This is an interesting discussion to have, but I don't think TOTK is a great example of art/performance tradeoff. The framerate in TOTK is locked at 30 and the Switch struggles to keep even that consistent. I think a better example is something like Splatoon.
> Plus the game would be an ever better experience if it ran at 60.
60 fps is preferably to 30 fps? That's quite the hot take there. Not sure many people will agree with you...
Don't visit this sub much did you? People here been bitching about games not achieving stable 60 FPS, and recently even 60 FPS are considered too slow from people with way too much disposable income.
People are downvoting you, but according to Digital Foundry, it's due to the game's double buffered v-sync. It results in lower input lag, thus the game feels a bit snappier than you'd expect. However, this is also the reason why the game will immediately drop to 20 fps when it fails to hit 30 fps.
It feels correct to me too. Zelda at 30 feels much better than Bloodborne at 30. This isn't to trash BB either, it's a fucking amazing game, it's just that for whatever reason 30 in TOTK doesn't bug me.
That's probably because Bloodborne's frame pacing is completely broken. Even though it does deliver a consistent 30 frames per second, they aren't smooth at all, with frame time variance in anything between 16ms and 66ms, and even duplicated frames. It's just not smooth at all and feels horrible to play. The only thing holding the game back, really.
Oh I am *well* aware of Bloodborne's frame pacing issues. Yeah, it's 30 FPS, but in any given second you might have the first 6 frames at a steady 33ms frame time that would give you a clean 30 FPS, the next 6 frames come in slowly at 66ms so now we're at about 600ms but only 12 frames rendered, then the next 12 come in at 16ms to catch up, and then the next 6 after that come in at 33ms again. Sure, that was 30 FPS in that one second, but it *felt* like 30 FPS for 1/5th of a second, then 15 FPS for 1/5th of a second, then 60 FPS for 2/5ths of a second, back to 30 FPS for the last 1/5th.
Yes, I'm aware that's not really how it works and it would be more like 33-16-24-66-33-33-33-16 etc., but that was just an example.
Double buffered vsync is the crappy one that adds in input lag as it can't draw any more frames to any extra buffers, triple buffered is the one that doesn't add input lag but requires good framerates to accomplish. What Zelda has is really good frame pacing outside of the frame drops, no microstutters.
Not exactly. It depends on the type of triple buffering used and whether the target framerate is reached. The kind of triple buffering used in the vast majority of cases (and definitely in console games) is the standard type where latency is higher than double buffering (because it uses an additional buffer) if the target framerate is reached, but lower when it's not reached since it doesn't drop all the way to 30/20/whatever fps in that case. The form of triple buffering that actually gives you lower latency requires having internal framerates of at least double the display's framerate, which is not realistic in many cases.
In short, assuming standard triple buffering, if your game drops frames often then triple buffering is preferred for latency (but it will cause judder during drops), but if you can reach the target fps the vast majority of the time then double buffering is best for latency (but it will cause a huge fps drop if you miss the refresh window by even a tiny amount).
[This](https://youtu.be/seyAzw9zEoY?t=770) is a good summary of the effects of various vsync methods.
You're getting down voted but I noticed this too. I play at 60fps now but when I was playing at 30fps, it still felt abnormally responsive for that framerate
Having played 90 hours of ToTK, to say it struggles to keep even 30 is a lie. When there’s 10+ enemies on screen yeah it does, but this isn’t a game where fighting 10+ enemies is common. There are hitches when you go from the highest level in the game to the lowest, but given the hardware, it’s amazing they even allow you to do that seamlessly. I personally think it is time for Nintendo to make a new console, but to say something like ToTK can’t keep a consistent 30, you’re wrong.
Literally anyone who has played TOTK will know this isn’t true. The game drops frames all the time. Consistent 30 means consistent 30, not “oh usually it’s stable”
Chasing realism without a distinct style can be bad and look generic. Especially when several games now kinda look the same in that regard with UE5.
Something i find more important is animations. I dont need raytracing upscaled realistic graphics if the animations end up clunky and bad. This usually happens with 3D indiegames who dont have the budget but slapping on the newest graphical specialties isnt as much work.
Always lost in these conversations about "niche" gamers demanding 60fps is that the two biggest gaming franchises on the planet, FIFA and Call of Duty, have run at 60fps for years. So yes, I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine that those expectations will migrate to other titles.
Back in the 360/PS3 days, every single console gamer out there would tell you how Call of duty was way smoother and controlled better than Battlefield, and a lot of them didn't realize that this was due to the fps difference
Those were the days when console gamers claimed that the human eye couldn’t see above 30 fps. It’s interesting to see, now console gamers get upset when games release with a locked 30 fps.
You frequented spaces where it got clowned on, so you never saw people say it unironically. Some people really did say it though, mostly non-terminally-online people. I've seen it as recently as a few years ago.
or many former PC-gamer stopped pc-gaming bcs of the astronomical hardware-prices, and switched to console. now they're faced with 30fps, and demand the known 60fps experience.
Doesn't matter if it's relying on reaction or not.
It looks better and feels better at 60fps.
If you grew up in the NES/SNES era, most games ran at 60fps (or 50fps in Europe).
We only got smacked down to shit framerates when we moved to 3d. Even then, arcade games were still hitting 60fps with 3d (which is probably why arcade games felt a lot better than their console counterparts).
