[jerf]

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.

[anonymousab]

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.

[mywittyname]

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.

[hammyhavoc]

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?

> No gambling mechanics

So you're just going to ignore the gacha mechanics? https://kotaku.com/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-switch-gacha-g...

[kibwen]

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.

[tm-guimaraes]

> 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.

[hammyhavoc]

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.

[Kiro]

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.

[hammyhavoc]

What toxic and obnoxious rampage?

Educate me about this lesson, o enlightened one.

[majormajor]

"Softening kids to the mechanics of gacha isn't good."

Let's go back a hundred years or so and ban gumball machines and half of the machines in arcades, then...

In this case you're describing a randomization game mechanic as gambling. How deterministic must a game be to avoid that, then?

[tm-guimaraes]

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.

So, yeah game looks good.

[hammyhavoc]

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?

[minimaxir]

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.

[mcphage]

> You insert something (a facsimile of a coin), out comes a capsule with something random in it.

You don't add a facsimile of a coin—you add batteries and/or blades.

The article you posted clearly came out before the game, because it was incorrect about most of the stuff it stated.

[mrguyorama]

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.

[hammyhavoc]

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.

[mrguyorama]

But this game doesn't

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.

[rideontime]

It's so weird that this commenter seems to understand what a "gacha game" is while, in the same breath, claiming that Minish Cap is one.

[skyyler]

It's hard to imagine a Japanese theme park without gachapon machines...

[JohnBooty]

>> No gambling mechanics

> 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.

[Shared404]

> So you're just going to ignore the gacha mechanics? https://kotaku.com/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-switch-gacha-g...

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.

[jerf]

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.

[hammyhavoc]

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.

[evantbyrne]

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.

[tempoponet]

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.

[pawelduda]

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.

[haunter]

>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)

[hammyhavoc]

Even the original Game Boy was 59.7Hz.

[datpiff]

Did you ever play one? The display had so such smearing that individual frames weren't distinct.

We still loved it though.

[hammyhavoc]

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.

[datpiff]

> even IPS-modded the display on my DMG-01

Haha, me too.

[fennecfoxy]

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

[haunter]

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.

[JohnBooty]

    It's just Nintendo hellbent on the 30fps

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.

[hammyhavoc]

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.

[robotnikman]

I don't think lower FPS is a problem, but an unstable FPS which keeps going between 20-40 FPS is pretty annoying.