real relevance to those games, yet it was the best game I’ve ever played in terms of the world and story and gameplay (with the possible exception of the first deus ex).
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)
I'm often discouraged by comments on Hacker News that downplay the importance of great design in a design-heavy medium.
This game isn't succeeding primarily because of great marketing, franchise, or blind loyalty to Nintendo (though all of those help!).
It's succeeding primarily because it's the follow-up to a game that critics and players universally found enormously fun. Before Breath of the Wild previous Zelda entries did not sell this well.
I disagree; Zelda games have always been a major draw for Nintendo audiences. Link to the Past was the best-selling game of 1991; Link's Awakening - released in 1993 on the Gameboy - was a defining game for Nintendo at the time and was directly responsible for a massive uptake in Gameboy sales (and was the best-selling game of the year.) OoT was an absolutely industry-defining success; it was the best-selling game of 1998, and it's the highest-rated video game of all time on Metacritic. Zelda games have always moved consoles and sold well; in terms of Nintendo's unit-movers, it's second only to Mario.
Of course the raw numbers look more impressive for BotW - there are 122m Switch units worldwide (and 30m BotW sales), but the N64 only shipped 33m units worldwide over its 8-year lifespan, and OoT still sold 7.6m copies (with another 6.4m on the 3DS).
My point is that it's the strength of the design, not the loyalty to the franchise or other factors, that is the primary driver of sales.
The titles you cite (Link's Awakening, Ocarina of Time) also made sales records because they were so good they reached a wider audience. But if you look at historical sales a mainline Zelda entry usually sells 6m to 10m.
Breath of the Wild sold 30 million and Tears of the Kingdom looks to be on a similar trajectory. That's due to the strength of the game design that's broadened the appeal well beyond the typical Zelda gamer.
I think the point the person you replied to was making was that BotW and TotK aren't just selling due to Zelda nostalgia.
There are lots adults with college degrees now that are playing this game who weren't even in kindergarten yet (or born!) when the games you mentioned were released.
BOTW has the same attachment rate as Windwaker and Ocarina of Time, which nullifies the argument that Zelda has sold poorly until BOTW. Attachment rates are important, better than pure sales, because it tells you how many potential buyers bought the game.
BOTW and TOTK are still huge successes, but it's not really about great design (unfortunately). If it was, every one of Nintendo's games would be record smashing sellers, but they aren't. They have plenty of games that don't make a dent despite their insane attention to detail. We saw this with Mario Maker 1 & 2, not even cracking 10m copies to this day, and one can't even blame lack of name recognition, it's literally Mario!
Where great design does have impact is on long term word of mouth sales. Which we saw with BOTW and are likely to see here again.
I did not say that the Zelda franchise has sold poorly, just less well than BOTW / TOTK.
I don't think attach rates offer the full picture. Early on the audience for BOTW was so eager for the game they were buying the Switch just for BOTW. For a period the attach-rate was greater than 100%! But the Switch has broad appeal and the attach-rate of BOTW has declined as more types of gamers buy-in to the Switch. The Gamecube and (to a lesser extent) the Nintendo64 had less success than the Switch outside of core Nintendo fans which naturally means franchises like Zelda would have higher attach rates.
Mario Mario 1 & 2 are both well-designed executions of a concept that appeals to a more limited audience (building and playing user-made Mario levels). BOTW / TOTK hit that sweet spot of widely appealing concept and excellent execution.
> Before Breath of the Wild previous Zelda entries did not sell this well.
Breath of the Wild was certainly the best-seller, but nearly every Zelda game has been a knock-out success selling millions of copies. I think Breath of the Wild is an outlier among them in part because it was out during the pandemic. I know a whole lot of people who bought a Switch during the lockdown and poured hours into escapism with that game.
Tears of the Kingdom is selling crazy numbers even without the lockdown boost. Other factors make a difference but the core of what drives the sale of these two titles is that they're great games people strongly want to play.
That's not a counterpoint. More serious gamers have always loved Zelda and the series has always sold well amongst that audience.
But this game (and Breath of the Wild) is selling above and beyond previous entries because it's such a great game that its appeal reaches well beyond Zelda's traditional audience.
The big story with this new Zelda game, and why it is able to include so many deep and interlocking systems on top of a staggering amount of content, comes down to institutional knowledge at Nintendo. Many of the people working on or giving input on this game have been making Zelda games for decades. Eiji Aonuma, the current producer of the Zelda series, directed every mainline Zelda from Ocarina to Twilight Princess. Hidemaro Fujibayashi was at Capcom when he directed Oracle of Ages/Seasons, Four Swords, and the Minish Cap in the late 90s and early 2000s. Skyward Sword was the first Zelda he directed and he went on to direct Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. While Western games studios crush their developers with crunchtime and pursue flashy graphics over deep systems, Nintendo nurtures and retains its internal talent and as a result they do far more with technically inferior hardware. Contrast Tears of the Kingdom's smooth launch with the ongoing debacle of Overwatch 2 from Blizzard, whose devs just announced they won't be delivering one of the core promised features of the sequel. Obviously not every Western studio is as bad as Activision/Blizzard, but Nintendo running circles around everyone on 7 year old mobile phone hardware should prompt some serious soul searching for Western games execs.