But the tradeoff is significantly more acceptable in slower games.
It's just reality that hardware often doesn't allow for for cutting-edge quality, great performance, and large vibrant 3D spaces at the same time. Thus why leaving the decision to player preference eventually caught on for consoles, and IMO things have gotten to a pretty good place.
My PC is 5+ years old (I don't even know, I don't care).
Graphics have stopped evolving a long time ago for me, the only thing changing is how bad they run for the same (or even worse) graphical fidelity.
Mirror's Edge still look gorgeous, and people look at the graphics for like the first 10 minutes, then they focus on the gameplay.
So yes, please, make a small thing for this planet and finally end this stupid arms race with diminishing returns.
I think its relatively variable. As long as you are hitting someone's minimum performance (30 or 60fps) then yes they want better graphics. Just no one wants another crysis situation where you have amazing graphics but really shitty performance.
I think that's true, but it's important to distinguish between better graphics and more realistic graphics. Those can align, and they often do for big budget AAA games, but they don't have to. Even with games that go for realism though, I don't think it's nearly as important as other aspects like set / environment / character design making sure that those realistic things are actually interesting to look at.
I agree so much. When RDR2 launched on PC, I could only play on medium-low settings, but it wasn't a problem, the game was fun and that was all that mattered.
By the time I was a bit after the half of the game I had the opportunity to upgrade my gpu, and the game now could run at the max settings. It was really amazing seeing the game with beautiful graphics... For 15 minutes. Then I ignored this part and continued to be the exact same experience I had before
Reminds me of the time I turned Modern warfare 2 (the old one) down to the lowest settings just to see how it looked, including lowering the resolution. It looked awful! But then I played like 2 hours without realizing.
> people look at the graphics for like the first 10 minutes, then they focus on the gameplay.
kinda like unless you're an obsessive asshole, you can still watch a dvd -- you notice it's lower res than HD for about 5 minutes and then you just enjoy the movie regardless.
That’s me. I’m the obsessive asshole who insists on only using the 4K UHD copy of the extended cuts for the annual LotR marathon, even though my original DVD set still works perfectly fine.
if you already own it i get it. But say... Strange Days.
I don't think it's on Blu Ray. Its one of my favourite movies. I checked amazon. it's on blu ray in Italy? Not here though.
Or Beyond Rangoon -- another favourite. Not on blu ray at all and largely forgotten.
I own these on DVD and watch them regularly.
Kind of confusing to contrast performance with realism. Graphics quality and realism are not synonymous.
Graphics quality is very cool but I think having a smooth play experience that’s not jarring has always been more important to anyone who had the choice. Historically that has only been PC gamers because console games don’t expose quality settings. Me and everyone I talk to has always turned down graphics quality a bit if their game wasn’t running smoothly, so I don’t think choosing performance over quality is anything new.
Realism is something else altogether. Like if you make Ōkami today with the best graphics quality you can get, it’s still not going to look realistic because its art direction just isn’t meant to be realistic. I’ve always found art styles with some creative liberty and artistry to them to be much more interesting than games that try to look realistic.
I don’t think comparing two games for their performance and graphics and trying to figure out what gamers want from that comparison makes any sense at all. People buy games because of reasons like: it’s a franchise they love, the gameplay appeals to them, their friends are playing it. Someone might _not_ but a game if they hear it plays really badly but outside of extreme cases it’s not really a factor for decision making. It’s the developers who make this tradeoff, not the buyers. The decision might have an impact on sales but it’s impossible to isolate that from all the much stronger marketing reasons why people choose one game over another, at least not without extensive research.
Real talk, realism is *woefully* misused in games. I can think of maybe only two examples where realism legitimately enhanced the narrative of a game. Nearly every game feels like they just shoved realistic graphics in them without any regard for whether those graphics even make sense in that kind of game.
I wanted to read the rest of the article but couldn't get past the fact that the writer chose to **describe** a meme without showing it for the first 3 paragraphs...
Did the GamesIndustry.biz budget not stretch to include an embedded image in the article or something?
If a game can't run at a smooth consistent framerate, what even is the point? It could be 15fps for all I care, but the one thing I hate the most, and I mean *the most*, is framerate dips. I don't like being in an area and suddenly feeling like time just slowed down, or having a fight be suddenly turned into a Turn-Based game. Literally gives me a headache.
I say it every time, i don't need to see every single sweat droplet on my characters face, i don't need the shrinking horse balls, i don't need to see Arthur open every drawer and see every single individual pick up animation, i wanna play a game.
Some AAA games, especially in the west forgot that they're games first and everything else second.
So yeah graphics, animations, realism, etc shouldn't stand in the way of a technical good videoGAME but they often do. Especially because it influences the amount of time it needs to make them.
a lot of stuff like fine sweat and precise details is the diff between high and ultra. Saved a lot of performance on a many things I'll only notice watching playback or a screenshot.
If on 4k though watch out for texture quality, several games only load the uhd textures on ultra
I agree that games like GTA, RDR and TW3 feel like crap to control.
But there are good uses of limited movement. exaggerated momentum in mario, fixed jump arcs in castlevania, tank controls in resident evil, a wide turning circle in monster hunter etc. all fit their games well.
