I cannot describe in words how impactful Ocarina of Time was to me as a kid, how intensely I got sucked into that world to the point that I even wrote some (bad) fanfic set in that universe back in the days. When Majora's Mask came out I was almost bursting with excitement until I was actually able to play it and was again totally blown away by a unique experience.
When I played Breath of the Wild, I felt ... nothing. It's not that I hated the game, it was even enjoyable up to a point, but I just can't seem to get as excited about it as many others, and it seems to be missing everything I loved about Zelda. I'm also not a huge fan of open world games in general and to this date, the only one that I think pulled this of well is IMHO Witcher 3 where every side quest feels meaningful.
So I wish everyone a ton of fun with Tears of the Kingdom, but I feel no particular urge to play it right now, given that it appears to largely copy BotW's formula from what I've read. Maybe I will pick it up at some later point.
I loved Star Wars as a kid. Then the prequels made me jaded that there could ever be anything as good as the originals. The sequels and other content did nothing to dissuade me from this. Then Andor showed up and it's like, holy cow, this is actually good.
Sometimes when the follow-on content is bad... it's because the follow-on content is bad.
Moreover, today's kids, including your own if you have them, like different things than you did. Most kids growing up with Breath of the Wild are not going to be impressed by Ocarina of Time. Most likely, you have pretty different preferences for book/music/movie preferences than your parents.
I don’t know. If we’re strictly speaking of nostalgia, I can still feel a very strong sense of nostalgia from things I’ve experienced as an adult, even experiences from just a few years ago — or even the previous year!
This can apply to a trip we went on, or a TV series we watched, or music I listened to, or a video game I played (e.g. I really experience this when playing Factorio again after it’s been a while).
So maybe YMMV, but I can still have things that (at least almost) live up to “feels” I had from childhood.
I would disagree. As a kid I played OOT to death but never owned a copy of Majora's mask. I have just started playing it and I think it may even be better than OOT (though it is not really even a "Zelda" game.)
I agree. It's a formative stage where everything is novel - even a new game that does everything right can't capture that in adulthood. You also have way more patience as a kid with nothing but time. I didn't mind trudging through jrpgs then, but I hate it now.
I don't replay old games like this (the ones that have you solve and explore). It's effectively a security blanket, with no thrill - the opposite of the first experience. I find it bittersweet and it dulls feelings I associate with those games.
> I think "as a kid" is the operative phrase here. Nothing will ever live up to that nostalgia.
Of course, you're entirely correct but other entries in the series, even Skyward Sword with all its flaws, has managed to capture some of that spirit. BOTW to me is just an entirely different game.
Ocarina of Time does a fantastic job going from the bright world of young Link to the more serious and darker world of adult Link. This adds a ton of depth to the game. And let's not forget the clever game mechanic of swapping between young and adult Link to solve puzzles.
There are indeed modern releases that live up to nostalgia for games of yore and they are... games that are incredibly similar to their predecessors. Game design has gone through a variety of eras and fashions and fads, and games "back then" (for whatever period you happen to be nostalgic for) were just built different. That doesn't necessarily mean better or worse, and maybe nostalgia is the reason people prefer games from the time period when their tastes were developing, but it's not just the games themselves. It's the way games operated.
I guarantee you that if Nintendo released "A Zelda in the mold of OoT but with a new set of dungeons and items and such" people who love OoT would go nuts for it. Look at what happened with Sonic Mania. For some reason, though, publishers/developers are very wary of doing this. Nintendo refuses to make a new Zelda that just reapplies the winning formula. Sega refuses to make Sonic Mania 2 - honestly, I was very pleasantly surprised they made the first one! I blame the late 2000s mantra of "innovation" and its presence/absence that seemed to be all the rage in critic circles.
I thought I was too dried up and curmudgeonly to get immersed in a video game but BOTW dispelled that myth. Prior to BOTW Ocarina of Time was my greatest gaming experience.
That's interesting. I'm roughly your age, and having played both the Witcher 3 and BotW, I vastly prefer the latter.
Part of it is just controls. BotW is nice and responsive, and Geralt feels incredibly sluggish in comparison because of all the presumably mocapped animations that have to play for every single little thing you do. Try running forward and turning around to run backwards in both games. Gerald has a hell of a time coping, but Link just does it.
Part of it though was definitely the design of the open world. The Witcher 3 just feels claustrophobic. You can't walk two steps without having to collect herbs or fight drowners or talk to NPCs. BotW spaces things out more, and I feel the pacing is improved by this.
I actually liked that sluggishness about the Witcher; it made Geralt feel like a person, in a way. Having read the books, he isn’t the youngest anymore - even for a Witcher - so it feels right that he isn’t as quick to turn on his heels as a teenager Link :)
However, I’m with you on the claustrophobia regarding the map. I guess that’s due to resource constraints of the previous console generations, and I have high hopes for future Witcher games. Glad the series isn’t dead yet.
Good to get some other perspectives from OoT fans. I played it multiple times as a kid. No other video game came close in terms of the connection. It was the perfect game IMO.
My interest in video games declined greatly as the trend in the video game industry shifted toward heavy violence and more realistic graphics. Fast forward to last year, I decided to pick up the Switch as I found one for a really good deal. I wanted to try the new (to me) Zelda. I felt pretty unimpressed, decent not great. As it turned out, I had mistaken the much hyped BoTW release with the Zelda release that I bought. I was playing Skyward Sword.
Once I realized my error, I picked up BoTW and took it for spin. I now think the hype is totally justified. I got all the feelings I felt with OoT. It's been wonderful so far. I'm only about halfway through and stocked for Tears of the Kingdom.
For me, "as a kid" was Zelda 1 and Zelda 2. I played some of the intervening Zelda games, and I liked them well enough, but they were fine. Which isn't a knock on Zelda in particular, 99.9% of games I thought were, well, "fine".
And then I played BotW. Since the late 90s there were only 2 other games that I put in more playtime than it and those were Ultima Online and WoW. And this was a single player game. It was the most amazing experience for me.
I don’t know man.
Compare the ambience of Zora’s Domain, music and all, to the equivalent area in BOTW. Compare the divine beasts to literally any temple in OOT. BOTW doesn’t even come close to the magic of Ocarina imo. The story in OOT was also much better imo. Seeing Hyrule as a kid and beginning to love it, then seeing it waste away as Adult Link, and being motivated to defeat an enemy with clear character development, Ganandorf, as opposed to a vague dark force. BOTW substituted magic for tedium. I didn’t have fun running around (because my horse is too far away and can’t be summoned), breaking weapons, running out of stamina constantly, and completing grindy uninspired shrines, all with almost no music. There’s enough there that I’ll finish the game…eventually. 7/10 at best
Same here. And so far with TotK I've got the same feeling. My original zelda experience was a link to the past on the SNES though, so maybe I enjoy the "openness" aspect more? LttP lets you go around pretty much wherever from the beginning, while OoT is pretty linear, especially at the start.
For me Zelda was always more of a puzzle game than an adventure game, and I feel like those puzzle aspects are much more amplified in the last two entries, though in a much more "freeform" way.
I had a very similar experience to you. The only parts of BotW that came close to the "feel" of OoT were the Divine Beasts, but they were such a small part of the game.
My biggest criticism was how much like it felt like you were canonically in a game. Link with his iPad complete with selfie camera, and the clearly computer-generated matrix-y shrines, and if you went too far towards the mountains a "You can't go further that way" message, the strongest feeling I got playing that game is that in truth Link is being observed in a simulated fishbowl environment. A cool idea for a game to lean into, maybe, but not in this case.
> I cannot describe in words how impactful Ocarina of Time was to me as a kid
Maybe it's an age thing? My first Zelda was the original Legend of Zelda, and while I absolutely love the whole series (except for Tri Force Heroes), Breath of the Wild brought me back to the feeling of playing the original like nothing has since. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask were huge, but I was already in college at that point.
It’s definitely an age thing. I’m a little bit younger than you, so Ocarina hit when I was 15. I mean, is there a more perfect age for a game like that to land?
I was fortunately able to takeoff my nostalgia glasses for Breath of the Wild, and similarly it blew me away. Haven’t felt that kind of emotional connection in a very long time.
I almost want to write a book: ‘Zelda Mind, Beginners Mind’
I think BOTW was too non-linear. You could do the main storyline and shrines in any order; there were no new skills or items blocking you from exploring the entirety of the map from the beginning (just health/stamina); and the dungeons and shrines are all visually identical. It lacks a feeling of progression.
Compare that with the "old" Zelda formula: you have to do dungeons in order, because the item you get in each dungeon unlocks the way forward on the overworked or in the dungeon. There are few to no side quests that aren't actually necessary to beat the game. Each dungeon (and overworld region) has a completely different visual aesthetic.
I think a middle ground would lead to a much better experience. Talking just about BOTW, imagine if 2 of the dungeons had to be done first, but each of those gave some item or ability that allowed you to complete one of the other ones. Or if the game was divided in half like most Zelda games are (light/dark world, young/old link), this makes you feel like you've accomplished something and are moving into a new chapter of the story.
> I think BOTW was too non-linear. You could do the main storyline and shrines in any order; there were no new skills or items blocking you from exploring the entirety of the map from the beginning (just health/stamina); and the dungeons and shrines are all visually identical. It lacks a feeling of progression.
This is exactly why it was one of my top 2-3 games of all time.
The Shrines were a huge part of why I was so unimpressed with BotW, because they were all so transparently made piecemeal. "Open World" doesn't mean a whole lot when you're expected to complete random identically flavored puzzles every 15 minutes.
I can also picture how Shrines were engineered in a fast-food style assembly line: "Nintendo Engineering Team 46-b, you're being assigned Shrines 5-23, complete them in x weeks."
Even barring Shrines, the "Open World" itself was fairly devoid of interesting things.
I got a switch and BoTW and played a bit but I hit a wall. I think its personal, maybe similar to you, where a game with big open worlds including long main quests and side quests I feel lost or rather overwhelmed after a while. It feels like never ending, repeated chores. Some of that I attribute to the game developer just repeating a bunch of content like the shrines, fetching things, weapons breaking (but not clothes?), etc.