Why is every one saying seven years ago? I remember the Switch coming out around March 2017. We're in May 2023. That's six years (and change) ago, not seven.
I don't play modern games and am hardly a connoisseur but I seem to recall this being a mostly-solved problem via "level of detail" and hardware fog effects... has pop-in been an issue in the last decade? Saturn/PS1 games having it was par for the course but modern hardware is so powerful that it seems unnecessary.
Pop-in essentially exists because the draw distance is too low. As the player get's closer to an object, it is more likely to be drawn, and the level of detail it is drawn at is higher.
While it's not Saturn/PS1 levels in modern games, in very large and very open maps you can have this problem where you know in the distance there can be things that you simply cannot see because of draw distance. If your running towards something in the distance, there can be noticeable 'step-ups' as it decides to draw the model with more and more details. So it comes up in exploring very large and very open areas. This happens to various degrees even on PS5+ level hardware.
There's a similar issues with movement speed, but instead the limit is how quickly can the game load new content.
For those not in the nintendo ecosystem, 'Immortals Fenyx rising' is a Zelda esque game to try. It's on game pass and is the best game ubisoft has made in some time.
This is the reason I don't find the game compelling. I don't want to sound like a hipster, so I'd like to recognize the incredible art direction and world design and that this is the first time console players are getting something like this.
But honestly all of the physics builds I've seen for TotK were being done in garrys mod circa ~2008 in multiplayer. My friends and I were racing rocket cars where the only steering was more side mounted thrusters. Great fun but feels like really old news.
“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” — Edsger W. Dijkstra
Game is about how fun the game is. Totk is easily the best game I've played this year. Definitely an upgrade from Botw. Costco is like $59, cheaper than preorder with $5 credits from GameStop which was $69 I think.
I love how every top level comment is all about how this is because Nintendo made an amazing game. Yet... with how fast this is selling, there is literally no way that folks know it is an amazing game ahead of time.
More, odds are high that if they had made this as not a sequel, it would not be selling as well. Go bolder and make it a new franchise? Same game would basically not be noticed.
I think it is fair to like the game. I go ever farther and think it is a fun game. But the lessons to learn from how fast and well this is selling is as much about the power of franchise as it is anything about this particular game/system.
> Yet... with how fast this is selling, there is literally no way that folks know it is an amazing game ahead of time.
Advanced copies to reviewers, gameplay footage, developer commentary, etc...
> But the lessons to learn from how fast and well this is selling is as much about the power of franchise as it is anything about this particular game/system.
There are plenty of popular franchises that release games that don't sell well.
Certainly some folks are reading the reviews. I guarantee most are not. Heck, I'm interested and I haven't read any. (And, yes, I prepurchased the game.)
There are, certainly, franchises that tank. Usually not after a successful release, though. That said, this one is odd, as the prequel didn't seem to generate near as much buzz?
This. They made BotW to sell the Switch, and this sequel doesn't add any novel elements to it. This game deserves the success if BotW didn't exist, but as a sequel the hype is pure marketing.
If game of the year awards were reserved for new, non-sequel games, maybe franchises would be discouraged from selling the same game multiple times.
I bought and played it the day of release, because of the hype and since I loved BotW. Yeah, they added some new mechanics and items and overall the gameplay seems more refined, but it definitely feels like a sequel with a lot of familiarity. If TotK was a standalone game, it'd be a masterpiece. But in comparison to BotW, it's just more and a little better.
Admittedly, some of my disappointment comes from chasing the thrill of playing BotW for the first time. Maybe those were unrealistic expectations, but for the same price and more hype, TotK just didn't have nearly the same impact for me.
TOTK originated as a DLC for BOTW that quickly outgrew it rather than originating as a truly separate game. The amount of new content absolutely justifies it being its own title, but you might find it less disappointing if you pretend it's BOTW part 2.
There has basically never been a Zelda game that wasn’t amazing. Also this is a sequel to a game that people were buying before they even had a switch (because switches were hard to get for the first year or so.)
So yeah, everyone assumed it’d be an amazing game and it is.
Personally I thought that Spirit Tracks was much worse than Phantom Hourglass. The whole train mechanic and being restricted on how you could move in the overworld really wasn't fun. Between that and the re-implementation of the recurring temple so that you could only temporarily disable the guards, the whole game felt like a semi-stealth mission where you either timed the enemy movement right to slip past them or died instantly.
Also the original black sheep of the franchise, Adventures of Link.
Although personally I think it was a good idea that suffered from bad implementation, I've found very few people willing to admit they actually liked it. Notwithstanding it being decades old at this point.
More rare, is finding folks that can honestly admit to having beaten it. I picked up the "game and watch" recently, and I can't remember crap about how to make progress in that game. It is really really hard to remember where to go next.