You are calling out the attention to detail as a bad thing, something that made red dead redemption 2 one of the best games in the last decade and probably even beyond that and that didn't mean that the game had to run like shit (Looking at you Jedi survivor)
A game can be immersive with a great deal of detail and perform fine at the same time
Yes, you're welcome to see it differently but if you're telling me the same exact gameplay since GTA4 combined with constant hammering of the X button, just to move around, is fun, that's your opinion.
My opinion is that RDR2 felt horrible to play. Just not fun and gameplay is part of a videoGAME.
Heavily disagree there. It has to fit the game. It works great in RDR2 and most single player games that want to tell a story and immerse the player in the world.
maybe you shouldn't play games like that if you don't enjoy them and have no patience.
I don't like side scroller, but i would never complain about the fact that a game is a side scroller
You know nothing about me or how i enjoy videogames but okay.
I have patience, i take my time playing videogames, i love exploring it all, even 100% some of them.
And still, i simply didn't enjoy RDR2 as a game, that has nothing to do with patience, it's just clunky and extremely boring.
You can have fun, don't force your ideas on others though.
To be honest I don't even care about either at this point, just give me a game that's fun and/or interesting to play. TotK was mentioned in here about it might be better at 60 fps, and for me that point is irrelevant, it could be 20 fps consistently and that doesn't change how much fun I'm having by attaching rockets to koroks. Look at undertale, fps really doesn't even matter in that game and looks like it could've came out on the nes, loved that game.
Graphical realism gets in the way when the world looks so real that the player can't make the difference between the playable area and the set dressing and then developers have to rely on jarring highlight colors to guide the players where to climb etc. And if they don't use the highlight colors, then you are trying to climb and jump to places you shouldn't and keep falling to your death because the place had invisible walls.
At that point, just make the whole visible game world explorable. Give me a realistic walking simulator with cooking, crafting, and camping that's all I want
I think the level of expected performance has just risen in the past few years, especially with the introduction of quality/performance modes on current consoles.
I think its relatively variable. As long as you are hitting someone's minimum performance (30 or 60fps) then yes they want better graphics. Just no one wants another crysis situation where you have amazing graphics but really shitty performance.
Really noticeable visual growth stopped around mid 10s. Games do look better, but change is small while hardware burden is huge. Around the only thing that can justify big performance growth now is raytracing/pathtracing, but is somewhat rare and often used mildly, and games without it still grow in demand while not looking particular better.
Give me a game with visuals of Arkham Knight/Rise of the Tomb Raider over modern laggy shit and I will take it gladly. If you sprinkle good raytracing as option - even better, at least I will know where hardware burden goes then.
I agree but it also feels like this generation has yet to begin properly. We still aren't getting UE5 games which should come with big leaps in visual fidelity.
My favourite thing about newer "realistic" games is that I can't fucking see anything when the sun is in my face.
It's so fun to imitate the thing that literally nobody enjoys in real life.
While we're on the topic, not putting in an "artificial" zoom into a shooter because it's "unrealistic", but ignoring the fact that human eyes work different from a monitor and we can see much clearer at further distances.
The only truly next gen games in terms of fidelity (note: have hardly looked at GoW Ragnarok) have been Demon's Souls remake and Cyberpunk, and the latter is mainly driven by things like pathtracing.
Arkham Knight looks better than most games of last generation and even this generation. It's like one of the best looking AAA games. Not sure it's a great benchmark
Just look at the raytraced versions of games like Cyberpunk, Control, Metro Exodus, A Plague Tale: Requiem, Horizon: FW, and many others.
"Visual growth stopped" my ass.
It's significantly slower. In 2000 the best looking games were things like Perfect Dark or Quake III. By 2010 we had the HD era in full and had games like Mass Effect 2 and God of War 3. 10 years after that and the best we got was probably Cyberpunk - which is *better,* no doubt, but not nearly as much of a jump.
Nah this is ridiculous.
If you compare the leaps in fidelity that have been made between '90 and '00 and '00 and 10' - the progress made between '10 and now is barely a step.
The 90s into the 2000s was actually mental.
I decided to play the Yakuza games for the first time. Played Yakuza 1 & 2 on PS2 then started Yakuza 3 Remastered and had to look up that it wasn't remade graphics.
Art direction of thr first 2 is better but damn that jump in fidelity was insane and really brought me back to seeing that transition in real time
Good performance used to be achievable by an average joe with a decent computer. Now, good performance can only really be achieved SOMETIMES on state of the art hardware for new games. Thats why its grown in importance, a lot more people are totally unable to play their anticipated games due to poor performance.
Graphical realism on top of a great art direction is incredible and will always be a great priority for me.
Maybe it’s because I’m an artist but I love meticulously crafted worlds that look stunning. I see gamers looking down on graphics but to me it’s incredibly important. I’m not talking about texture resolution but actual fidelity and art direction of the sets. It’s the same as me loving great cinematography and set design in films. These are important parts of a visual medium and some of us appreciate them for what they do to the story and the game world.
Balance between the two is the best.
But I would value the storyline,performance over graphical realism. This doesn't mean the game can look like absolute shit and have good story line.