I also don't like replaying games - I've tried this a few times but once the nostalgia wears off I don't find it fun. Maybe my brain knows I did it already so it feels like chores? I don't know what it is but I just don't really replay things at all. This means I pretty much don't play Nintendo titles because they are all revivals/remakes of the same IP. Its-a-me Mario, again.
I'm in my mid-30s and loved SNES and N64 Zelda games with a fervor bordering on zealotry.
BOTW is certainly different regarding its core game design, but then again Majora's Mask and OOT are incredibly different in design as well. Look at the contrast between the first NES Zelda and Zelda II. Compare the SNES/N64 titles to 4 Swords on GameCube as well.
My point is there is incredible gameplay variation in the Zelda franchise historically. While they've often come back to release more "classic" Zelda games, Nintendo has _always_ tried new mechanics and gameplay loops. Some of these titles that deviate from the core/classic design have major flaws, but I think it is important for a game development studio to branch out and deviate from their "winning" formula.
That's a good point. I don't know of any other gaming franchise which tries to reinvent itself basically every time. (Maybe Final Fantasy is similar, though I haven't played any of those games.)
I enjoyed Breath of the Wild for a bit, but felt it was over hyped. The open world feels pretty empty compared to other games (Skyrim, GTA5), and the shrines are a bit of a repetitive loop. Still had fun with it, but never finished. Of course also much less of a gamer than I used to be.
Good game, but seems to be a fair amount of herding/rose colored glasses with reviewers.
> I'm also not a huge fan of open world games in general and to this date
In theory they sound great. In reality it seems to work against every open-world game I've played. Elden Ring is almost an exception, but the side quests are completely broken in this format without following a guide.
I hated the Witcher 3. Much like RDR 2 it has great presentation, writing and VA - and everything else suffers. But it seems the new generation of gamers have spoken, and they like glorified interactive television with a low bar for gameplay.
Open world games need the open world to work with how players explore and interact. Interesting sites should be visually distinct from each other and the environment, and frequent. They should not all be visible at once, to avoid players being overwhelmed with unclear choices. They should all be rewarding so players are confident they aren’t wasting their time visiting. There shouldn’t be important content hidden from visibility because then the game is teaching the player that looking at the world is futile. And the world should be navigable without the UI, i.e. the players are focused on the world and not the UI.
When OoT came out I'd already played Link To The Past And Link's Awakening so I didn't find OoT very impressive.. it often had clunky camera and controls & the story was pretty lame(especially compared to Link's Awakening).
It also just wasn't that creative.. a very safe Zelda. Majora's Mask was much better though.
I'd agree that it is closer to Link to the Past in terms of storytelling, but I also think that Link's Awakening is the best Zelda story in the entire lot of games. I don't agree that the story was lame. Doing so would just be a condemnation of the series as a whole, which has always been light on narrative with very simple themes. Link's Awakening was the exception.
> It also just wasn't that creative.. a very safe Zelda.
It was the first 3d installment of the franchise. I think that it was unbelievably creative in how it approached the game design because it translated the ideas from 2D titles and took them 3D and found ways to make them new.
Majora's Mask got to be as creative as it was because it was just building on top of all the work that Ocarina of Time did to bring Zelda to 3D. In my case, I think it's a worse game, even if it is more "creative."
Nostalgia is a funny beast. Your comment holds true for me but the wonder was with the original NES Legend of Zelda and I felt nothing for Ocarina/Majora's Mask.
Interestingly, Breath of the Wild is the first modern game I can remember that brought back that sense of wonder I had as a kid.
I also have a preference for more linear RPG's that tell a great story over big open worlds. The time and investment in a 100 hour open world RPG is too much for my FOMO/ADHD addled mind to handle. I can't commit long enough to finish.
I think it is the difference between a fine crafted adventure/narrative versus an open world sandbox for you to experiment in.
I am very similar to you in that Ocarina of Time was a game that blew my mind and converted me from "kid who plays some video games" into "video gamer". I couldn't get enough of it. And while I also yearn for that older style of Zelda adventure, I find that because I always loved the puzzles, that experimenting in the shrines and around the world with BOTW brings me some level of enjoyment. However, I agree that I am not as "over the moon" with this style of game like some others are.
I share this feeling. I loved Ocarina of Time on the N64. BotW was a total snooze fest for me, just felt like way too much to see and do without a lot of structure.
I'm having this issue also right now. I'm trying to play through it, but what really had me stopped at the beginning was the indirection, not knowing where to go, or if I was really headed in the right direction. It's not a problem per say, but it is when you expect "zelda is a linear experience". You have to treat it like Dark Souls or Elden Ring - which has helped me enjoy it more.
Similar situation for me. Ocarina of time is my favorite game of all times. Got BOTW and after playing ~40 mins I left it and never touched it again. It felt too open and overwhelming, maybe as an adult I don't have the time to commit or I missed a more contained/guided approach like with Kokiri Forest.
If you want more of that kind of Zelda seek out the earlier Ocarina-like games. Wind Waker & Twilight Princess were remastered in HD on the Wii U and Skyward Sword was remastered for the Switch.
Yeah, it's hard to word it exactly, but that's how it felt for me too. OOT felt like the characters and world were more personally touching and meaningful, and BOTW felt more cold/meaningless in comparison. I think they're both great games, but BOTW just felt hollow at various points.
Majora's mask is hugely underrated IMO. It's on par with OOT for me.
The Witcher 3 is a truly remarkable game. Probably the only one where I’ve felt some kind of connection with the characters, and somehow felt sad when the game ended. It’s extremely well written.
Yeah because you’re not a child anymore. This is like saying you can’t get into fruit rollups like you used to. Don’t fight your nature and find some mature hobbies to get excited about rather than looking forward to the next Zelda game.
I don't understand this. Someone expressed feelings about two entries in a franchise with wildly different gameplay designs. The age of the player does not change the content of the game.
I caved and bought a Switch last week. It’s the best tech purchase I’ve made in years! The games on it are fun, the versatility of the Joycons is incredible, and the loading speed is a breath of fresh air. My main console is an original PS4. I upgraded to PS5 last year and returned it. It’s just more of the same. Huge game downloads, huge update downloads, a huge console, and long load times. And tbh, I didn’t see a lot of difference in terms of graphics. If you want to play super realistic games then Nintendo doesn’t seem to be the way to go, but if you want to have fun and don’t care about frame rate/whatever other performance metric people complain about, the Switch is amazing.
What are you talking about long load times on a PS5? Isn't it supposed to revolutionize gaming by dropping load times altogether because of it's ridiculously ( for a consoles anyways ) fast SSDs? That's what I have heard anyways, don't have PS5 myself.
It is. I don't know what OP is on about, but load-times on the PS5 are practically non-existent for me. Played the latest Horizon game, and on loading screens I can't even read the first few words of the game-tip. It's never longer than a second, if it's not instant.
It’s a lot faster than the PS4 but it’s still slow in comparison with Switch games. It’s understandable given the difference in file size/game “quality” but I don’t want to wait more than a few seconds.
I don't know what games you're playing but my experience pretty much across the board with the switch is "frustratingly long" loading times. Metroid dread is one of the more recent games I played and the loading screens are painful. Especially compared to a PS5. Check out something like Spiderman for how good it can be.
> And tbh, I didn’t see a lot of difference in terms of graphics.
Then you're not the target audience. Look at TOTK beside Ratchet and Clank on PS5. The difference is night and day.
I have uncapped gigabit internet. (Like many of us, I WFH, and want the most "internet" I can get.) I recall redownloading a game I wanted to play recently. It was 40GB. I thought I would go get a coffee while I waited. It was done before I rounded up and got my shoes on. I don't think the game and update sizes really matter to most of the target demographic of a current-gen console any more. But, hey, I could be extrapolating my experience in a terribly shortsighted way.
Back in the PS4 era when I had FIOS gigabit it was incredibly frustrating to have that internet speed with a console which would download things at 10-15Mbit. There were some tweaks which would double it plus or minus a bit, but, it was fundamentally incapable of using anything close to line rate.
PS5 is incredibly faster. Sony is using Akamai CDN now (they didn't when I checked in the PS4 era) and I consistently max out the PS5s gigabit port (I have 10G symmetric at home).
Unfortunately having uncapped gigabit Internet isn’t an option for most people. I would gladly pay for that if I could. But I’m stuck with Comcast. I’ve lived in 4 different cities in the last decade and I’ve always been stuck with Comcast. You should absolutely not assume that massive downloads don’t matter to most people.
I'm a huge gamer across a few platforms and I wish this was consistent across all platforms, launchers, and companies. I have a fast inner city fiber connection as well and a Sea of Thieves download from Gamepass recently took multiple hours. I've had some patches for PS5 games take 30-45 minutes for a couple gigs. Many companies are hosting their stuff on fast scalable infra but some are still cheaping out.
Did you get a chance to checkout Horizon: Forbidden West (the sequel to Horizon: Zero Dawn)? I have been gaming for a few decades now, and this is the most impressive technical achievement I have seen in a game. For me, everything else pales in comparison after this experience (The studio develops their own game engine Decima)
It looks beautiful, but I tortured myself through zero dawn and then dropped forbidden West an hour in. The story is dumb, the dialogues are a nightmare and I feel like the more they try to paint the female protagonist as some kind of strong woman the worse it made the whole thing. Instead of making her seem strong she's like a petty person, constantly complaining and badmouth everything. The game mechanics make it hard to overlook the terrible storytelling, constant boring grind with an extremely boring skill system.
But it's not exclusive to her. All of dialogues are silly. If you had Horizon with the script writers of God of War (2018) even with the boring game mechanics, it would probably be a masterpiece.
Horizon: Forbidden West is an amazing technical achievement, I just wish I had found it more enjoyable, instead it was "fine". Elden Ring coming out 2 weeks later kinda made me forget all about it - it gave me a feeling I haven't felt playing games in decades that I had been really missing.
I felt the same. I came late to Zero Dawn playing it 5 years after it came out. My first Zelda was the original Zelda (I was 7 when it came out) and Zero Dawn is the closest I ever came to that same feeling as an adult. I don't know the siblings comments are on about—I usually don't really care about the story, though I found myself super curious to find out what was going on the whole time and worried less about what kind of person Aloy was.
