Is it really that impressive that focusing on game design results in a better game than spending a billion dollars on a thousand artists so that every tree can have ten times as many polygons and each texture is 16kX16k? Better graphics rarely actually IMPROVE a game, and can do nothing to fix a game that was designed poorly.
AAA studios whine and cry about how expensive games are to make (completely glossing over the fact that they are 100x as profitable as they were in the 90s because videogames are no longer niche) but nobody asked them to! Linus Tech Tips water cooling a 4090 isn't the normal consumer! Most consumers want to have fun when they pay $70 for a game, not play the exact game they bought a decade ago with more detailed scenes, and more detail doesn't make a game better
I agree with your general point but I don't think Tears of the Kingdom is a good example of it.
They have clearly poured a mountain of design and engineering effort into squeezing every last drop of graphic fidelity and art out of the Switch. It looks really really good. Some of that is having the wisdom to choose an art style that works well on the Switch—a little cel-shaded, not a ton of texture detail. But, also, they really are getting as much detail and graphic complexity as they possibly can out of that little machine.
This isn't some cheap 2D pixel art game that spent their whole budget on game mechanics. It's a AAA game that maxed out their budget along every single axis. They just happened to target hardware with lower specs.
Sure graphics gives diminishing returns, but I've played ToTK @ 60fps on an emulator. It's significantly better than a Switch @ 30fps, and personally I think the Switch's hardware is ToTK's biggest flaw
Often times better graphics make a game worse because they're at the expense of everything else, while also making the community smaller because most people can't run it.
Yes, I'm still slightly salty about the train wreck that KSP 2 turned out to be.
Graphics don't impact gameplay, but this game really does look flat-out bad on a full-sized TV or monitor. Using FSR1 upscaling the realtime shadows (required for dynamic time of day) all "crawl", like a constant flicker in any motion, and it's really distracting. Level of detail "clicks" in when you're 20 feet away from objects, also extremely noticeable. And beyond the visual issues, it also suffers from a poor framerate in many areas. It can't even hit 30fps all the time.
It's true that gameplay trumps all, and it definitely didn't push me off the (excellent) game, but the Switch hardware really _substantially_ impacts the experience.
I'm not sure what your point is other than complaining.
It is impressive to make a great game with broad appeal. It isn't easy or trivial to do and companies that get it right should be recognized with good reputation and customers. I haven't heard other Studios whine and cry, but if they do it's not my problem so I don't care or mind if they do.
Nobody is forced to buy bad games, so I don't really understand the complaint there.
Recently I found good stuff actually sell the most in game industry, you have stuff like Elden Ring and Legend of Zelda, in indie space you have stuff like Pizza Tower, all selling huge. I wonder if big studios that makes safe copy 3As will actually think about innovation as an element to maximize profit.
Also realistic graphic != good graphics, we need more stylized graphics like these recent 2 Zelda titles! It's a shame we already lost the great graphics of the 3ds era Pokemon (which I think is peak cell shading aesthetics) to a generic 3d look of recent titles.
The other day I was playing Super Mario World, I didn't play since the nineties, and wow, they where capable to do so much with so little, from the graphics to the sound, the game feels so good, I was in love
Imagine AAA studios investing all their energy on creative ideas, gameplay innovation and fun experiences for a second. What would that do to indie developers and small studios?
What initially "wow"s me about a game is how beautiful it is. What keeps me coming back to it time and time again, is how well put together it is as a whole.
> not play the exact game they bought a decade ago with more detailed scenes, and more detail doesn't make a game better
Except in the case of this Zelda sequel you sort of are playing the exact same game you bought 5 years ago, and with little/no improvement to detail, for an even higher price (69.99)... While I've bought it and am enjoying it, its hardly some huge shift in any way (technical, gameplay or story) from BOTW, and virtually all the mechanics are identical. I still think it worthy of great reviews to be clear, but it is not some genre shaking release.
Most games coming on current gen hardware are utterly forgettable.