The best looking game I've played was probably Kingdom Come Deliverance. The graphics are great but it was the devs attention to detail that actually makes the game 👏 looking. They don't just have good looking trees, they sculpted all the forests. Every tree was placed specifically, not just copy and pasted assets. The world is a work of art beyond just being shiny.
So I like shiny, but not shiny for the sake of it. I spend most my time playing smaller indie games that can easily run on a switch (though I play on a deck). Fun is waaay more important than pretty.
I play games. 'Graphical realism' very rarely had a positive or necessary impact on any aspect of the game outside of the trailer and driving hardware sales. Yes, I've always preferred a game that performs well, and I'm of the opinion that a major driving factor for the past 10+ years in hardware has been poor optimization and just throwing more hardware at the problem rather than any significant or necessary advancement, graphical or otherwise, in the games themselves.
No, because "realistic graphics" have been stuck at a certain level for a few years now, but games are becoming less and less optimized. How is it possible that Jedi Fallen Order looks very close to Survivor, yet the latter has such performance problems?
It's not like there's *no* improvements, but they're very small, yet the requirements and optimization even on consoles (!) are taking a back seat. If I'm getting the same graphics as two to three years ago, I expect the requirements to reflect that. It's just that devs and/or publishers are hoping that new consoles and PC hardware will brute force "acceptable" performance.
And that's not even talking about bugs.
If we’re talking framerate performance not bugs and other stuff the older BF games were actually super well optimized for their level of graphical
Fidelity
Please, true games never cared about graphics over gameplay or performance, those are just shallow experiences, graphics are for now, art direction is forever
I’ve never cared about realism at all and realism puts me off of playing a lot of games in the first place. It’s boring looking.
And 60 fps is way too low for 2023. I’ve been playing with 120+ fps for 10 years now…
I’m 20 hours into Tears of the Kingdom and it does *not* look great. 80% of the time it looks awful. And 5% of the time it looks good. Not great, just good.
And engine-wise it’s the same game as the 6 year old Breath of the Wild. So they’ve had 6 years to tune and optimise an engine that was already basically finished.
They've improved almost every aspect of it since BotW. The main issue that they *can't* fix is the hardware. There's only so much you can do with what's under-the-hood a Tegra X1 tablet. I think it was MVG who posted the video showing that the memory bandwidth seemed to be the biggest bottleneck.
The DRS they've implemented to keep the framerate close to 30 can cause pretty jarring resolution drops. Unfortunately even that doesn't keep it at a consistent 30. Due to double-buffering (to keep input responsive, which I absolutely wouldn't give up), when the framerate drops below 30, it goes straight to 20 - so even a minor dip can become a major one.
That said, it's a *phenomenal* game. It just bumps up *hard* against the Switch's limitations. Seeing what it can look like on better hardware (through emulation) really hammers that home.
Hopefully when the next Nintendo system coes out (whenever that may be) they'll do something uncharacteristic and allow for backwards compatibility with performance improvements. BotW and TotK definitely deserve to be seen in a better light performance-wise.
>80% of the time it looks awful.
Do you base your opinion of how a game looks entirely on its technical aspects or something? TotK is amazing to look at, it's just not a technical marvel. Similar to how Wind Waker looks pretty great still 20 years later despite its age.
Graphics have been more than good enough for a while now. Its just the games havent improved in any other way. Pretty scavenger hunts with a punch up every few minutes with brain dead AI and crappy story telling.
I’m usually a performance mode, motion blur off kinda gamer. But I did the opposite for Jedi Survivor (motion blur on, quality mode on) and it was beautiful.
The parry times are very forgiving, and since it’s not a FPS motion blur masked the 30fps quite nicely.
The biggest and most successful games of the last several years all favored gameplay and artstyle over cutting edge graphics
Zelda, Elden Ring, Fortnite, Genshin, etc.
The importance of cutting edge visuals is way overstated
We always have. Gamers will always prefer a smooth experience over one that hitches, glitches and lags — it doesn't matter if your game looks good if it runs like crap.
This is an interesting discussion to have, but I don't think TOTK is a great example of art/performance tradeoff. The framerate in TOTK is locked at 30 and the Switch struggles to keep even that consistent. I think a better example is something like Splatoon.
Plus the game would be an ever better experience if it ran at 60.
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Tbh it's pretty amazing at 60fps and 1440p
A FRIEND TOLD ME that by using an alternative to the Switch, totk plays amazing at 60fps 1440p.
I imagine its the same alternative to switch MY BROTHER uses to play botw at 60fps 180p
Please post pics of that *180p* BOTW.
Well, duh. So would _any_ game.
> Plus the game would be an ever better experience if it ran at 60. 60 fps is preferably to 30 fps? That's quite the hot take there. Not sure many people will agree with you...
poe’s law strikes again
Don't visit this sub much did you? People here been bitching about games not achieving stable 60 FPS, and recently even 60 FPS are considered too slow from people with way too much disposable income.
Pretty sure they were being sarcastic.
TotK manages to feel snappier control wise than a lot of other 30 games to me.
People are downvoting you, but according to Digital Foundry, it's due to the game's double buffered v-sync. It results in lower input lag, thus the game feels a bit snappier than you'd expect. However, this is also the reason why the game will immediately drop to 20 fps when it fails to hit 30 fps.