This is not correct, but there are many people making this claim. Yuzu is arguably the most popular emulator, and only around 20% of games work well out of the box (https://yuzu-emu.org/game/). A further 30% require tweaks, or operate sub-optimally. The remaining 50% either don't run at all or offer a terrible experience. The thing to remember is that even if you pick one of the games in the "perfect" category, it's still not perfect. For example, you often have to content with hours and hours of "shader" loading. This means choppy and and strange graphical glitches. Further, drivers for various systems are not perfect, and sometimes certain features utilising, for example, the gyroscope, don't work correctly.
There is a VERY vocal minority of Linux gamers who have VERY rose coloured glasses on for anything Linux. I expect some of them to respond to this comment with some variation of "well I have never had any problems with Yuzu. It's the most amazing thing I've ever used in my whole life!!!"
I own a Switch, but I'm still debating whether I play BoTW on Deck or Switch. Either way I'll probably buy it on Switch because developers should be rewarded for making good games, but it's handy for me to have all of my games in one place. Plus the Deck is a much more comfortable for me to hold - more ergonomic, better fit for larger hands.
To offer a counterpoint - the Deck is heavy. For a system that is meant to be chiefly used as a handheld, the thing borders on being as heavy as your average laptop, which gets quite tiring on your arms after a while.
The Switch' fit is a lot lighter by comparison, which is quite nice.
Can I play the Steam Deck handheld (with controllers attached), on kickstand with controllers detracted and split, docked with controllers in a dock to make a single controller, and docked with controller split and turned sideways for two player?
The Deck is impressive and wonderful, but it's not exactly a high end gaming device. Emulating ARM code efficiently requires a significant amount of CPU power and my experience is that the Deck doesn't quite have the CPU capacity to keep up with heavier emulated titles.
I expect the new Logitech handheld (or the many other, even more expensive competitors) to perform much better in this regard.
In a perfect world, emulators such as Skyline would be developed further. As the Switch is just a five year old mid tier Android tablet with a controller attached, I can only imagine the experience if you were to use the KVM capabilities of the upcoming Android 14 to run Switch software at near native performance on modern devices. Just buy one of those controller grips for phone and tablets and you're off!
iPhones/iPads would do even better, but I doubt Apple is going to let you use the necessary APIs to virtualize like that.
It's a shame Skyline has been killed off. With terrible games like that Pokémon game needing much more CPU power than the Switch can provide, I imagine even legitimate players would be interested in a way to play their switch games on modern hardware.
I've had a switch for years and I agree I do love playing it, but, there are some really great games in the playstation ecosystem. It's definitively a less casual environment but I personally would not give up on playing games like The Last of Us and Horizon and the new God of War games. Really incredible gameplay with incredible story as well.
The Switch is an excellent piece of hardware. Nintendo knocked it out of the park so far it's only just starting to see competition at the end of it's lifecycle.
It is a super cool piece of kit. I haven't had a console since the PS2, the switch won me over with it's form factor versatility and of course the game library.
Honestly, while I have a running boycott of consoles on moral grounds (Steam Deck notwithstanding), I feel like the Switch and PS4 are the best systems in quite a while, both for the variety of independent/AA games in all genres on them, and the retro arcade game ports M2 and Hamster are churning out at a steady and ever increasing pace.
I really want to get a Switch but I can’t seem to justify paying full price for hardware that is evidently several years out of date. Released 6 years ago and still $300.
I was so used to older consoles being bundled with games after a couple years after being released
When I first got a PS4 it was bundled with GTAV and Last of Us. Pretty incredible deal.
>> I really want to get a Switch but I can’t seem to justify paying full price for hardware that is evidently several years out of date.
I thought similar but at the end of the day does it matter? Games work well on it. Sure they might be making bigger profit margins on it but it still does what it’s meant to at a good level.
I was listening to a gaming podcast last week and they were talking about how this release was pirated and available for the last week or so on torrents. That in itself wasn't surprising, but the interesting point they talked about is that the game is much more enjoyable when played on PC with an emulated copy because modern gaming PC hardware is much smoother and higher resolution than the stock Switch.
It really makes me think Nintendo has an untapped market here to sell a little box you plug into your PC that plays switch games, interfaces with their controllers, etc. They've done oddball stuff like the SNES Gameboy player and GameCube GBA player add-ons in the past. It feels like there would be people willing to pay to properly play Switch games on their gaming PCs.
> It really makes me think Nintendo has an untapped market here to sell a little box you plug into your PC that plays switch games, interfaces with their controllers, etc. They've done oddball stuff like the SNES Gameboy player and GameCube GBA player add-ons in the past, it feels like there would be people willing to pay to properly play Switch games on their gaming PCs.
It seems unlikely they would be willing to let go of control like that. With all their oddball stuff, you were still largely within the Nintendo ecosystem. They also probably don't want to deal with the piracy problem on PC, considering they already deal with it on their relatively locked-down consoles.
For better or for worse, Nintendo also likes to really control the experience you get playing games on their platforms; It would probably not be a great look for them to have to deal with thousands of customers that are trying to run their games on hardware older than a Switch and complaining that it's a terrible experience. Yeah the existing hardware is underpowered, but its uniformly underpowered, and that's worth quite a bit too.
I think for Nintendo, the more prudent solution would be to release an updated Switch with some more powerful hardware that's fully backwards compatible with the existing Switch library. It would be very par for the course for them, and assuage most of the complaints about the Switch being underpowered.
People complaining about the Switch being underpowered are expecting PS5 level performance on a mobile device. Even if a new console would be twice as fast they still would be disappointed.
It's perfectly possible to create innovative and - most important - fun games on something as powerful as the Switch.
> I think for Nintendo, the more prudent solution would be to release an updated Switch with some more powerful hardware that's fully backwards compatible with the existing Switch library. It would be very par for the course for them, and assuage most of the complaints about the Switch being underpowered.
This could result in fragmentation: some games could only run smoothly on the new version.
I pretty like the idea of using old hardware and to require game dev to adapt to this.
The piracy point is moot. If you go on torrent websites, you'll find repacks of Nintendo games with prepackaged and set up emulators. It can't really get worse than that.
I've a really good pc under my TV that I pretty much only use for emulation. So I'm not anti emulation by any means (it's allowed me to put all my real hardware in a cupboard and not have a big mess of wires in my living room)! But what these videos never show is that emulation is a pain in the ass. There's always a nagging feeling that game isn't quite right. I end up spending more time tweaking settings than playing the game. If I get stuck I end up wondering if there's a bug in the emulator.
I don't own a switch but I'd much prefer to play a fully tested game the way the developers intended. My pc could run it no problem (rtx 3070 etc), but if I ever do play it, it will be on a switch.
Anyway your point is a bit differen, that Nintendo could make money on this etc.
Breath of the Wild (Wii U version) on PC is the ideal way to play the game. Gyro is kind of a pain to set up, but 1080p 60fps more than makes up for it. I highly recommend it, even if it’s a second play through. It’s a beautiful and elegant game.
I’ve heard TotK is still pretty glitchy under Switch emulation, but I expect it’ll be resolved in less than a year or two. Yuzu and Ryujinx have a healthy competition between the two of them.
Out of curiosity, what is your setup? I'm guessing windows 10/11, hdmi plugged into your TV? I have a windows box in my home office but and an Nvidia shield attached to my TV but it has always been a pain to play games via steam link. I mean, it's doable, I just figure there's a way to make it as convenient as console gaming and I'm missing something.
Absolutely, the worst feeling of being stuck on a puzzle is not knowing whether you simply haven't solved the puzzle, or a bug has caused this door to not open and having to run online to check.
Like it or not apparently Switch piracy is a thing so this doesn't really change much for their current situation. But it does give people who want to do things the right way an avenue to do so.
I kind of think of it like high end CAD software and such that ships a physical dongle in order to use the software--Nintendo can sell hardware to help ensure it's legitimate use of their emulation software.
What you call 'control freak' is just the culture of a company focussed on creating a curated experience which is a combination of software, hardware and user experience. Anything not fitting in that vision diminishes that experience and they will do anything to prevent that. Of course, they also like to get paid for their work ;)
Also Nintendo's whole philosophy is all about doing more with less. They make money on every device by not putting out overly engineered / performant systems. So they have always been lagging in terms of cutting edge hardware, but they make up for it by focusing on joyful content.
I think it would make more sense for Nintendo to make a more powerful console on a compatible platform that isn't handheld, kind of like the Sega Master System/Game Gear or Sega Mega Drive/Nomad consoles.
So you can enjoy the same titles on the go as you can on the TV, and you could still use the Switch on the TV, but there would be an alternative for people who want a more high fidelity, fluid experience on a TV or a monitor.
It doesn't even have to be that much more powerful. Even when sticking to the same vendor, a 2018 Nvidia ARM chip had roughly 3-4x the CPU power and 10x the GPU power of the Switch, in a 15-60W power budget. This would be fine for a console that's always plugged into the power mains.
Going to more midrange vendors like Rockchip or Mediatek, or - and this is a long shot - striking a deal with Samsung for using their Exynos chips would probably yield a lower cost device but still net a 4-5x increase in gaming performance.
Emulation has proven that the games are not tied so tightly to their hardware platform for switching to a more modern architecture while maintaining compatibility to be an issue. Even without first-party involvement people have been running Switch games on mobile Android devices with a good processor.
It would be incredibly cool if they ported their games (even just ones more than 10 years old) to PC, but they clearly want to double/triple/quadruple dip on retro game purchases from console to console so that would never really work. I have really grown sour on Nintendo over the years but that would do a lot to win me back, personally.
I have katamari reroll on the switch and the steam deck and I vastly prefer the experience on the steam deck. It loads the levels faster, has a smoother experience, and it’s easier to do the acceleration of the ball with the steam decks analog switches or extra buttons on the back.
The game is nowhere near tears of the kingdom level and the experience is better. So I understand why people want a better switch
> It really makes me think Nintendo has an untapped market here to sell a little box you plug into your PC that plays switch games
Games that are more locked down and walled than Apple products, that run 30fps on the oldest hardware possible in 2023, made by a company that actively alienates its own fanbase with aggressive copyright claims over the silliest things?
No thanks. Really, you can keep them out of the PC market.