Granted, the first game is bad at that, too. Especially on the second play through. Really difficult to have the same map be different in that way. Still have fun playing it, years later. :D
Stating the obvious, yes being a sequels helps, and not leveraging a sequel and be bold just for the heck of it is pointless. Also a sequel that sucked and get 65% reviews won’t get you these numbers
That sounds like a criticism that would apply if this were just some generic game that had the Zelda IP slapped onto it. But that doesn’t seem at all the case here, right?
I don't really mean this as a criticism. Yes, I think it is a good game. No, I don't think there are any real lessons others can capitalize on from it.
> More, odds are high that if they had made this as not a sequel, it would not be selling as well.
Probably. I’m not sure by how much though, there really aren’t many original games getting made with similar budgets. The story/dialog/acting definitely would not cut it without decades of nostalgia and backstory.
While I have no doubt it’s a great game because it’s Nintendo, AAA headliners tend to be sort of immune to criticism. It only becomes possible to determine decades down the line if one of these “10/10” games was actually top-tier or just middling and highly polished.
Nintendo first party games are reliably good. Bad Nintendo franchise games are the exception. After 30 years, and six after a huge hit, trust/prepurchase isn't absurd.
The marketing was insane as usual. Nintendo performed excellent.
Multiple front page reddit posts, multiple 10/10 reviews from big name outlets. Nintendo rivals Apple as the best company in marketing.
Nintendo has done some sort of mass psychology that allows them to have sub 30fps with no complaints, I was born too early to see this reviewed in business schools, but we are starting to see a bit of the innerworkings of how Nintendo has created IP that is worshiped.
Nintendo didn't really need to do any marketing beyond "Hey we are releasing a new Zelda game, it will run on the Switch you bought years ago mostly in order to play the previous Zelda game".
I've been playing games for 30+ years, at no point have I cared deeply about the difference between 30fps and 60fps. I do not like 5fps-stuttering, which happens sometimes in poorly optimised AAA games no matter how good (within reason) the GPU.
The new Zelda runs well and looks good. I like it, though it's very much "BOTW Continued" which maybe we didn't need, I might have preferred a completely fresh world & characters instead of the same Hyrule a few years later.
I'm in Warsaw and I see countless of zelda ads: whole walls of huge buildings are covered with them. They probably spent insane amount of money if they advertise it like this everywhere
I care about the difference between 30fps and 60fps, but only in certain games. If I'm playing a PC first-person shooter, I'm gonna want 60fps (or preferably 144fps). For an RPG or strategy game, 30fps or less is good enough.
I agree on the stuttering though - the only thing worse than low framerate is slightly higher average framerate + big dips.
Not to mention, Good products sell themselves. Nintendo's marketing isn't that much different from anyone else. They just make products that people want to talk about.
I’m kind of amazed that Nintendo continues to put as much effort into their first party games as they do. They could probably get away with phoning it in and releasing a crappy mainline Zelda/Mario game annually, because as you say their marketing is so strong. Instead they take 6 years to make an excellent sequel.
Every Pokémon game seems to be worse than the last, and every single one breaks sales records. I’m very grateful they haven’t gone the same route with their other IPs, but the financial temptation must be immense.
> Every Pokémon game seems to be worse than the last
You don't get the Pokemon community then.
Each generation of Pokemon fixes the meta. The overwhelming Dragon-meta that was in Diamond/Pearl was fixed by Fairy Types by X/Y (which also improved the weakest Diamond/Pearl type: Poison by making Poison strong vs Fairy). The difficult "breeding" mechanics as the community learned to use (and abuse) IVs was fixed by adding in NPCs that helped figure out IVs, and items (Destiny Knot) to figure that out. Then Bottlecaps and Mints were added to make other details easier. Etc. etc.
As Toxic-Spikes/Spikes/Stealth Rock teams grew more powerful in a stall environment, the Pokemon Team added Mega-evolutions and other powerful mechanics to sweep / push the game back into an offensive style, rather than degenerating into a defensive stallfest.
Every generation of Pokemon makes it easier-and-easier to build a competitive team and join the online competitive community. Every generation the Pokemon team demonstrates an understanding of the online competitive meta.
And even recently, the Pokemon Anime has acknowledged what the community has figured out. Gengar / Dragonite are powerful and popular, and in the show are part of Ash's championship team. Ash's opponents used similarly "competitive" Pokemon, showing that the anime-writers are paying attention to the in-game meta and online competitive environments.
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Its a holistic experience. The game designers are responsive to the community, and seem to have leeway into acknowledging the community experience inside of the show.
That's more or less what people want. Game designers that acknowledge the community and tailor the game for the community. Yes, Pokemon isn't too mainstream, its not like Legend of Zelda or Skyrim. Its... its own thing. There is a large amount of children playing who remain happily ignorant to the subtle details of the metagame. But there's also a large amount of adults who have played Pokemon for the last 20+ years, and its kind of awesome that the Pokemon company remains responsive to these subtle metagame issues / high-competitive metagame issues.
Nintendo (and the Pokemon Company) aren't afraid to cater to the needs of the community its built up. They actually cultivate it and help it grow.
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If you're not the type to understand why a few weekends ago the 5x perfect IV Ditto raid-boss was such a big deal, Pokemon probably isn't for you.
why is it amazing? they take pride in their work and seemingly intend to continue doing a good job for another fifty years. more companies should copy that rather than "oh yeah marketing blitz".