Zelda games, especially cell animation ones tend to age so well. Like WindWaker on the Game Cube. Such an amazing and fun game even on almost 20 year old hardware.
For all the amazing hardware on PS5 and Xbox Series ... most games releases are barely even an event that register in the cultural zeitgeist.
A few exceptions exist of course. But for the most part, yes the graphics are pretty but the game is not that fun.
And also, another thing Zelda has going for it and this cannot be said enough: it is a full freaking game. Not a broken game that needs to be patched up later (though there are always patches but the game isn't unplayable).
Nor is it pay to win. You unlock stuff by just playing and progressing. The Amiibo content is optional.
You get a full game with tons of stuff, ready to go. With a solid single player campaign and no online bullshit needed to experience it to its fullest. I cannot stress how much this needs to be said. But lately, broken or partial game experiences at triple A prices is a thing that people tolerate.
> Most games coming on current gen hardware are utterly forgettable.
I don't make any strong claim that the proportion hasn't shifted, but that has absolutely been the case at every point in my awareness of games. Flip through an old Nintendo Power or Game Pro.
Meanwhile, some very interesting games are coming out these days - some of my favorites are from the past 5 years; time will tell how well they hold up, but I am optimistic.
nintendo's playbook: bet on withered technologies.
which means their focus is only on gameplay mechanics, story and art direction. not focusing on bugs that are well not known cz of using something too new, expensive etc.
not fancy graphics, or other modern fancy things - that don't really add anything to the game.
wish the software industry would learn to bet on old technologies and develop novel experiences on those.
not the current - move to the latest framework, hardware etc. while presenting shit.
You are wrong there. Nintendo instead been always pushing the tech.
The NES, SNES, N64 and GameCube were part of the "bits race" and kept pushing forward in hardware power. Mario 64 is credited along with Wing Commander for creating the AAA graphics race at all costs behavior in the industry.
The Wii wasn't entirely a direction change, Nintendo felt competing on CPU power now was not interesting and went for motion controls, that later all other consoles imitated.
Then we had the Wii U that tried to mix TV with handheld. Wii U kinda sucked so they just tried it again with the Switch and made it portable. This again is spawning clones (steam deck for example).
I am not a Nintendo fan (I was on Sega camp during console wars and currently I prefer the Playstation) but Nintendo hardware always is impressive.
PS4 and 5 for example are boring, just mostly normal x86 computers with custom OS.
Always blows my mind when I see the install size for Nintendo games. Super Mario Odyssey was under 6GB. That’s smaller than the patch size of most games.
Weird take because of how much they have experimented with entire consoles in the past. I don't know how the Wii could be called betting on withered technologies.
Their [Nintendo] art-books are so cool - while a game-art-book isn’t necessarily unique to Nintendo I do appreciate the value in them being so well done and expansive. Don’t have the time to play Zelda sadly but the books have been a really neat thing to page through.
As a kid, going to Barnes and Noble and grabbing the Emerald/Sapphire/Leaf Green official strategy book was, and still is, one of the coolest “books” I have.
The withered technologies idea was Gunpei Yokoi’s vision for development, explained in these terms after he had left Nintendo. Yokoi has been dead 25 years at this point, and more recent strategies, like the Blue Sea idea, have a far more influential impact on Nintendo’s design ethos.
Actually I would say this is yet more proof of how awesome breath of the wild was, and the incredible strength of a good franchise. 10 million people instabought it just in the hope it will live up to its predecessor.
That's what I did. I'm apparently in the minority. though, because I HATE it. But since I bought it digitally, I can't return it so I'm counting towards those 10M sales. I guess I'll just go back to my Game & Watch Zelda and keep playing Adventures of Link.
I also bought the Dragon Quest Builders game and hated that. It turns out I like classic RPG and action puzzler games but I don't like crafting and sandbox games. Now I know.
> gameplay and art direction matter more than anything.