It seems the fault is less with Nintendo than with parts of the "fan base" which defend piracy. I bet much, much fewer people would play Zelda on an emulator if they a) had to pay for it and b) had to wait until it comes out.
But hasn't this always been the case? Like computers are always more powerful than consoles, but the draw of consoles being a "turns on and just works" system - minus blowing-into-the-cartridge-on-the-original-nes
We are talking playing a current generation console game on emulator with better framerate and resolution than on the original console, at release. So no, it has not always been the case
For the last few generations Nintendo has been happy to be slightly behind Playstation and Xbox in terms of graphics so that they can be the lower-cost alternative.
And based on unit sales, that strategy seems to be doing pretty well.
I think it's a really smart strategy. They avoided the raw-power hardware arms race and are thriving because of it.
It seems like Nintendo picked up on what makes video games so fun early on while a lot of studios struggle with it even today: The gameplay comes first and it has to be fun. Art/style comes next, then way down the list is graphics. Graphics are the only thing about a video game that get worse with time. If you focus on making fun games that have a distinct style, they will remain fun forever. Importantly to a corporation, they also remain sellable forever.
Nobody talks about crysis 1 anymore, but people definitely talk about wind waker.
Yeah, and parents love it too for that reason. People really seem to underestimate the market for children (and parents / family gifting and indulging said children), not just with gaming but also with e.g. youtube.
To add, people also underestimate mobile gaming; westerners still look down on it compared to console and PC gaming, despite the financials telling a whole different story.
It's not really a lower-cost alternative due to cartridge prices and no sales.
I chose Steam Deck instead of the Switch. Yes the SD is more expensive, but it already supports most of my existing Steam library and I can buy new games on sale.
Playing Switch games emulated on the Steam Deck is pretty common. The power of the Deck does give you better performance, no doubt. The trade off is that the battery life is significantly worse than a Switch.
> I was listening to a gaming podcast last week and they were talking about how this release was pirated and available for the last week or so on torrents.
https colon slashslash thepiratebay DOT org slash description.php?id=68303898 (slightly broken for inadvertent link click)
But yeah, games arent my cup of tea, but I did try it. And it's BUTTER SMOOTH on real computer hardware. And yeah, we pierats had it before legit purchase. Again, pirates get the best experience and legit gets meh.
> It really makes me think Nintendo has an untapped market here to sell a little box you plug into your PC that plays switch games, interfaces with their controllers, etc. They've done oddball stuff like the SNES Gameboy player and GameCube GBA player add-ons in the past. It feels like there would be people willing to pay to properly play Switch games on their gaming PCs.
I guess they could do that, but that would cannibalize sales of their consoles. And then, what makes them any different than Steam?
The biggest benefit of a Switch is it's handheld and portable. The biggest pirate downside is that it nearly necessitates a desktop with significantly better equipment. I've heard some work being done with the Steam handheld.. but subpar at best.
Or sell a Nintendo "emulator" of their own for PC. Just for Nintendo releases like Zelda, MarioKart, etc. They wouldn't even need to produce any hardware in that case. I'd be first in line to purchase such a piece of software.
I tried one of the popular Switch emulators, and they work great. But, I'd rather just pay Nintendo, and not have to fiddle with it. Really does seem like an opportunity for them.
A great example of this is Sony with Playstation exclusives.
In the past few years, they have broken their longstanding rule and made PC ports of many of their previously exclusive Playstation titles to play on PC. This includes Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, and The Last of Us.
In the most recent earnings call, Sony said that these titles sales on PC have dramatically outperformed expectations and that they will be putting additional effort towards PC ports in the future as a way to supplement Playstation sales.
Microsoft has figured out the same thing, by not really making Xbox exclusives anymore. Granted, they were always much more closely tied between PC and Xbox than companies like Sony were, but they quickly embraced this "play everywhere" mentality many years ago, and released a Ultimate Gamepass which basically lets you play the same games (with some exceptions) on PC or Xbox and even switch between the two with cloud saves.
Point being, other publishers have discovered that locking yourself down to a single hardware device is not good. PCs are the most universally owned and flexible hardware devices out there and have the biggest market. I'd love for Nintendo to do the same thing. But knowing Nintendo, they will never do such a thing. They are a very stubborn company. They often do not act in their own self-interest (market share, revenue) in order to control things like hardware or create false scarcity.
Nintendo is extremely resistant to change and compromise, there is probably zero chance they will do it. Remember that, even as they make excellent games, they reject a lot of modern aspects of gaming. Like they used to ban Twitch streams and YouTube let's plays of their games.
I play a lot of emulation (of older titles mostly), and i really like the cheats functionality. I'm not 15yo anymore, I don't have the time to grind, but I really like the adventure part of a game... so playing a game with some kind of invincibility is great for me.
I understand the concept of games needing to be "hard" in some parts, and that making your grind to get stronger to win is a thing... but sometimes I just want to mess around and play through the story, and games like zelda ones (and GTA series and many others) are one of those.
Sadly, cheats have turned into microtransactions (be it crystals, gems or amiibos).
It might just be a gigantic support burden for them: They then would have to care about thousands of hardware configurations, and people complaining "doesn't work on my PC". It's probably not worth it. Also the market for it is likely small. Most Switch users seem children, casual games, families, etc. Those usually just want to buy hardware which "just works", compared to enthusiasts who actually want to fiddle around with tons of settings.
The PC version also let you mod the game. The weapon durability mod (removing the extremely quick destruction of your favourite equipment in the normal game) was excellent.
The day 1 patch makes this a Locked 30 fps game without frame drops except when using ultra hand. It’s the first AAA release in months to run this smooth.
It definitely still dips regularly in heavy areas. It doesn't impact the experience the way it did before, imo, but saying that it doesn't would be disingenuous.
You're right about it being the only acceptable AAA release this year though.
I doubt Nintendo would be willing to open up like that, but who knows. Nowadays there are barely any exclusive games on Xbox and Playstation. Most games are made available in every platform.
Maybe Nintendo will buckle under the $$$ figure they could earn by making their games available on other platforms.
On the other hand, Nintendo could make a killing releasing a "Switch 2" with beefier hardware and backwards compatibility.
Nintendo makes very confusing business decisions very often. They seem to succeed despite all their business decisions, largely due to having IP that people love, and people are constantly thinking about how great they could be.
> the game is much more enjoyable when played on PC with an emulated copy
Neophyte question here, but what's the 3d engine used for this game? can you just change a parameter to make the game more realistic if the hardware supports it?
It's a custom engine by nintendo, also seems to be user by other games like super mario odyssey.
Changing graphics settings would be accomplished using patches, more or less the same idea as making cheats in older games. Find the value somewhere in their code that corresponds to render distance and change that, as an example.
Emulators for older systems can do more impressive things. Graphics pipelines tend to be a certain shape and use certain data types, so once you're already emulating at the GPU level you can do things like upscale old textures (works great on cell-shaded games like megaman legends). For 2d games you can use a dedicated pixel art scaling algorithm.
Pretty much all 3D games can output at a higher resolution than the original hardware allowed, just due to how the hardware is set up. You're game isn't responsible for deciding the output resolution, the GPU is, essentially. Changes aspect ratios is much harder and often requires patching the games themselves to make it work properly.
Other common patches are things like higher FPS. By default the new zelda game plays at 20fps, but there are patches to play them at 30 and 60 fps for a smoother experience. Those are once again actually reverse engineering and patching the game files though.
You can play it at 120 Hz, 4K, ultrasmooth, what have you, when you buy the next gen Nintendo console for 350+ eur/$. Not using a small cheap box... Knowing Nintendo.
I stopped my BOTW playthrough recently after seeing game being rendered in 4K RTX. I'm usually not a stickler for visuals, but swith is getting a bit too dated.
I doubt there's much, if any profit margin on the consoles themselves. I think it's pretty typical for consoles of all brands to be sold at a loss in order to capture customers for their ecosystem where they will buy games and other media which have very healthy margins.
Nintendo's biggest concern is probably controlling the experience. While it might not be a marvel of gaming technology on the Switch, it is consistent. Allowing it to run on any old computer hardware means a lot of it will be poorly optimized as a rule. non-technical people will likely have no idea what that means; to them it will just be a shitty gaming experience and they will then associate that experience with Nintendo. Technical people will probably not even bother and they'll just emulate it for free instead of paying $70 for a game that isn't going to have any official support on their platform. There's really no upside for Nintendo in this plan.
Is Switch emulation on PC that good? Maybe I should try it if so. I imagined it would be fairly janky due to the difficulty of emulating currentish hardware, and only old consoles could be emulated with good performance.
I already bought the game from Nintendo, but stumbled on this thread this morning. I'd be willing to play it on an emulator instead of my switch if the performance was better, but some quick skimming online isn't convincing me.
To wit, the consensus opinion on reddit is that BOTW is still a buggy mess on the main switch emulators, Yuzu & Ryujinx, and that people should play the Wii U version via the CEMU emulator instead. If BotW isn't a polished experience many years after release, I'm pessimistic about TotK being a good experience so soon after release. You can skim the bug reports on the emulator sites; there's lots of stuttering and invisible walls and all other kinds of jank.
I've been playing the leaked version of TotK at 4K 60 fps for several days, and with only extremely minor visual bugs (example: when switching abilities, the background turns black rather than out-of-focus). It's honestly less janky than many AAA PC games.
How can they compare with something that hasn’t been released?
It might be true, but at the same time it feels disingenuous to compare unreleased games on switch to a pirated PC. “Much more enjoyable” can’t be a thing until you compare, right?
You were downvoted but you are right. The podcast was released last week, but the game came with a day-1 patch to improve the performance on Switch which they would not have been able to try.
Obviously it will never compete with emulation on a PC, but it runs just fine on Switch. 99.9% of players are not going to think "wow, this would be much more enjoyable on a PC!" The gaming podcast crowd is not exactly representative.
You can compare all the other releases, including Breath of the Wild, why should this release be any different? Especially when the emulator keeps improving and PC hardware keeps getting better
I've tried this and I have a monster machine. The experience is overall better on the switch. Not everything has been emulated correctly and the frame rate is still higher on the switch overall.