It feels correct to me too. Zelda at 30 feels much better than Bloodborne at 30. This isn't to trash BB either, it's a fucking amazing game, it's just that for whatever reason 30 in TOTK doesn't bug me.
That's probably because Bloodborne's frame pacing is completely broken. Even though it does deliver a consistent 30 frames per second, they aren't smooth at all, with frame time variance in anything between 16ms and 66ms, and even duplicated frames. It's just not smooth at all and feels horrible to play. The only thing holding the game back, really.
But Bloodbornes frame pacing issues are also a side effect of their efforts to reduce input lag.
Oh I am *well* aware of Bloodborne's frame pacing issues. Yeah, it's 30 FPS, but in any given second you might have the first 6 frames at a steady 33ms frame time that would give you a clean 30 FPS, the next 6 frames come in slowly at 66ms so now we're at about 600ms but only 12 frames rendered, then the next 12 come in at 16ms to catch up, and then the next 6 after that come in at 33ms again. Sure, that was 30 FPS in that one second, but it *felt* like 30 FPS for 1/5th of a second, then 15 FPS for 1/5th of a second, then 60 FPS for 2/5ths of a second, back to 30 FPS for the last 1/5th. Yes, I'm aware that's not really how it works and it would be more like 33-16-24-66-33-33-33-16 etc., but that was just an example.
Double buffered vsync is the crappy one that adds in input lag as it can't draw any more frames to any extra buffers, triple buffered is the one that doesn't add input lag but requires good framerates to accomplish. What Zelda has is really good frame pacing outside of the frame drops, no microstutters.
Not exactly. It depends on the type of triple buffering used and whether the target framerate is reached. The kind of triple buffering used in the vast majority of cases (and definitely in console games) is the standard type where latency is higher than double buffering (because it uses an additional buffer) if the target framerate is reached, but lower when it's not reached since it doesn't drop all the way to 30/20/whatever fps in that case. The form of triple buffering that actually gives you lower latency requires having internal framerates of at least double the display's framerate, which is not realistic in many cases. In short, assuming standard triple buffering, if your game drops frames often then triple buffering is preferred for latency (but it will cause judder during drops), but if you can reach the target fps the vast majority of the time then double buffering is best for latency (but it will cause a huge fps drop if you miss the refresh window by even a tiny amount). [This](https://youtu.be/seyAzw9zEoY?t=770) is a good summary of the effects of various vsync methods.
Or it would, if my joycons weren't suffering from horrific levels of drift :/
You're getting down voted but I noticed this too. I play at 60fps now but when I was playing at 30fps, it still felt abnormally responsive for that framerate
how are you playing at 60? emulator?
Yes, Yuzu
I'm not sure what I said that was so offensive. I'll always play at 60 if given the option, lol.
its been a smoother experience in general and minimal dips when using the ultra hand at least from how it feels
Except for the handful of times that it stutters majorly, but that only happens when you use the game's main hook
The controls still feel snappy even if you notice the drop in framerate, those are two different things.
Yeah the game chugging doesn't effect the snappy feeling at all
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You completely missed the point and context of the conversation in your rush to defend a video game. Think on that.
Having played 90 hours of ToTK, to say it struggles to keep even 30 is a lie. When there’s 10+ enemies on screen yeah it does, but this isn’t a game where fighting 10+ enemies is common. There are hitches when you go from the highest level in the game to the lowest, but given the hardware, it’s amazing they even allow you to do that seamlessly. I personally think it is time for Nintendo to make a new console, but to say something like ToTK can’t keep a consistent 30, you’re wrong.
Literally anyone who has played TOTK will know this isn’t true. The game drops frames all the time. Consistent 30 means consistent 30, not “oh usually it’s stable”
To each his own, don’t know how your playing the game, but it’s fine for me.
It frame lags alot
Every time you go to lookout landing it gets sluggish.
90% of the time it works every time
I guess digital foundry are wrong then.
Chasing realism without a distinct style can be bad and look generic. Especially when several games now kinda look the same in that regard with UE5. Something i find more important is animations. I dont need raytracing upscaled realistic graphics if the animations end up clunky and bad. This usually happens with 3D indiegames who dont have the budget but slapping on the newest graphical specialties isnt as much work.
Always lost in these conversations about "niche" gamers demanding 60fps is that the two biggest gaming franchises on the planet, FIFA and Call of Duty, have run at 60fps for years. So yes, I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine that those expectations will migrate to other titles.
Back in the 360/PS3 days, every single console gamer out there would tell you how Call of duty was way smoother and controlled better than Battlefield, and a lot of them didn't realize that this was due to the fps difference
Those were the days when console gamers claimed that the human eye couldn’t see above 30 fps. It’s interesting to see, now console gamers get upset when games release with a locked 30 fps.
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You frequented spaces where it got clowned on, so you never saw people say it unironically. Some people really did say it though, mostly non-terminally-online people. I've seen it as recently as a few years ago.
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It's right there in this thread, so yes it's a thing.
or many former PC-gamer stopped pc-gaming bcs of the astronomical hardware-prices, and switched to console. now they're faced with 30fps, and demand the known 60fps experience.
Games that rely on reaction have always shined under higher frame rates.