I would argue gameplay. Look at how insanely successful Minecraft is. It needs to be accessible to anyone who plays the game, nobody cares that you can emulate a fighter jet perfectly, you'll get your niche crowd, but if you want everyone, it needs to be adoptable by everyone.
Quick Edit: Remember Flappy Bird? It was simple graphics, a rip off of old old browser game from the 2000s (idr name) but everyone was hooked overnight.
Also to some extent 2048 though I felt that was niche to geeks.
Minecraft’s art direction is very cool and was, at the time, pretty unique. Arguably it was one of the most striking things about the game at the time, and definitely what got me interested back when it came out.
Art direction doesn’t have to mean a complex art style. It’s more about consistency — making your assets all feel like they’re part of the same universe.
I do think this 8-year-old GPU really pretty out-of-date. Even if Nintendo did a lot of optimize for TOTK, it really has a low reslution and low fps(sometimes 540p and 20fps).
Of couse the gameplay and art direction is the best part of a game(compared to Sony games, they has a great performance, but it's totally not fun).
However, I saw some screen records in simulator, I think that is the best which game maker want people to play: 1080P and 60FPS.
Whatever, Nintendo Games is good. But we really need a better console.
There's a Game Maker's Toolkit video [1] that does a good job explaining how Nintendo focuses on play first.
"That's how we make games at Nintendo, though: we get the fundamentals solid first, then do as much with that core concept as our time and ambition will allow" - Shigeru Miyamoto
They also take into consideration the limitations of the hardware from the very beginning, and not just the engineers, but the designers as well.
"...Although I am not an engineer, I have always included in my designs consideration for the technology that will make those designs a reality. People have paid me a lot of lip service, calling me a genius story teller or a talented animator, and have gone so far as to suggest that I try my hand at movies, since my style of game design is, in their words, quite similar to making movies. But I feel that I am not a movie maker, but rather that my strength lies in my pioneering spirit to make use of technology to create the best, interactive commodities possible, and use that interactivity to give users a game they can enjoy and play comfortably. "
It’s true. But the actual hardware doesn’t offer anything particularly unique (which is a win for me: Nintendo is settling down with the gimmicks.)
This game would be an objectively better experience if it ran on a PS4/5 or Xbox if you don’t care for the handheld mode.
The game is an absolute masterpiece despite hardware, not because of it.
I think Nintendo should be lauded for experimenting with hardware, but ultimately they’re a games company and I almost wish they’d get out of the hardware business. I gave my kid my 3DS last week and showed him how the 3D worked. It took him no more than 30 seconds to ask me to turn the 3D off.
Well the Switch has a big gimmick: it is a desktop & mobile console at the same time. It's in the name.
This is why they had to compromise on GPU power and basically skip 2 generations compared to the PS5.
It actually could be benefited from improved performance, for instance the introduction of the sky and the depth was only possible because of performance improvements from Switch (note that BotW's target platform was Wii U, so Nintendo intentionally limited the game's scope to the overworld).
I think a sparsity of sky islands could be partially attributed to performance issues. Those need to be visible from almost everywhere, so cannot be really culled out from the drawing pipeline. Even with aggressive LoD, this will take a considerable performance budget if you put hundreds of islands given a high level of drawing distance requirement in TotK.
I also noticed that TotK has lots of unusually aggressive performance optimization which seems to be done at the very last moment, and even with that a considerable level of frame drops on specific areas. I suspect this to be likely due to the reported delay of the Switch successor. They would still launch it on Switch with possibly worse visual fidelity but that would be fine if they got the successor at the launch time.
So yeah "how to use it" is what really matters, but having more performance budget can allow more freedom for developers. It's a really nice time to have the successor platform for Switch, possibly with backward compatibility.
It's also more than capable of running on other platforms via emulation, and there are visual tweak mods (increased draw distance, LOD tweaks, etc) that don't change the art style but make it far more beautiful than being limited to the underperformant Switch hardware.