Funny, related to your last paragraph, I saw a review of the new Zelda were the only downsides they found were "the switch hardware can't do more than this" and "this sets too high a bar for the next Zelda game" :)
Well, looking at the time it takes them to make a mainline Zelda game, the next one will not come out on the Switch, so it'll be easy to overcome that technical bar.
good to know, cause honestly the trailer looks.. kinda boring. I really liked Breath of the Wild though, so if this is similar in quality (or better) I'll probably get it.
Well, apparently they went the safe route (feature-wise) of adding more interesting mechanics (specially turning the world into a sandbox) and polishing existing ones. Pretty much like GTA after GTA 3. My guess is that they'll continue this trend by making the game richer and bigger...until they get a Zelda online game like GTA.
Has Nintendo ever talked about how they do software development? Can we all drop the thousands of books that have been written about software engineering in general and just figure out what they do?
Game aside, the reviews have been pointing out how the game performs well (after day 1 patch) and is not pestered with bugs, which is an impressive feat for such an open world game where most things are able to interact with everything else.
It 100% has to do with retention of key talent and knowledge transfer. It seems the model for most western studios is to make one or two big successful games, then layoff all the staff and/or be acquired by EA/Activision/Microsoft. Then their next games flounder as they're milked dry. Western companies are only worried about the next quarter and treat talent as a bottom line expense.
I guess it's not only about what the studios do. Japanese also have a different kind of loyalty from employees which rarely ever change change. It's probably 20 years of average tenure, compared to 2 years in the US. And that's not because these companies pay so much more: They probably pay less for their most experienced stuff than what an employee with 2 years of experience gets in the US. It's just a different culture.
There is no big secret to this. They just don't go all out. They don't take big risks. They just see what works elsewhere and polish it until it shines brighter than everything else. And they only add (or take away?) until they have the necessary minimum of gameplay. For example, Zelda BotW is by far not the best survival or crafting-game which was around at release, but it was the most pleasant experience for casual gamers and Zelda-fans, because it left out all the unimportant grind which is not relevant for a Zelda-Game.
Notable in that regard: Apple did the same under Steve Jobs. Focus on the important part, and don't play around.
I would put a lot of it down to Japanese craftsmanship coupled with relatively experienced engineers (average age in their Kyoto office is 40 IIRC). Their selection process is notoriously rigorous too and goes far beyond the usual LeetCode questions you'd get at a FAANG company.
I disagree. Nintendo has good engineers but so does many of the other studios. For me what sets Nintendo apart is not their code or technology, but their game design and game direction. The way they seem to craft their game-play and game mechanics to have everything it needs but nothing more, and then couple it with the perfect match for game aesthetics with unmatched consistency.
> I would put a lot of it down to Japanese craftsmanship
This is such an orientalist and borderline racist view it’s crazy. If it were true then it would also imply the other japanese game devs also affected by it. There countless bad games from Japan, don’t even have to walk far from Nintendo just look at the Pokémon games and how GameFreak release them with 0 optimization. And then the countless misses from Square Enix, Bandai Namco etc.
It might be worth listening to the Acquired podcast episode on Nintendo. They are very far from perfect, and have had a good number of serious failures, along with some very strange decisions that clearly hurt them. Nintendo has a die hard stance on modding that is definitely net negative. Just a few weeks ago they went after some giant Twitch streamers for playing modded content. They also consistently ship technology that is generations behind.
One big thing they pointed out is the type of gaming they target. While the Playstation and Xbox general aim for very serious, high "skill" players, Nintendo often launches just above the seriousness and skill level of mobile gamers. It's easy for me to sit down with my extended family and play Mario Party or Mario Kart, but they'd hate me if I had them play Elden Ring. They also are strongly against much of the free to play content.
I left that episode questioning how much of Nintendo's recent success is due to them outcompeting versus the competition making a series of unforced errors.
I think they have a couple advantages:
1) Zelda on Switch has very basic graphics compared to modern AAA titles on other consoles and only a 30 fps framerate.
2) The last Zelda game came out in 2017 so they've had tons of time.
I know people say this, and of course the art style is stylised. But playing it last night and watching the day-night cycle, the grass moving around on the first sky island, the physics simulation as I dropped my clumsily-made creations and I thought it was pretty impressive. I do think it's a wonder this runs on a low power tablet computer from 2017 but if I open up Teams on a brand new machine it can be a laggy mess. I do think we have lost track of how much computing power we have and how poorly it is used.
It would be like figuring out what Steve Job, Usain Bolt, or Killian Jornet do. It would be interesting and helpful, but you will not be able to replicate it by following a recipe.
I have tried to figure this out myself and found two facts that stood out:
1. On BOTW game designers did not allow polishing within two thirds of the game dev process
2. The executives do a lot of play testing.
To implement both at the same time is quite something if you ask me.
Easy, with proper algorithms and data structures thinking about a single kind of hardware, instead of developing on a octacore with 32 GB and SSD with a RTX GPU and then expecting everyone else has the same setup.
Basically by doing development like we used to do in the 8 and 16 bit home computer days.
Mechanical sympathy. Rather than designing a game on a PC to take arbitrary advantage of modern tech and then trying to cram it down onto a more limited console platform, Nintendo ask, at design time, what the most interesting things they can do are that would work perfectly within the constraints of the platform — and then do that.
(And Nintendo engineers can have perfect knowledge of "the constraints of the platform", because 1. they built the platform; 2. it's the only platform they ever code for, never porting to anything else; and 3. for late-in-generation titles, they have been developing for it for years already, while also doing platform-SDK support for every third-party development studio.)
Oh, and besides that, because they design each platform initially specifically to work well for the types of games they want to make. (This goes all the way back to the Famicom, which has hardware PPU registers that were specifically implemented clearly to make the launch-title port of Donkey Kong extremely easy to code.)
I think it's great that it maintains a solid 30 and seems to have very few issues.
Another interesting perspective is that it—a game made at the end of the Switch's life (we hope)—is only marginally prettier and more polished than BOTW—a launch title. I would still hold BOTW as one of the prettiest Switch titles, including third parties (I realise this is subjective). I'm not sure of another console where you don't make graphical progress in 6 years of it existing. I don't know why this is, or even if it's a failing, I just think it's interesting.
I think sometimes we conflate "graphical fidelity" with "beauty". I agree that BotW is one of the most beautiful games I've played, and that's an artistic achievement not a technical one. They do of course go hand in hand to some extent - sometimes you need technical tools for artistic vision, but you don't need high-tech for beauty.
> I would still hold BOTW as one of the prettiest Switch titles
+1; I don't usually care much about graphics (I play ASCII roguelikes for crying out loud), but there have been several moments in BotW where I found myself soaking in the scenery because it was gorgeous.
Priorities. For Nintendo, size matters.
Time also matters. In an old interview, Someone from Nintendo says that the time to put the disc in the Wii and be able to play Zelda needs to be less than 30sec.
no offense to nintendo and fans, but fidelity wise the game looks like an early ps3 game and runs at 30 fps with dips in certain areas and very regular dips when using certain game mechanics.
I can count the triangles on a lot of geometry visibly, and the textures are so blurred it looks like you take any modern PC game and only render the lowest available level of detail of all the textures. I can count the pixels in the shadows on the floor and lighting wise the game is extremely basic (it doesn't need to be more because of the art style). most effects you see in the game are literally blurry billboarded (but granted alpha blended) sprites, including the clouds that are so important in this games visuals.
and to top it off we're in 2023 with half the people or more on 4k screens and the game doesn't even manage native 900p most of the time.
the art design of the game is just designed well around those constraints. very well. but the devs likely did nothing super special to make it run well.
I wouldn't say seamlessly but it run okay yeah. There is a digital foundry video already on the technical side of thing, apparently it's using AMD FSR1
Note that all Switch games have to be small, out of technical necessity. The Switch only comes with 32 GB of internal storage, and that also gets used for your game saves, your screenshots/videos, and the OS itself. If Nintendo wants to offer digital downloads, and if it doesn't want to require users to go out and buy an SD card to expand their storage (which, to be clear, you should anyway for convenience), then they have to keep game sizes small.
It's using proven technology and they didn't push any boundaries, graphics wise; Breath of the Wild also came out for the Wii U, which is nearly 11 years old now and even at the time didn't really try to push any performance boundaries.
Pokemon-Games are not from Nintendo itself. They own shares of the franchise, but it seems they are overall not directly involved into the game-development, unlike with Zelda. And Pokemon in general has different problems regarding quality. They are more time-constrained, stressed, and seem to have some internal struggle in the last years. While Zelda seems to had the liberty to develop peacefully for years on their own.
The better question you should be asking is why does everyone else need 300GB of disk space that transfers at over 7GB/s, 32 CPU cores at 6GHz, a video card worth $3000 dollars, and RAM sizes measured in gigabytes with 3 digits just for a fucking game?
At some point I have to wonder if the reason we have so much computing power is so we can use that computing power.
If you are serious (I do game development for a living and work on graphical assets daily so that seems evident for me, but I totally understand it can be arcane stuff) it's simply that they choose a stylized graphical style avoiding a lot of costly details you generaly find in hight end games.
They use low poly models, as far as I know there is no baked lightmap (these are pretty expensives but are mandatory in a lot of engine if you want realistic shadows on higtly detailled environment) and their shader materials probably use very simple and low resolution maps.
All these thing decrease the asset footprint by orders of magnitude.
If you want to look in more detail in can look and compare a similar rendering in unity. Taking two unity exemple you can compare :
- 'chop chop' a game using a similar rendering style : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGTTHOpUQDE, if you take the pig and its environment showed in the video and go in the github repository you can see they only use one texture map : an albedo one.
All the models (pig + environment) weight about 6mB of textures and 350kB of models. and are sufficient to have the full main character and an environment.
- a 'realistic PBR workflow gun asset' on asset store (choose randomly but seems nice, realistic and containing only the gun so we can see download size) : https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/guns/free-fps.... The workflow need 6 maps (there are 7 here but you generaly only use either a normal map or a heightmap) The pack weight 35MB. It's only the gun, you lack a full character handling it and the environment.
While I really like zelda, even with stylized graphics the game look a bit outdated for me. The cellshaded characters are fluid and pretty but the 'low resolution texture and low poly models' bother me a bit especially on environments. The artistic direction is really good but technically I can only think they are held back by the hardware.