It’s really tempting to see the success of something you don’t understand or value as “marketing” or “mass psychology” but I suspect that path doesn’t usually lead to any interesting or useful insight.
well put. it really is fascinating to see how common that is on HN, where I imagine most of the posters imagine themselves to be worldly and open-minded, see for example every iphone thread.
Do not make the mistake of comparing framerates in feature films and video games. Those are perceived by viewers very differently.
In movies, 24 fps (and the 180° shutter) provide just the right amount of the dream like visuals that help the audience get into the story. Movies that tried higher framerates mostly flopped because they end up looking like documentaries. There is also no reasons to increase the framerate to reduce latency.
In video games, technical limitations aside, higher fps is always a good thing. I don't think I ever heard anyone complain that the animation was too smooth or the latency too low.
Comparing the artistic experience and interaction and physical eye movement with movies and videos games is apples and oranges.
I don't interact with a movie. The movie doesn't respond to my inputs. The field of view is different. My expectations of a movie as a fantasy told at 24fps to keep the "movie experience" is different from wanting an immersive simulation.
> Nintendo has done some sort of mass psychology that allows them to have sub 30fps with no complaints
I've put in about 15 hours and haven't noticed it. I've sorta been looking, too, because I read everyone complaining about it on here before I picked up the game. But I keep getting distracted by... playing the game.
> Nintendo has done some sort of mass psychology that allows them to have sub 30fps with no complaints, I was born too early to see this reviewed in business schools, but we are starting to see a bit of the innerworkings of how Nintendo has created IP that is worshiped.
I don't think I've ever known the fps of any of the games I've played.
I do remember having to zoom in on Doom II on some levels because my computer was very slow for that game, yet I still loved the game (of course, I did enjoy it better when I played at a friend's that had a better computer and a sound card, but that's another story).
I only care about the playing part of playing games. Like, when I played marbles (yeah, I've been around ...), while I did have a favorite marble or two, I only cared about playing.
I don't say this to discredit you, of course, just that I think by the time a game makes it so big as this one, it's because it's reaching ordinary people like me who couldn't care less about fps and just like the game if playing it lets them have a great time, so if there is any mass psychology involved, I suppose it's the mass psychology of coming up with a compelling game that people enjoy playing. Anyone who has that doesn't need to fool people into not noticing how low their fps rate is.
It has nothing to do with psychology. FPS is a meme, Nintendo makes good games and always had and they’ve basically never cared about having the best hardware.
That's not quite the right lesson. NES, SNES, N64, and Gamecube were all highly competitive, from a technical perspective. By having the best hardware, Nintendo learned that making good games on good-enough hardware is really what they're interested in.
Tri Force Heroes is bad. You can play it single player or with 3 players, but not with 2. And if you play it single player, you constantly have to reorder your stack of Links, which is a tedious process.
Compared with Four Swords Adventures, which is fun to play with 1, 2, 3, or 4 people.
"Mass psychology" is an odd way to interpret "people are having fun." I think the opposite is true — its easy to sell people on the importance of powerful hardware when the success and exclusivity of your games is a not a guarantee.
I think Nintendo is unique in that, when selling a console, your customers at least know they'll get a few good exclusive games out of it.
(But like most, I wish they did more with their IPs)
Nintendo sucks at marketing, it’s why the Wii U failed. Apple barely does marketing in my country. They are doing well right now because they make superior products and people are noticing.
Which country do you live in? A company doesn't have to actually market in your country as such, they do it where it matters and the rest flows in other places.
Seriously. Nintendo has put quality games out like clockwork for decades now to the point where the biggest IP is almost instantly given top rating from everyone any time it's released, no matter how many glaring technical flaws exist.
It's kind of nauseating, but impressive nonetheless. I can understand why - their games are fun, colorful, and (for the most part) very family friendly.
All that said I wish Nintendo would dive back into some of the more underutilized IP, such as making a new first-person Metroid game, or a new Star Fox or F-Zero game. All 3 would have a lot of replay value if a proper multiplayer element was added. Yet Nintendo can straight up ignore multiplayer for the most part and still sell well, so what do I know?
I don't think Nintendo knows how to make StarFox. They haven't been able to actually make a successful improvement to the formula since it was first released. StarFox 2 actually could have been that successful iteration, but they canned it for StarFox64, which is a remake of Starfox. Starfox Adventure pissed off everyone because it shouldn't have been a starfox game, Starfox assault did not do well for a multitude of reasons, Starfox command was fun, but shat all over any semblance of a story the universe had and didn't scratch the itch people were desperate for, Starfox zero was a half assed expansion to a tech demo that had a terrible gimmick the producer was married to but nobody wanted and made no sense (I can't focus on both screens at once), and they've basically called the time of death at this point.
Rail shooters aren't exactly knock out hits anymore.
Which is why I suggested multiplayer being a reason to bring the game back. A 4-on-4 or 5-on-5 Starfox multiplayer would be absolutely incredible on modern consoles.