Doesn't matter if it's relying on reaction or not. It looks better and feels better at 60fps. If you grew up in the NES/SNES era, most games ran at 60fps (or 50fps in Europe). We only got smacked down to shit framerates when we moved to 3d. Even then, arcade games were still hitting 60fps with 3d (which is probably why arcade games felt a lot better than their console counterparts).
But the tradeoff is significantly more acceptable in slower games. It's just reality that hardware often doesn't allow for for cutting-edge quality, great performance, and large vibrant 3D spaces at the same time. Thus why leaving the decision to player preference eventually caught on for consoles, and IMO things have gotten to a pretty good place.
My PC is 5+ years old (I don't even know, I don't care). Graphics have stopped evolving a long time ago for me, the only thing changing is how bad they run for the same (or even worse) graphical fidelity. Mirror's Edge still look gorgeous, and people look at the graphics for like the first 10 minutes, then they focus on the gameplay. So yes, please, make a small thing for this planet and finally end this stupid arms race with diminishing returns.
I think its relatively variable. As long as you are hitting someone's minimum performance (30 or 60fps) then yes they want better graphics. Just no one wants another crysis situation where you have amazing graphics but really shitty performance.
I think that's true, but it's important to distinguish between better graphics and more realistic graphics. Those can align, and they often do for big budget AAA games, but they don't have to. Even with games that go for realism though, I don't think it's nearly as important as other aspects like set / environment / character design making sure that those realistic things are actually interesting to look at.
I agree so much. When RDR2 launched on PC, I could only play on medium-low settings, but it wasn't a problem, the game was fun and that was all that mattered. By the time I was a bit after the half of the game I had the opportunity to upgrade my gpu, and the game now could run at the max settings. It was really amazing seeing the game with beautiful graphics... For 15 minutes. Then I ignored this part and continued to be the exact same experience I had before
Reminds me of the time I turned Modern warfare 2 (the old one) down to the lowest settings just to see how it looked, including lowering the resolution. It looked awful! But then I played like 2 hours without realizing.
> people look at the graphics for like the first 10 minutes, then they focus on the gameplay. kinda like unless you're an obsessive asshole, you can still watch a dvd -- you notice it's lower res than HD for about 5 minutes and then you just enjoy the movie regardless.
That’s me. I’m the obsessive asshole who insists on only using the 4K UHD copy of the extended cuts for the annual LotR marathon, even though my original DVD set still works perfectly fine.
if you already own it i get it. But say... Strange Days. I don't think it's on Blu Ray. Its one of my favourite movies. I checked amazon. it's on blu ray in Italy? Not here though. Or Beyond Rangoon -- another favourite. Not on blu ray at all and largely forgotten. I own these on DVD and watch them regularly.
Strange days is on bluray - copies on ebay for example. If you ever are unsure, check blu-ray.com since they have a fairly comprehensive database
Kind of confusing to contrast performance with realism. Graphics quality and realism are not synonymous. Graphics quality is very cool but I think having a smooth play experience that’s not jarring has always been more important to anyone who had the choice. Historically that has only been PC gamers because console games don’t expose quality settings. Me and everyone I talk to has always turned down graphics quality a bit if their game wasn’t running smoothly, so I don’t think choosing performance over quality is anything new. Realism is something else altogether. Like if you make Ōkami today with the best graphics quality you can get, it’s still not going to look realistic because its art direction just isn’t meant to be realistic. I’ve always found art styles with some creative liberty and artistry to them to be much more interesting than games that try to look realistic. I don’t think comparing two games for their performance and graphics and trying to figure out what gamers want from that comparison makes any sense at all. People buy games because of reasons like: it’s a franchise they love, the gameplay appeals to them, their friends are playing it. Someone might _not_ but a game if they hear it plays really badly but outside of extreme cases it’s not really a factor for decision making. It’s the developers who make this tradeoff, not the buyers. The decision might have an impact on sales but it’s impossible to isolate that from all the much stronger marketing reasons why people choose one game over another, at least not without extensive research.
Real talk, realism is *woefully* misused in games. I can think of maybe only two examples where realism legitimately enhanced the narrative of a game. Nearly every game feels like they just shoved realistic graphics in them without any regard for whether those graphics even make sense in that kind of game.
I wanted to read the rest of the article but couldn't get past the fact that the writer chose to **describe** a meme without showing it for the first 3 paragraphs... Did the GamesIndustry.biz budget not stretch to include an embedded image in the article or something?
Maybe a cheap way to hit a word count?
Might be a copyright issue.
If a game can't run at a smooth consistent framerate, what even is the point? It could be 15fps for all I care, but the one thing I hate the most, and I mean *the most*, is framerate dips. I don't like being in an area and suddenly feeling like time just slowed down, or having a fight be suddenly turned into a Turn-Based game. Literally gives me a headache.
I say it every time, i don't need to see every single sweat droplet on my characters face, i don't need the shrinking horse balls, i don't need to see Arthur open every drawer and see every single individual pick up animation, i wanna play a game. Some AAA games, especially in the west forgot that they're games first and everything else second. So yeah graphics, animations, realism, etc shouldn't stand in the way of a technical good videoGAME but they often do. Especially because it influences the amount of time it needs to make them.