As a game developer, I totally want to use all the resources i know i can find on the target hardware. Trust me even today they are lots of features game designer dream to put in game and cant because computing resources are still limited ^^. Do game NEEDS them to be fun ? Of course not, but COULD they be fun experiences ? I think yes :)
Because this hardware is for a different experience. Zelda is nice, but the style has its limits. It's kinda like asking why Disney invests hundreds of millions of Dollar into Marvel and Star Wars-Movies, when you can also make a cheaper but polished animation-movie with a fraction of that price. It's simply not the same.
We need this power because companies need to keep selling us new stuff and also because developers nowadays can't optimize their games too much since their managers make them do ten times the work, in half the time, and for one third of the pay they had on the 1990s.
Gaming has been a massive driver of hardware for a very long time in a way that can always be looked at as unneeded. We surpassed more compute for the sake of compute a while ago. The neat thing is that there are still new things to do with it. Real-time path tracing will be the next thing as well as moving more compute over to the GPU. We don’t need it but it will open new possibilities. And it seems less wasteful than running ten copies of Chrome to support a few desktop apps.
The new Zelda demonstrates something that’s been true of every console generation. They are a fixed platform and the later games are always considerably better at utilising the hardware.
I doubt anyone is asking that question since none of what you said is true. This just seems like rant of someone wanting to play recent games and not wanting to upgrade their computer. If that's the case, just say that instead of whining about a trend that's been going on for 40 years.
Furthermore, why does a 2023 released game, in development since 2018, run like utter garbage on said spec hardware that is orders of magnitude more performant than last years specs ...
My god. This almost brings tears to my eyes. I haven't played games for years. Small children and adult life kind of came in the way... I don't miss gaming that much, but I miss Zelda.
The sheer perfection of the Zelda games are just mindblowing to me. I replayed The Legend of Zelda many years ago and it was obvious that the gameplay was still holding up. They got it right from the absolute beginning. And not only that, it is basically the same gameplay still used (at least up to Twilight Princess which is the last major Zelda game I played. They are so consistent.
Breath of the wild was probably the largest change in the original Zelda formula since ocarina of time (which introduced 3D for the first time)
Based on the trailers I've seen of tears of the kingdom(and I've been trying to avoid that because spoilers) this game walks even further down the path that breath of the wild set out!
We're kind of alike you and I,I think. While I don't have kids that keep me from gaming, I could do without it all, except for Zelda. My switch is currently downloading totk.
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When I played Breath of the Wild, I felt ... nothing. It's not that I hated the game, it was even enjoyable up to a point, but I just can't seem to get as excited about it as many others, and it seems to be missing everything I loved about Zelda. I'm also not a huge fan of open world games in general and to this date, the only one that I think pulled this of well is IMHO Witcher 3 where every side quest feels meaningful.
So I wish everyone a ton of fun with Tears of the Kingdom, but I feel no particular urge to play it right now, given that it appears to largely copy BotW's formula from what I've read. Maybe I will pick it up at some later point.
That's not to discount the criticisms or "feel" you get from the game, but it's worth noting that nothing lives up to our childhood favorites.
Sometimes when the follow-on content is bad... it's because the follow-on content is bad.
This can apply to a trip we went on, or a TV series we watched, or music I listened to, or a video game I played (e.g. I really experience this when playing Factorio again after it’s been a while).
So maybe YMMV, but I can still have things that (at least almost) live up to “feels” I had from childhood.
Meanwhile, Elden Ring drew me in like no other game in recent memory.
It's the best game. As a kid I liked Marathon and Mario but never played Zelda for some reason. OOT is just a perfect game.
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I don't replay old games like this (the ones that have you solve and explore). It's effectively a security blanket, with no thrill - the opposite of the first experience. I find it bittersweet and it dulls feelings I associate with those games.
You can never go back, is the thing.
Of course, you're entirely correct but other entries in the series, even Skyward Sword with all its flaws, has managed to capture some of that spirit. BOTW to me is just an entirely different game.
It's a damned shame civ II is so hard to get properly running (dosbox, win3.1, etc, sound drivers, etc)
I guarantee you that if Nintendo released "A Zelda in the mold of OoT but with a new set of dungeons and items and such" people who love OoT would go nuts for it. Look at what happened with Sonic Mania. For some reason, though, publishers/developers are very wary of doing this. Nintendo refuses to make a new Zelda that just reapplies the winning formula. Sega refuses to make Sonic Mania 2 - honestly, I was very pleasantly surprised they made the first one! I blame the late 2000s mantra of "innovation" and its presence/absence that seemed to be all the rage in critic circles.
Part of it is just controls. BotW is nice and responsive, and Geralt feels incredibly sluggish in comparison because of all the presumably mocapped animations that have to play for every single little thing you do. Try running forward and turning around to run backwards in both games. Gerald has a hell of a time coping, but Link just does it.
Part of it though was definitely the design of the open world. The Witcher 3 just feels claustrophobic. You can't walk two steps without having to collect herbs or fight drowners or talk to NPCs. BotW spaces things out more, and I feel the pacing is improved by this.
However, I’m with you on the claustrophobia regarding the map. I guess that’s due to resource constraints of the previous console generations, and I have high hopes for future Witcher games. Glad the series isn’t dead yet.
My interest in video games declined greatly as the trend in the video game industry shifted toward heavy violence and more realistic graphics. Fast forward to last year, I decided to pick up the Switch as I found one for a really good deal. I wanted to try the new (to me) Zelda. I felt pretty unimpressed, decent not great. As it turned out, I had mistaken the much hyped BoTW release with the Zelda release that I bought. I was playing Skyward Sword.
Once I realized my error, I picked up BoTW and took it for spin. I now think the hype is totally justified. I got all the feelings I felt with OoT. It's been wonderful so far. I'm only about halfway through and stocked for Tears of the Kingdom.
Interesting. Opposite for me. Playing BotW reignited the feeling of playing OOT and MM for me.
And then I played BotW. Since the late 90s there were only 2 other games that I put in more playtime than it and those were Ultima Online and WoW. And this was a single player game. It was the most amazing experience for me.
For me Zelda was always more of a puzzle game than an adventure game, and I feel like those puzzle aspects are much more amplified in the last two entries, though in a much more "freeform" way.
My biggest criticism was how much like it felt like you were canonically in a game. Link with his iPad complete with selfie camera, and the clearly computer-generated matrix-y shrines, and if you went too far towards the mountains a "You can't go further that way" message, the strongest feeling I got playing that game is that in truth Link is being observed in a simulated fishbowl environment. A cool idea for a game to lean into, maybe, but not in this case.
Good observation. Compare with Ocarina's temples which felt genuinely scary.
Maybe it's an age thing? My first Zelda was the original Legend of Zelda, and while I absolutely love the whole series (except for Tri Force Heroes), Breath of the Wild brought me back to the feeling of playing the original like nothing has since. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask were huge, but I was already in college at that point.
I was fortunately able to takeoff my nostalgia glasses for Breath of the Wild, and similarly it blew me away. Haven’t felt that kind of emotional connection in a very long time.
I almost want to write a book: ‘Zelda Mind, Beginners Mind’
Compare that with the "old" Zelda formula: you have to do dungeons in order, because the item you get in each dungeon unlocks the way forward on the overworked or in the dungeon. There are few to no side quests that aren't actually necessary to beat the game. Each dungeon (and overworld region) has a completely different visual aesthetic.
I think a middle ground would lead to a much better experience. Talking just about BOTW, imagine if 2 of the dungeons had to be done first, but each of those gave some item or ability that allowed you to complete one of the other ones. Or if the game was divided in half like most Zelda games are (light/dark world, young/old link), this makes you feel like you've accomplished something and are moving into a new chapter of the story.
This is exactly why it was one of my top 2-3 games of all time.
The Shrines were a huge part of why I was so unimpressed with BotW, because they were all so transparently made piecemeal. "Open World" doesn't mean a whole lot when you're expected to complete random identically flavored puzzles every 15 minutes.
I can also picture how Shrines were engineered in a fast-food style assembly line: "Nintendo Engineering Team 46-b, you're being assigned Shrines 5-23, complete them in x weeks."
Even barring Shrines, the "Open World" itself was fairly devoid of interesting things.
I also don't like replaying games - I've tried this a few times but once the nostalgia wears off I don't find it fun. Maybe my brain knows I did it already so it feels like chores? I don't know what it is but I just don't really replay things at all. This means I pretty much don't play Nintendo titles because they are all revivals/remakes of the same IP. Its-a-me Mario, again.
BOTW is certainly different regarding its core game design, but then again Majora's Mask and OOT are incredibly different in design as well. Look at the contrast between the first NES Zelda and Zelda II. Compare the SNES/N64 titles to 4 Swords on GameCube as well.
My point is there is incredible gameplay variation in the Zelda franchise historically. While they've often come back to release more "classic" Zelda games, Nintendo has _always_ tried new mechanics and gameplay loops. Some of these titles that deviate from the core/classic design have major flaws, but I think it is important for a game development studio to branch out and deviate from their "winning" formula.
Good game, but seems to be a fair amount of herding/rose colored glasses with reviewers.
In theory they sound great. In reality it seems to work against every open-world game I've played. Elden Ring is almost an exception, but the side quests are completely broken in this format without following a guide.
I hated the Witcher 3. Much like RDR 2 it has great presentation, writing and VA - and everything else suffers. But it seems the new generation of gamers have spoken, and they like glorified interactive television with a low bar for gameplay.
Open world games need the open world to work with how players explore and interact. Interesting sites should be visually distinct from each other and the environment, and frequent. They should not all be visible at once, to avoid players being overwhelmed with unclear choices. They should all be rewarding so players are confident they aren’t wasting their time visiting. There shouldn’t be important content hidden from visibility because then the game is teaching the player that looking at the world is futile. And the world should be navigable without the UI, i.e. the players are focused on the world and not the UI.
It also just wasn't that creative.. a very safe Zelda. Majora's Mask was much better though.
> It also just wasn't that creative.. a very safe Zelda.
It was the first 3d installment of the franchise. I think that it was unbelievably creative in how it approached the game design because it translated the ideas from 2D titles and took them 3D and found ways to make them new.