The other reason Starfox is hard to do is because the game itself is quite short - IIRC Starfox64 could be completed in less than an hour - it was only 7 stages at most, 6 at least. Crazy short. Make the whole campaign 20+ missions with longer stages, totally possible with today's tech.
I love F-Zero and dumped a lot of time into it when I was 13 but F-Zero GX was so insanely inaccessible to new players. None of my friends ever wanted to play split-screen because it required intimate knowledge of the controls, tracks, and machines in addition to crackerjack timing on the controller. Mario Kart is a lot more successful because it's the exact opposite. Although I'd love another F-Zero game I understand why they aren't bothering.
Oh yeah, it's not for the Mario Kart crowd - it's a lot more hardcore than that. But for those of us who liked fast, technical racing games, F-Zero was a dream. Would love it if Nintendo released an F-Zero with an easy mode, and a hard mode.
F-Zero X had that mode that generated new tracks randomly. If only that could be packaged into a modern game.....
There's a great YouTube video that shows how the first attempt to make a sequel to F-Zero is what turned into Mario Kart! So every time you play super-accessible Mario, that is in fact a sequel.
Nintendo is rarely a slouch in this area either, Splatoon is firmly "classic" now and I suspect we'll see sequels to both Ring Fit Adventure and Arms on the next console.
It is for most customers. They're not buying a movie, they're buying a movie player that only plays Disney movies.
For me and you we can likely buy every console but most of this rivalry stems from the fact that most people buy one console.
In this case the PC is the overall winning choice imo, but it's too expensive for a top of the line model. In that case the PS5 takes the next spot and the overall best choice when affordability and simplicity* are factored in.
(PC can play pirated games and emulate many past consoles leading to vast overall savings but it requires a bit more technical know how then most consumers are used to. Also many consumers are not into piracy, but it is an option here)
Metroid is one of the least casuals but that's as casual as nintendo will get. Simple stories no blood, no dark hard themes like in RDR2 or dead space.
>What do God of War, RDR2, and Dead Space have in common that makes them not casual? I'm really curious about what makes a game casual or not.
Things that will make a movie casual. That's what I meant. Not casual in the sense that tetris is casual. Casual in the sense that a disney movie is casual while inception or Evil Dead is not casual.
Here's a better way to put it, thematically casual and age friendly is what nintendo is all about.
I'm not a mega gamer, but I've been playing console games since the original NES and I have never, not once, known or given a shit what a game's fps was. Maybe I just don't play the kind of games where it matters, but my guess is that most Switch users are in the same boat. People who care about FPS are more likely to go with Playstation or Xbox anyway.
BOTW was the first Zelda game I've played since the SNES days. I've never been a big fan of the franchise, but I still love these two games because they are fun to play. Everything else is window dressing.
Graphics have stopped making any meaningful difference in the total experience since the PS2 era. The move to HD and 4k is nice, and things look a bit more realistic, but they don't make games any more fun, and they hardly even make them any more immersive. I will take a fun 20fps game any day over a 4K 60fps game that sucks.
Hmm, this is a bit of an exaggeration. The Gamecube was considerably more powerful than the PS2, (and Microsoft took a huge dive on the original XBOX hardware in order to compete - although it was indeed more capable than the GC).
The Wii was the first time Nintendo explicitly entered the market with hardware knowingly less powerful than their competition, and that was... 2006? So like 17 years, not 30.
You could make a case that their handheld hardware was always "underpowered" compared to the competition, like the Game Gear and PSP, but the justification at those times was better battery life and pocket-ability. The market results seem to speak for themselves, though
A lot of western pundits (and major studio executives) have been expecting Nintendo to "go third party" like Sega ever since the Gamecube, and yet they're still around. They seem to know what they're doing.
No? The n64 was a graphics powerhouse, literally SGI tech in a cheap box you put in front of your TV. The gamecube too was very powerful, at least compared to the PS2. The GameBoy Advanced was a pretty powerful 32 bit ARM system.
It wasn't until the Wii that Nintendo gave up the tech arms race, because making games people want to play and marketing to the people who aren't turbo-nerds about half true specs turns out to be way more profitable.
FPS is important for some titles. I tried dishonored 2 on the ps4 slim (not pro), and it was an awful experience so much that I bought it a second time on PC.
But yes, TOTK is one of those titles which work great at 30 FPS.
Eh, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese constantly shipped 24fps and people were still very happy with their work. FPS does not good entertainment make.
I honestly don't even notice that it's sub 30fps and I'm a longtime Melee player and therefore 60fps nut. If anything, it makes this game more impressive lmao.
I am very much enjoying this game. It would rate my favorite game for the simple fact that I just feel zero desire or need to finish it. Not in a bad way!
I am just having fun in this world, I feel like I can get lost in it. The new mechanics with the abilities is just insane and I could easily just spend hours building things.
Sure the frame rate drops a bit, but the core gameplay is so good that I honestly don't care. It never gets bad enough that I can't play it or I feel like the drops are why I died.
It is just a beautiful game to look at.