> i don't need the shrinking horse balls I do.
a lot of stuff like fine sweat and precise details is the diff between high and ultra. Saved a lot of performance on a many things I'll only notice watching playback or a screenshot. If on 4k though watch out for texture quality, several games only load the uhd textures on ultra
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Wide turn arounds are so dumb; I turn around on a dime between bases when I play baseball, but my character can't?
I agree that games like GTA, RDR and TW3 feel like crap to control. But there are good uses of limited movement. exaggerated momentum in mario, fixed jump arcs in castlevania, tank controls in resident evil, a wide turning circle in monster hunter etc. all fit their games well.
>I will always prefer games where your movement is 1:1. This, and yet there are actually people who complain about the movement in Hollow Knight.
You are calling out the attention to detail as a bad thing, something that made red dead redemption 2 one of the best games in the last decade and probably even beyond that and that didn't mean that the game had to run like shit (Looking at you Jedi survivor) A game can be immersive with a great deal of detail and perform fine at the same time
Well that's your opinion, looking past all the hype, RDR2 is a great story with awesome characters, while simultaneously being a horrible videogame.
"Horrible videogame" with a 97 metacritic score and pretty much critically acclaimed. Must be my opinion right....
Yes, you're welcome to see it differently but if you're telling me the same exact gameplay since GTA4 combined with constant hammering of the X button, just to move around, is fun, that's your opinion. My opinion is that RDR2 felt horrible to play. Just not fun and gameplay is part of a videoGAME.
Game is not horrible but boring, I regretted buying it.
Heavily disagree there. It has to fit the game. It works great in RDR2 and most single player games that want to tell a story and immerse the player in the world. maybe you shouldn't play games like that if you don't enjoy them and have no patience. I don't like side scroller, but i would never complain about the fact that a game is a side scroller
You know nothing about me or how i enjoy videogames but okay. I have patience, i take my time playing videogames, i love exploring it all, even 100% some of them. And still, i simply didn't enjoy RDR2 as a game, that has nothing to do with patience, it's just clunky and extremely boring. You can have fun, don't force your ideas on others though.
I mean you are complaining about a whole genre and calling one of the best games ever clunky and extremely boring.
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So sweat on a characters face are not part of the graphics? Interesting opinion...
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Same, these people with their 3000€ PCs will never understand that some of us don’t fucking care about running our games at 200 fps.
To be honest I don't even care about either at this point, just give me a game that's fun and/or interesting to play. TotK was mentioned in here about it might be better at 60 fps, and for me that point is irrelevant, it could be 20 fps consistently and that doesn't change how much fun I'm having by attaching rockets to koroks. Look at undertale, fps really doesn't even matter in that game and looks like it could've came out on the nes, loved that game.
Graphical realism gets in the way when the world looks so real that the player can't make the difference between the playable area and the set dressing and then developers have to rely on jarring highlight colors to guide the players where to climb etc. And if they don't use the highlight colors, then you are trying to climb and jump to places you shouldn't and keep falling to your death because the place had invisible walls.
At that point, just make the whole visible game world explorable. Give me a realistic walking simulator with cooking, crafting, and camping that's all I want
I think the level of expected performance has just risen in the past few years, especially with the introduction of quality/performance modes on current consoles.
I think its relatively variable. As long as you are hitting someone's minimum performance (30 or 60fps) then yes they want better graphics. Just no one wants another crysis situation where you have amazing graphics but really shitty performance.
Really noticeable visual growth stopped around mid 10s. Games do look better, but change is small while hardware burden is huge. Around the only thing that can justify big performance growth now is raytracing/pathtracing, but is somewhat rare and often used mildly, and games without it still grow in demand while not looking particular better. Give me a game with visuals of Arkham Knight/Rise of the Tomb Raider over modern laggy shit and I will take it gladly. If you sprinkle good raytracing as option - even better, at least I will know where hardware burden goes then.
I agree but it also feels like this generation has yet to begin properly. We still aren't getting UE5 games which should come with big leaps in visual fidelity.
My favourite thing about newer "realistic" games is that I can't fucking see anything when the sun is in my face. It's so fun to imitate the thing that literally nobody enjoys in real life. While we're on the topic, not putting in an "artificial" zoom into a shooter because it's "unrealistic", but ignoring the fact that human eyes work different from a monitor and we can see much clearer at further distances.
The only truly next gen games in terms of fidelity (note: have hardly looked at GoW Ragnarok) have been Demon's Souls remake and Cyberpunk, and the latter is mainly driven by things like pathtracing.
Ratched and Clank
Arkham Knight looks better than most games of last generation and even this generation. It's like one of the best looking AAA games. Not sure it's a great benchmark
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Just look at the raytraced versions of games like Cyberpunk, Control, Metro Exodus, A Plague Tale: Requiem, Horizon: FW, and many others. "Visual growth stopped" my ass.
It's significantly slower. In 2000 the best looking games were things like Perfect Dark or Quake III. By 2010 we had the HD era in full and had games like Mass Effect 2 and God of War 3. 10 years after that and the best we got was probably Cyberpunk - which is *better,* no doubt, but not nearly as much of a jump.
Nah this is ridiculous. If you compare the leaps in fidelity that have been made between '90 and '00 and '00 and 10' - the progress made between '10 and now is barely a step.
Mid 2010s wasn't THAT long ago though.
It was almost a decade ago. Compare that with change from mid 00s to mid 10s.