Majora's Mask got to be as creative as it was because it was just building on top of all the work that Ocarina of Time did to bring Zelda to 3D. In my case, I think it's a worse game, even if it is more "creative."
Interestingly, Breath of the Wild is the first modern game I can remember that brought back that sense of wonder I had as a kid.
I am very similar to you in that Ocarina of Time was a game that blew my mind and converted me from "kid who plays some video games" into "video gamer". I couldn't get enough of it. And while I also yearn for that older style of Zelda adventure, I find that because I always loved the puzzles, that experimenting in the shrines and around the world with BOTW brings me some level of enjoyment. However, I agree that I am not as "over the moon" with this style of game like some others are.
There was something fun about getting Nintendo Power and the guidebooks which sticks with me as well. Super nostalgic
Majora's mask is hugely underrated IMO. It's on par with OOT for me.
TOTK is just bigger and better than BOTW in every conceivable way. It's the perfect video game sequel.
Make sure to get also Super Mario Odyssey. This game is just such a joy. It feels like a trip to a funfair every time.
And sure, Mario Kart 8 for some multiplayer fun.
6 years in, and the Switch is still the most used console in my family with 3 kids.
Boomerang Fu. You are welcome.
It's a silly, simple, utterly un-put-downable game in our house.
I don't know what games you're playing but my experience pretty much across the board with the switch is "frustratingly long" loading times. Metroid dread is one of the more recent games I played and the loading screens are painful. Especially compared to a PS5. Check out something like Spiderman for how good it can be.
> And tbh, I didn’t see a lot of difference in terms of graphics.
Then you're not the target audience. Look at TOTK beside Ratchet and Clank on PS5. The difference is night and day.
I have uncapped gigabit internet. (Like many of us, I WFH, and want the most "internet" I can get.) I recall redownloading a game I wanted to play recently. It was 40GB. I thought I would go get a coffee while I waited. It was done before I rounded up and got my shoes on. I don't think the game and update sizes really matter to most of the target demographic of a current-gen console any more. But, hey, I could be extrapolating my experience in a terribly shortsighted way.
PS5 is incredibly faster. Sony is using Akamai CDN now (they didn't when I checked in the PS4 era) and I consistently max out the PS5s gigabit port (I have 10G symmetric at home).
But it's not exclusive to her. All of dialogues are silly. If you had Horizon with the script writers of God of War (2018) even with the boring game mechanics, it would probably be a masterpiece.
Death Stranding (Hideo Kojima's latest game) also uses Decima and is a nice showcase as well, runs like a dream on even the Steam Deck.
There is a VERY vocal minority of Linux gamers who have VERY rose coloured glasses on for anything Linux. I expect some of them to respond to this comment with some variation of "well I have never had any problems with Yuzu. It's the most amazing thing I've ever used in my whole life!!!"
The Switch' fit is a lot lighter by comparison, which is quite nice.
I expect the new Logitech handheld (or the many other, even more expensive competitors) to perform much better in this regard.
In a perfect world, emulators such as Skyline would be developed further. As the Switch is just a five year old mid tier Android tablet with a controller attached, I can only imagine the experience if you were to use the KVM capabilities of the upcoming Android 14 to run Switch software at near native performance on modern devices. Just buy one of those controller grips for phone and tablets and you're off!
iPhones/iPads would do even better, but I doubt Apple is going to let you use the necessary APIs to virtualize like that.
It's a shame Skyline has been killed off. With terrible games like that Pokémon game needing much more CPU power than the Switch can provide, I imagine even legitimate players would be interested in a way to play their switch games on modern hardware.
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I was so used to older consoles being bundled with games after a couple years after being released
When I first got a PS4 it was bundled with GTAV and Last of Us. Pretty incredible deal.
I thought similar but at the end of the day does it matter? Games work well on it. Sure they might be making bigger profit margins on it but it still does what it’s meant to at a good level.
It really makes me think Nintendo has an untapped market here to sell a little box you plug into your PC that plays switch games, interfaces with their controllers, etc. They've done oddball stuff like the SNES Gameboy player and GameCube GBA player add-ons in the past. It feels like there would be people willing to pay to properly play Switch games on their gaming PCs.
It seems unlikely they would be willing to let go of control like that. With all their oddball stuff, you were still largely within the Nintendo ecosystem. They also probably don't want to deal with the piracy problem on PC, considering they already deal with it on their relatively locked-down consoles.
For better or for worse, Nintendo also likes to really control the experience you get playing games on their platforms; It would probably not be a great look for them to have to deal with thousands of customers that are trying to run their games on hardware older than a Switch and complaining that it's a terrible experience. Yeah the existing hardware is underpowered, but its uniformly underpowered, and that's worth quite a bit too.
I think for Nintendo, the more prudent solution would be to release an updated Switch with some more powerful hardware that's fully backwards compatible with the existing Switch library. It would be very par for the course for them, and assuage most of the complaints about the Switch being underpowered.
This could result in fragmentation: some games could only run smoothly on the new version.
I pretty like the idea of using old hardware and to require game dev to adapt to this.
I don't own a switch but I'd much prefer to play a fully tested game the way the developers intended. My pc could run it no problem (rtx 3070 etc), but if I ever do play it, it will be on a switch.
Anyway your point is a bit differen, that Nintendo could make money on this etc.
I’ve heard TotK is still pretty glitchy under Switch emulation, but I expect it’ll be resolved in less than a year or two. Yuzu and Ryujinx have a healthy competition between the two of them.
I kind of think of it like high end CAD software and such that ships a physical dongle in order to use the software--Nintendo can sell hardware to help ensure it's legitimate use of their emulation software.
So you can enjoy the same titles on the go as you can on the TV, and you could still use the Switch on the TV, but there would be an alternative for people who want a more high fidelity, fluid experience on a TV or a monitor.
It doesn't even have to be that much more powerful. Even when sticking to the same vendor, a 2018 Nvidia ARM chip had roughly 3-4x the CPU power and 10x the GPU power of the Switch, in a 15-60W power budget. This would be fine for a console that's always plugged into the power mains.
Going to more midrange vendors like Rockchip or Mediatek, or - and this is a long shot - striking a deal with Samsung for using their Exynos chips would probably yield a lower cost device but still net a 4-5x increase in gaming performance.
Emulation has proven that the games are not tied so tightly to their hardware platform for switching to a more modern architecture while maintaining compatibility to be an issue. Even without first-party involvement people have been running Switch games on mobile Android devices with a good processor.
The fantasy world where they do a deal with Apple for M2 SOCs (or even just get bought wholesale by Apple.)
Can also play at ultrawide 21:9 if you have a monitor like that.
The game is nowhere near tears of the kingdom level and the experience is better. So I understand why people want a better switch
Games that are more locked down and walled than Apple products, that run 30fps on the oldest hardware possible in 2023, made by a company that actively alienates its own fanbase with aggressive copyright claims over the silliest things?
No thanks. Really, you can keep them out of the PC market.
And based on unit sales, that strategy seems to be doing pretty well.
It seems like Nintendo picked up on what makes video games so fun early on while a lot of studios struggle with it even today: The gameplay comes first and it has to be fun. Art/style comes next, then way down the list is graphics. Graphics are the only thing about a video game that get worse with time. If you focus on making fun games that have a distinct style, they will remain fun forever. Importantly to a corporation, they also remain sellable forever.
Nobody talks about crysis 1 anymore, but people definitely talk about wind waker.
To add, people also underestimate mobile gaming; westerners still look down on it compared to console and PC gaming, despite the financials telling a whole different story.
I chose Steam Deck instead of the Switch. Yes the SD is more expensive, but it already supports most of my existing Steam library and I can buy new games on sale.
https colon slashslash thepiratebay DOT org slash description.php?id=68303898 (slightly broken for inadvertent link click)
And https://github.com/Abd-007/Switch-Emulators-Guide/blob/main/... for a howto install Ryujinx/Yuzu Switch emulators.
But yeah, games arent my cup of tea, but I did try it. And it's BUTTER SMOOTH on real computer hardware. And yeah, we pierats had it before legit purchase. Again, pirates get the best experience and legit gets meh.
> It really makes me think Nintendo has an untapped market here to sell a little box you plug into your PC that plays switch games, interfaces with their controllers, etc. They've done oddball stuff like the SNES Gameboy player and GameCube GBA player add-ons in the past. It feels like there would be people willing to pay to properly play Switch games on their gaming PCs.
I guess they could do that, but that would cannibalize sales of their consoles. And then, what makes them any different than Steam?
The biggest benefit of a Switch is it's handheld and portable. The biggest pirate downside is that it nearly necessitates a desktop with significantly better equipment. I've heard some work being done with the Steam handheld.. but subpar at best.
For me personally, the biggest downside is that I don’t feel good about myself when I take things I know I don’t have the right to take. YMMV.
I tried one of the popular Switch emulators, and they work great. But, I'd rather just pay Nintendo, and not have to fiddle with it. Really does seem like an opportunity for them.
In the past few years, they have broken their longstanding rule and made PC ports of many of their previously exclusive Playstation titles to play on PC. This includes Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, and The Last of Us.
In the most recent earnings call, Sony said that these titles sales on PC have dramatically outperformed expectations and that they will be putting additional effort towards PC ports in the future as a way to supplement Playstation sales.
Microsoft has figured out the same thing, by not really making Xbox exclusives anymore. Granted, they were always much more closely tied between PC and Xbox than companies like Sony were, but they quickly embraced this "play everywhere" mentality many years ago, and released a Ultimate Gamepass which basically lets you play the same games (with some exceptions) on PC or Xbox and even switch between the two with cloud saves.
Point being, other publishers have discovered that locking yourself down to a single hardware device is not good. PCs are the most universally owned and flexible hardware devices out there and have the biggest market. I'd love for Nintendo to do the same thing. But knowing Nintendo, they will never do such a thing. They are a very stubborn company. They often do not act in their own self-interest (market share, revenue) in order to control things like hardware or create false scarcity.
They’d never do this in a million years.
Are you sure? The company the brought us…
- Color TV-Game
- Game Boy
- Nintendo 64
- GameCube
- Nintendo DS
- Wii
- many, many others [0]
… is resistant to change? They have always been at the forefront of hardware innovation/experimentation, I'm sure they wouldn't be against it.