I am getting really frustrated seeing the complaints that it's "the same game". No... no it's not. Not anymore than the countless COD games that come out every year. This feels like a sequel that takes place in the same world that has been drastically changed that actually deserves to be a sequel.
I think the general consensus will end up giving this game a solid 8.5/10 (user consensus of course, not journali$t consensus. You can already see that in the user score on metascore.)
Someone mentioned online "which part of this game constitues giving it a 10/10?" and I totally agree having been playing since the leaks. This is coming from an OG OOT 1998 player too. Happy Zelda is back, but still think they could have done more with this one or at least innovate more.
Worst is the Switch hardware making this unplayable until emulation catches up. How on earth did a game that looks and runs like how TOTK not get dinged EVEN A TINY BIT for graphics and performance? I'm not a graphics whore by any means, but there's a limit here.
Strange, I personally find it very enjoyable on the switch.
Could be better obviously but I really like the art style and the gameplay is way more fluid than almost any other AAA games running at 60FPS on my PC.
It's already running remarkably well under emulation, the few minor bugs that exist are easy to overlook when the upside is playing it at 60fps with triple or quadruple the resolution.
I'm very bothered by this aspect of switch gaming. If I want to play a game at a decent framerate and resolution I have to jump through hoops to run it on unofficial hardware.
I've been playing through BotW again on CEMU since my Wii U died awhile back. I'm blown away by how amazing it looks and how stable it runs on my PC. There are some minor issues with completing certain puzzles that require motion controls, but so far I found easy workarounds for everything
I ordered the standard and just before launch they optioned a collectors edition. I ordered that at two spots in the off chance it didn't come. So now I'm sitting with three copies. I know a few people in this boat. Still bodes well for the number of copies moved.
Achieving (what feels like) true gaming freedom with such a simple UX is really impressive. I know Zelda has always had a great UX, but they've added so much complexity. Games like this remind you why Nintendo has had so much staying power.
The only potentially bad UX is attaching things to arrows or choosing what item to throw. Using the sorting options helps, but you still end up doing a lot of scrolling through a list during combat which takes you out of fun of combat.
They might've gone with a grid display, but with the amount of items they have, they're inevitably going to have some UI sprawl, so it's a hard problem.
First party Nintendo (at least mainline Zelda and Mario) are all about quality. You might wait six years between games, but it'll always be worth it. I haven't had a "I wish I wasn't working so I could play this game" in years, but I have it now with TOTK and I couldn't be happier. Neglecting sleep to play just one more hour - I feel like a kid again.
They've always squeezed a ton out of the hardware they have, especially since the Wii, which, in my head at least, is when they started being notably behind hardware wise.
I'm just glad that they're a fantastic example of a company that really prioritizes quality over quantity.
I wonder what would be those sales if the game was released on PC too.
Like they obviously make it exclusive to the Switch to sell more consoles. But I'll never buy that console (or any console, really) just to play this game, or even to play 10 games as good as this one. I imagine tons of PC gamers are in my case. I heard the game runs quite well on a Switch emulator and it was getting massively downloaded via torrent on day 1. Personally I won't bother going this route, I'm too lazy for that, but if the game was on Steam and playable in 1 click, I would gladly give Nintendo 70 bucks.
Same here, it's a shame they don't support the PC market. I bought the game for my wife to play on Switch, but I'm playing it at 4k 60fps on my desktop via Yuzu with my saves being synced to my steamdeck which can emulate the game at 1080p and 25-40fps.
It’s a business strategy that works to have exclusives on a hardware. It sells the hardware and it keeps them in their ecosystem. There are a few percent that won’t buy but they are not going to go after you just to blow up their entire business model
I bought the switch for the first Zelda, great game that got me back into console games. I don't really see any other game worth playing on Switch but it was great. You can always buy it second handed and sell it once you're done.
Is it? It plays like a clone of the first game without a lot of meaningful improvements over the criticisms of the first. Weapons still break, the story still sucks, the dungeons aren't dungeons... It plays more like Minecraft.
I grew up on SNES and N64 Zelda, so admittedly I'm biased towards the old gameplay loop and mechanics.
Yes, it's amazing. The story is better, the dungeons are better, and the weapon durability is further reduced in impact due to continually finding new weapon attachments on enemies.
And you are listing pretty much the lower priority parts of the game - the exploration, density of content, core mechanics, innovation, insane freedom, variety of content, is absolute magic. It definitely plays like BOTW so you may not like it if you didn't like BOTW, but to say it doesn't have a lot of meaningful improvements is simply inaccurate.
The remade world is better and more alive than the first game, the new runes allow for more meaningful interaction with it, and the weapons breakage feels a lot more natural with the addition of object fusion. The dungeons are also substantially more dungeony this time, but still not up to par with previous entries in the series yeah. It also made big improvements on what my biggest complaint with the first game was, which was enemy variety.
It’s not going to fix the desire for the game to be like the old games, no. But for those that did already find something to like in the original BOTW, TOTK is most definitely all around an improvement on the original and substantially more fun.
Link to the Past was my Zelda, too. But BotW surpassed it for me, and TotK so far has been "more BotW". I guess I could imagine being disappointed by that, but so far the prevailing feeling is delight. And a wish that I had more time in my schedule to play.