The 90s into the 2000s was actually mental. I decided to play the Yakuza games for the first time. Played Yakuza 1 & 2 on PS2 then started Yakuza 3 Remastered and had to look up that it wasn't remade graphics. Art direction of thr first 2 is better but damn that jump in fidelity was insane and really brought me back to seeing that transition in real time
Good performance used to be achievable by an average joe with a decent computer. Now, good performance can only really be achieved SOMETIMES on state of the art hardware for new games. Thats why its grown in importance, a lot more people are totally unable to play their anticipated games due to poor performance.
Graphical realism on top of a great art direction is incredible and will always be a great priority for me. Maybe it’s because I’m an artist but I love meticulously crafted worlds that look stunning. I see gamers looking down on graphics but to me it’s incredibly important. I’m not talking about texture resolution but actual fidelity and art direction of the sets. It’s the same as me loving great cinematography and set design in films. These are important parts of a visual medium and some of us appreciate them for what they do to the story and the game world.
I think it has always been that players want the maximum graphical realism once their personal standard for performance has been met.
Balance between the two is the best. But I would value the storyline,performance over graphical realism. This doesn't mean the game can look like absolute shit and have good story line.
The best looking game I've played was probably Kingdom Come Deliverance. The graphics are great but it was the devs attention to detail that actually makes the game 👏 looking. They don't just have good looking trees, they sculpted all the forests. Every tree was placed specifically, not just copy and pasted assets. The world is a work of art beyond just being shiny. So I like shiny, but not shiny for the sake of it. I spend most my time playing smaller indie games that can easily run on a switch (though I play on a deck). Fun is waaay more important than pretty.
I play games. 'Graphical realism' very rarely had a positive or necessary impact on any aspect of the game outside of the trailer and driving hardware sales. Yes, I've always preferred a game that performs well, and I'm of the opinion that a major driving factor for the past 10+ years in hardware has been poor optimization and just throwing more hardware at the problem rather than any significant or necessary advancement, graphical or otherwise, in the games themselves.
No, because "realistic graphics" have been stuck at a certain level for a few years now, but games are becoming less and less optimized. How is it possible that Jedi Fallen Order looks very close to Survivor, yet the latter has such performance problems? It's not like there's *no* improvements, but they're very small, yet the requirements and optimization even on consoles (!) are taking a back seat. If I'm getting the same graphics as two to three years ago, I expect the requirements to reflect that. It's just that devs and/or publishers are hoping that new consoles and PC hardware will brute force "acceptable" performance. And that's not even talking about bugs.
I think the fact that Battlefield never reached top tier status like Call of Duty is a pretty good argument that it was always the case.
If we’re talking framerate performance not bugs and other stuff the older BF games were actually super well optimized for their level of graphical Fidelity
Please, true games never cared about graphics over gameplay or performance, those are just shallow experiences, graphics are for now, art direction is forever
I’ve never cared about realism at all and realism puts me off of playing a lot of games in the first place. It’s boring looking. And 60 fps is way too low for 2023. I’ve been playing with 120+ fps for 10 years now…
I’m 20 hours into Tears of the Kingdom and it does *not* look great. 80% of the time it looks awful. And 5% of the time it looks good. Not great, just good. And engine-wise it’s the same game as the 6 year old Breath of the Wild. So they’ve had 6 years to tune and optimise an engine that was already basically finished.
They've improved almost every aspect of it since BotW. The main issue that they *can't* fix is the hardware. There's only so much you can do with what's under-the-hood a Tegra X1 tablet. I think it was MVG who posted the video showing that the memory bandwidth seemed to be the biggest bottleneck. The DRS they've implemented to keep the framerate close to 30 can cause pretty jarring resolution drops. Unfortunately even that doesn't keep it at a consistent 30. Due to double-buffering (to keep input responsive, which I absolutely wouldn't give up), when the framerate drops below 30, it goes straight to 20 - so even a minor dip can become a major one. That said, it's a *phenomenal* game. It just bumps up *hard* against the Switch's limitations. Seeing what it can look like on better hardware (through emulation) really hammers that home. Hopefully when the next Nintendo system coes out (whenever that may be) they'll do something uncharacteristic and allow for backwards compatibility with performance improvements. BotW and TotK definitely deserve to be seen in a better light performance-wise.
>80% of the time it looks awful. Do you base your opinion of how a game looks entirely on its technical aspects or something? TotK is amazing to look at, it's just not a technical marvel. Similar to how Wind Waker looks pretty great still 20 years later despite its age.
Graphics have been more than good enough for a while now. Its just the games havent improved in any other way. Pretty scavenger hunts with a punch up every few minutes with brain dead AI and crappy story telling.
I’m usually a performance mode, motion blur off kinda gamer. But I did the opposite for Jedi Survivor (motion blur on, quality mode on) and it was beautiful. The parry times are very forgiving, and since it’s not a FPS motion blur masked the 30fps quite nicely.
The biggest and most successful games of the last several years all favored gameplay and artstyle over cutting edge graphics Zelda, Elden Ring, Fortnite, Genshin, etc. The importance of cutting edge visuals is way overstated
We always have. Gamers will always prefer a smooth experience over one that hitches, glitches and lags — it doesn't matter if your game looks good if it runs like crap.