I'd suggest listening to the 2-part Acquired podcast episodes about Nintendo [1] if you haven't already.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_video_game_consoles
[1]: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nintendo https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nintendo-the-console-wars
I understand the concept of games needing to be "hard" in some parts, and that making your grind to get stronger to win is a thing... but sometimes I just want to mess around and play through the story, and games like zelda ones (and GTA series and many others) are one of those.
Sadly, cheats have turned into microtransactions (be it crystals, gems or amiibos).
You're right about it being the only acceptable AAA release this year though.
Maybe Nintendo will buckle under the $$$ figure they could earn by making their games available on other platforms.
On the other hand, Nintendo could make a killing releasing a "Switch 2" with beefier hardware and backwards compatibility.
Neophyte question here, but what's the 3d engine used for this game? can you just change a parameter to make the game more realistic if the hardware supports it?
Changing graphics settings would be accomplished using patches, more or less the same idea as making cheats in older games. Find the value somewhere in their code that corresponds to render distance and change that, as an example.
Emulators for older systems can do more impressive things. Graphics pipelines tend to be a certain shape and use certain data types, so once you're already emulating at the GPU level you can do things like upscale old textures (works great on cell-shaded games like megaman legends). For 2d games you can use a dedicated pixel art scaling algorithm.
Pretty much all 3D games can output at a higher resolution than the original hardware allowed, just due to how the hardware is set up. You're game isn't responsible for deciding the output resolution, the GPU is, essentially. Changes aspect ratios is much harder and often requires patching the games themselves to make it work properly.
Other common patches are things like higher FPS. By default the new zelda game plays at 20fps, but there are patches to play them at 30 and 60 fps for a smoother experience. Those are once again actually reverse engineering and patching the game files though.
I have legally purchased all my switch games but I make backups and play on PC sometimes just because it is a better experience.
Nintendo's biggest concern is probably controlling the experience. While it might not be a marvel of gaming technology on the Switch, it is consistent. Allowing it to run on any old computer hardware means a lot of it will be poorly optimized as a rule. non-technical people will likely have no idea what that means; to them it will just be a shitty gaming experience and they will then associate that experience with Nintendo. Technical people will probably not even bother and they'll just emulate it for free instead of paying $70 for a game that isn't going to have any official support on their platform. There's really no upside for Nintendo in this plan.
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To wit, the consensus opinion on reddit is that BOTW is still a buggy mess on the main switch emulators, Yuzu & Ryujinx, and that people should play the Wii U version via the CEMU emulator instead. If BotW isn't a polished experience many years after release, I'm pessimistic about TotK being a good experience so soon after release. You can skim the bug reports on the emulator sites; there's lots of stuttering and invisible walls and all other kinds of jank.
I think I'll stick to playing it on my switch :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fscwp3RkEvM
It might be true, but at the same time it feels disingenuous to compare unreleased games on switch to a pirated PC. “Much more enjoyable” can’t be a thing until you compare, right?
Obviously it will never compete with emulation on a PC, but it runs just fine on Switch. 99.9% of players are not going to think "wow, this would be much more enjoyable on a PC!" The gaming podcast crowd is not exactly representative.
That’s an impressive achievement for a team that had to beat the high bar they set with Breath of the Wild. Kudos to them!
That's kinda crazy.
https://www.ign.com/articles/the-legend-of-zelda-tears-of-th...
Game aside, the reviews have been pointing out how the game performs well (after day 1 patch) and is not pestered with bugs, which is an impressive feat for such an open world game where most things are able to interact with everything else.
Notable in that regard: Apple did the same under Steve Jobs. Focus on the important part, and don't play around.
Execution. Not originality.
I disagree. Nintendo has good engineers but so does many of the other studios. For me what sets Nintendo apart is not their code or technology, but their game design and game direction. The way they seem to craft their game-play and game mechanics to have everything it needs but nothing more, and then couple it with the perfect match for game aesthetics with unmatched consistency.
This is such an orientalist and borderline racist view it’s crazy. If it were true then it would also imply the other japanese game devs also affected by it. There countless bad games from Japan, don’t even have to walk far from Nintendo just look at the Pokémon games and how GameFreak release them with 0 optimization. And then the countless misses from Square Enix, Bandai Namco etc.
Nintendo made blogs take down the pictures of the slides afterwards, but here is a good summary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZzcVs8tNfE
https://www.youtube.com/@sora_sakurai_en
One big thing they pointed out is the type of gaming they target. While the Playstation and Xbox general aim for very serious, high "skill" players, Nintendo often launches just above the seriousness and skill level of mobile gamers. It's easy for me to sit down with my extended family and play Mario Party or Mario Kart, but they'd hate me if I had them play Elden Ring. They also are strongly against much of the free to play content.
I left that episode questioning how much of Nintendo's recent success is due to them outcompeting versus the competition making a series of unforced errors.
Game maker's toolkit has one on how they solved their open world problem for BotW:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZzcVs8tNfE
And at GDC, they talked about their Chemistry engine for BotW:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyMsF31NdNc&t=2354s
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk5swSyJ5zQ
Game historian has some tidbits of how they made certain design decisions for their successful games
Mario Kart:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDHZKYETDyU
Super Mario World:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2bTQK6vbKI
Super Mario Bro 3:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxT6IwUtLSU
GMT, Snowman, and Extra credit does analysis of how Nintendo designs their Mario levels.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBmIkEvEBtA
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_KVEjhT4wQ
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwj3On5o58U
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fI9pfDf60g
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH2wGpEZVgE
Generally, it follows the ramp up and down of the Hero's journey in storytelling.
1. Introduce a new mechanic in a safe area where it's impossible to die.
2. Increase the challenge with the mechanic by adding variations
3. Ramp up challenge even more by combining with previously learned mechanic
4. Have periods of rest inbetween the challenges.
Being exceptional is, by definition, exceptional.
To implement both at the same time is quite something if you ask me.
Basically by doing development like we used to do in the 8 and 16 bit home computer days.
How does Nintendo pull it off?
(And Nintendo engineers can have perfect knowledge of "the constraints of the platform", because 1. they built the platform; 2. it's the only platform they ever code for, never porting to anything else; and 3. for late-in-generation titles, they have been developing for it for years already, while also doing platform-SDK support for every third-party development studio.)
Oh, and besides that, because they design each platform initially specifically to work well for the types of games they want to make. (This goes all the way back to the Famicom, which has hardware PPU registers that were specifically implemented clearly to make the launch-title port of Donkey Kong extremely easy to code.)
Another interesting perspective is that it—a game made at the end of the Switch's life (we hope)—is only marginally prettier and more polished than BOTW—a launch title. I would still hold BOTW as one of the prettiest Switch titles, including third parties (I realise this is subjective). I'm not sure of another console where you don't make graphical progress in 6 years of it existing. I don't know why this is, or even if it's a failing, I just think it's interesting.
+1; I don't usually care much about graphics (I play ASCII roguelikes for crying out loud), but there have been several moments in BotW where I found myself soaking in the scenery because it was gorgeous.
A great example is the size of Super Mario Odyssey being 5.7GB and a save file from NBA2k18 being 5GB. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/09/super_mario_odysse...
I can count the triangles on a lot of geometry visibly, and the textures are so blurred it looks like you take any modern PC game and only render the lowest available level of detail of all the textures. I can count the pixels in the shadows on the floor and lighting wise the game is extremely basic (it doesn't need to be more because of the art style). most effects you see in the game are literally blurry billboarded (but granted alpha blended) sprites, including the clouds that are so important in this games visuals.
and to top it off we're in 2023 with half the people or more on 4k screens and the game doesn't even manage native 900p most of the time.
the art design of the game is just designed well around those constraints. very well. but the devs likely did nothing super special to make it run well.
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While not a deal breaker, BOTW with zero waiting 5-10s for fast travel or shrines or loading saves would have been a MUCH smoother experience.
At some point I have to wonder if the reason we have so much computing power is so we can use that computing power.
They use low poly models, as far as I know there is no baked lightmap (these are pretty expensives but are mandatory in a lot of engine if you want realistic shadows on higtly detailled environment) and their shader materials probably use very simple and low resolution maps.
All these thing decrease the asset footprint by orders of magnitude.
If you want to look in more detail in can look and compare a similar rendering in unity. Taking two unity exemple you can compare :
- 'chop chop' a game using a similar rendering style : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGTTHOpUQDE, if you take the pig and its environment showed in the video and go in the github repository you can see they only use one texture map : an albedo one. All the models (pig + environment) weight about 6mB of textures and 350kB of models. and are sufficient to have the full main character and an environment.
- a 'realistic PBR workflow gun asset' on asset store (choose randomly but seems nice, realistic and containing only the gun so we can see download size) : https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/guns/free-fps.... The workflow need 6 maps (there are 7 here but you generaly only use either a normal map or a heightmap) The pack weight 35MB. It's only the gun, you lack a full character handling it and the environment.
While I really like zelda, even with stylized graphics the game look a bit outdated for me. The cellshaded characters are fluid and pretty but the 'low resolution texture and low poly models' bother me a bit especially on environments. The artistic direction is really good but technically I can only think they are held back by the hardware.
As a game developer, I totally want to use all the resources i know i can find on the target hardware. Trust me even today they are lots of features game designer dream to put in game and cant because computing resources are still limited ^^. Do game NEEDS them to be fun ? Of course not, but COULD they be fun experiences ? I think yes :)
The new Zelda demonstrates something that’s been true of every console generation. They are a fixed platform and the later games are always considerably better at utilising the hardware.
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The sheer perfection of the Zelda games are just mindblowing to me. I replayed The Legend of Zelda many years ago and it was obvious that the gameplay was still holding up. They got it right from the absolute beginning. And not only that, it is basically the same gameplay still used (at least up to Twilight Princess which is the last major Zelda game I played. They are so consistent.
Based on the trailers I've seen of tears of the kingdom(and I've been trying to avoid that because spoilers) this game walks even further down the path that breath of the wild set out!
We're kind of alike you and I,I think. While I don't have kids that keep me from gaming, I could do without it all, except for Zelda. My switch is currently downloading totk.