> I grew up on SNES and N64 Zelda, so admittedly I'm biased towards the old gameplay loop and mechanics.
This is an interesting perspective to me. I bounced off Ocarina of Time hard. It felt like I was being shuffled along a story that was already fully written.
Contrast that to my first experience with the series — the Legend of Zelda on NES — where you’re essentially dumped into the world without instruction and need to make your way.
For me, a huge draw of Breath of the Wild was the same as the NES version: being dumped into a world and being able to go wherever I wanted. I felt like that was a return to the old gameplay loop and mechanics. There was even item breakage — the Like Likes eating your upgraded shield.
I had essentially resigned myself to Zelda games from Ocarina on not being what I wanted, so it was refreshing to get BotW. I’m guessing similarly with TotK, but others in my household have made it such that I haven’t had a chance to try it yet.
The only thing I can think of that Nintendo could do to make me happier than with BotW is make a playable 3D game that is essentially the art that was in the original NES Legend of Zelda’s instruction manual.
Yeah, from the trailers and footage I've seen on Twitter this doesn't seem like the game for me. I want a dungeon crawler, not a physics sandbox. Also I want Link to be left handed again.
That is a feature, not a flaw. They improved the feature in TOTK with Fuse. Now you're forced to try out hundreds of different weapons. You could play for ages and not use the same weapon twice.
Compare to something like Elden Ring, where I felt like the game was almost discouraging me from trying out different weapons. You have to sink so much into a build that just kicking the tires on a different kind of weapon is almost impossible. It's almost guaranteed to feel underpowered.
Note this strategy is mainly only being executed by Nintendo, who insists on selling their hardware at a profit. I still suspect they are making more money on their software though.
I believe Microsoft And Sony lose money per console sold
I thought they only lost money per console early in the builds, but as the production ramps up efficiencies are realized and the consoles themselves become profitable. Are they really sold at a loss throughout the product lifecycle?
I think MS might have been losing money throughout the lifecycle of the device. I'm pretty sure that was true for at least one of their console generations.
Sony has always made money on a per console basis after the first year or years. The PS3, I believe, was exceptional in how long it took Sony to start making money off the device, which might have been largely due to the high cost of including the Blu Ray player.
I've heard that the turning point on the hardware profitability tends to occur around the halfway point of a given generation, but haven't seen anything to really substantiate that—just echoing what I've seen in past discussions.
Deservedly so. The game has tons of content, it's fun, and very polished; it has no right to run as well as it does on hardware as constrained as the Switch. It still dips of course and pop-in is noticeable, but it's very minimal.
It's genuinely impressive to me that in a day when AAA games tend to weigh in at 100GB+, TOTK is only 18GB. Nintendo has done something genuinely impressive both technologically and in terms of game design.
I don't like the Nintendo Switch because it's not ergonomic as a handheld and doesn't perform that well in docked mode. Also, I can't simply backup / transfer saves :(
TOTK is truly a technical and gameplay marvel, it's been so much to spend hours upon hours running around. It's hard to focus on a single mission because you can get side-tracked so easily and that is one of its charms.
It's also amazingly impressive because of the seamless transition from sky to earth to underground, and the amount of stuff it can draw on over 10 year old hardware. But it's also doing impressive physics stuff - attaching multiple objects to each other, and tracking the movement of everything to allow for time reversal. It's truly incredible.
I think a fair number of people, including myself, consider MM > OoT. They are very different games, but MM excels in areas that OoT doesn't.
You're right that this inversion is rare though. I think Phantom Hourglass is a great sequel to Wind Waker, but I can't reasonably claim it's better. (And Spirit Tracks was not better than Phantom Hourglass.)
Majora’s Mask is such an incredibly ambitious title. The game loop is just super cool. The aesthetic is this super interesting depressed melancholic cheerfulness of people coping with their impending death. OoT’s ambition is of course noteworthy in its own right, but damn Majora’s is just so cool.
It's a very recent thing, from players liking to go against the grain for the sake of it. No one would have assumed that in the 64 era. In fact Majora was pretty unloved, which lead to the "for those who knows" phenomena about it.
This seems pretty revisionist. I loved Majora to bits as a child, and I don't recall this being a contrarian opinion whatsoever on the Zelda Universe forums at the time.
Maybe there's a difference between critical and popular reception at play here?
This is definitely not the case. If anything the opposite is true, when MM was released those who played through it found it to be a better game and only with time have people (myself included) come to think of it as worse than OOT.
People hate Phantom hourglass because of the Ocean temple, despite the entire POINT of the ocean temple being improving your ability to skip most of it the next run. By the midpoint of the game, you can get to the midpoint of the ocean temple in a minute, without using any tricks. It's a speedrun integrated into a mainstream game that doesn't require stupid precision to be good at.
Meanwhile it had incredible music, looked really good, the combat was a great fusion of 2D simplicity with the openness and flexibility of Windwaker, the boss fights were fun and felt "Big", boat customization was great, the world was huge, writing directly on your map is a wonderful feature, the characters were lovely, I just don't understand the hate it gets.
I feel like a lot of people wanted it to be a 3D zelda game and that's why they were upset. 2D zeldas and 3D zeldas are basically two different franchises.
PH really is underrated. It's one of the only Zeldas I've gone back to for repeat playthroughs, and it's fun every time. You're absolutely right that the Ocean Temple is an integrated speedrun experience -- and even then, they really make it fun to go back through old floors to make use of new routes and obtain locked-off treasure chests.
Also, Linebeck is one of my top-three sidekicks out of any Zelda game. He really grows on you over the course of the story.
My favorite part of the ocean temple was a simple trick on one of the early floors. You have to get a key out of a closed room, by sneaking around some guards and solving a puzzle. OR you have a boomerang that you can throw around the room, and it will go through the walls on it's way back to you but still pickup the key. You bypass the entire floor.
Judging by activity on eBay and FB, a lot of those copies are already changing hands. Wild reviews must have had a role in overselling the title a bit; I've never played Zelda before and I'm not a massive RPG player, but I just bought BotW to dip my toes into it because the hype is so massive. Before, to me it had always been just "that game that gave Zelda Williams her name". (We miss you, Robin)
After a few hours of play, I found the game extremely tedious and gave up. I don't want to build a raft from scratch every time I come to a river, or maybe I would if the building system wasn't so cumbersome to use. Also the, "your weapon breaks every few seconds" gets old real quick.
But It seems like I'm in the minority; people really like games that have a lot of tedium to them.
Based on the complaints about framerate, pop-in, etc. I'm strongly reminded of Shadow of the Colossus (2005) which had these same issues on its original PS2 release. It was truly a seventh-gen game running on sixth-gen hardware, revolutionary for the time but the available hardware struggled to keep up.
Looks like time is nearly up for the Switch. Awesome run, though.
I think the Switch form factor will remain, it just needs a chipset refresh. It clearly hit a sweet spot that would be silly to abandon, I would expect Nintendo to have learned that lesson with the Wii U.
Nintendo would be fools to abandon the Switch form factor. And with the Steam Deck and Asus Ally delivering AAA-tier gaming in a similar form factor, doubtless some executives at Nintendo are stroking their chins, pondering how to evolve the Switch concept to take back the lead -- with airtight DRM this time, of course.
I believe that it was going to get a chip refresh like a year and a half ago but they had to scrap it because of the chip shortage, so they just released the refreshed hardware as the OLED switch with the same chip.
I disliked BOTW but TOTK is radically different. Combat flows differently, the world feels different, the story is dramatically changed in actually interesting ways. It's not BOTW with minor crafting add-ins.
Imagine how many they would sell if it ran on something else besides a switch. I'm not paying $500 just so I can play the three switch games I'm interested in.
I'm not sure if that's correct. While Nintendo does make some profit selling the Switch console, it's not much, and they make most of their money by selling their own games and charging fees to third-party developers. But I don't know the exact amounts, so this may be wrong.
I include the 3rd party fees as part of the hardware platform.
I could be wrong too, but I don’t think most of their money comes from their own games.
Actually, thinking about their other franchises like Pokémon, Animal Crossing, Smash, etc. you’re probably right, but I still fell like the way they act/view themselves is in-line with my comment.
This is not my experience at all. I have noticed some FPS drops when using the 'ultrahand' to move many objects around, but other than that I've been pretty impressed with the performance.
It still blows my mind that I can walk for what seems like hours from one end of the map to the other while the weather and environment changes drastically and not experience any loading screens.
From watching BoTW speedruns (which, I assume is the same engine), the game simply does not do loading screens in the overworld. If you move to quickly, you get to experience an area that is not fully loaded.
Having said that, looking at what it takes for speedrunners to accomplish that, you will likely never see even that in casual gameplay.
It's actually pretty incredible for how well it runs and how good it looks on Switch. Focusing on a few FPS drops like this is really missing the forest for the trees.
Does it? I've been playing quite a bit and the framerate feels steady and I also have not been bothered by the fps even when the game is in fast motion.
And I'm a longtime Melee player so I have eyes used to 60fps and am usually bothered by poor framerate in games.
Generally curious, but how do you (and everyone else) know when the game drops to a certain framerate, and how do you know exactly what framerate it's running at? Are you actually measuring it somehow, or do you just "feel" it?
My iPhone pro is a high refresh screen, my TV is 120hz and my gaming rig has a 7900 XTX. Going from that to 30fps is a pretty jarring experience. Obvi it is a small handheld device from 2017 so the expectations need to be set correctly - but doesn't change the experience. Nintendo has always been at the bottom when it comes to graphics though - but that is intentional.
I don't think it's a huge deal but there is a ton of footage of youtube that does frame-by-frame analysis and "30fps dropping to 20fps" seems very accurate.
I just wish Nintendo would sell the rights to Zelda, one of the most iconic franchises in gaming history, to a modern game company that won’t cripple it by forcing studios to cram it onto god damn potato. It’s fun, sure… but it’s so much worse than it could be.
Nintendo proved again that gameplay and art direction matter more than anything.