Also polish. So many AAA titles have come out with so many bugs and performance issues they’re arguably just unfinished.
Nintendo’s games _work_, and, even though many would say they can overlook glitches, I believe that maintaining a “seamless” experience - not breaking the flow - is an much, much, more important part in maintaining the subconscious ‘this game is great!’ feeling than people give it credit for.
“It just works” is just as important a part of gaming as it is of other things.
> Nintendo proved again that gameplay and art direction matter more than anything
Absolutely. I'm sure the PS5 has great graphics but some of the game creators don't pay attention to this enough, it's basically like throwing heavy computation at an average directed game and to me that's not appealing at all.
"Look at how realistic the water looks" is not enough for me to play a game.
Nintendo knows graphical superior games is mainly to draw in gamers to look, but Nintendo franchises will draw regardless. The graphics just need to be good, also cartoonish graphics will look the same if you are on a PS5 or 6
I also upgraded to new Zelda-edition OLED Switch and case and snatched two Zelda-edition controllers from local Walmart. They will have huge bump in hardware sales as well.
Nah, it's Stockholm Syndrome. It's seems to basically be the same game as the previous one with a few small extras such as the building/gadget system.
If you really want to be all "gameplay matters most of all, therefore we don't need to improve on anything else" then tetris is still being bought even to this day. Doesn't mean we should stop pushing the limits in new games.
> Nintendo proved again that gameplay and art direction matter more than anything
More like- Nintendo proved that in spite of barely listening to the fan base over literal decades, a solid brand will still get sales with just bleh content.
They barely caught onto the open world concept and sandbox - and it took years and years.
Like I get that they aren't anywhere close to as detailed or sophisticated as the graphics available in other games, but they appear to facilitate gameplay quite well.
Like "poor" has a connotation of "bad", where in this game they just weren't a focus and clearly are good enough to not be distracting, at least in the videos I've seen.
You know that just because it's the same franchise doesn't mean it's not innovative.
BotW was completely different than the zelda before. The only similiar enough zeldas mainline were Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, and these Switch Zeldas. And still both MM and TotK changed enough things from the previous game they they feel very completely different.
Same applies for mario main games for example. Check 64 -> Sunrise -> Galaxy -> 3D world -> Odyssey. They are all very different games.
Formulae changes, that something that most companies don't risk with their big IPs. And still, nintendo does occasionally comes up with new IPs like splatoon or arms.
Let me preface this by stating I have owned every piece of Nintendo hardware other than Virtual Boy, up to and including the Switch. I have played through BotW and other modern iterations of the usual IP. Also, yeah, this is really long and goes into a bunch of other stuff completely unrelated to TOTW. Sorry xD
Nintendo has a significant chunk of fans on that cultist level where they go ballistic and come for your throat when you point out they’ve been making the same games literally for 40 years. They have like half a dozen totally distinct IPs. LOL at the people bringing up side projects like BoxBoy, which could have shipped on all those old Nokias along with Snake. Mario + Rabbids is a MARIO game crossover and sells on name recognition. Literally nobody in 2023 would know what “Rabbids” even is let alone pay for a game centered on them without the “Mario” part.
The only thing that changes is technology, but they’re always behind too. Zelda is still using N64 single button combat and just sold 10 million copies of a copy/paste of BOTK with 20 year old Banjo and Kazooie Nuts & Bolts creation physics, and the vast majority of critics have to bow and praise. There are some real reviews with actual people out there unafraid to give BOTW/TOTK the 5-6 it deserves, but they’re too few and far between.
None of this is even getting into the gross superiority complex and behavior they show in their treatment of any third party studio even willing to port anything over to their systems, how they hold them hostage if they had ANY kind of involvement on any level financially (RIP Bayonetta 2 and 3), how they treat their own customers with crazy aggressive lawsuits and threats, etc. Just go look up their entire history - even that gold Nintendo label they put on boxes was for monetary and control reasons. Yes, companies do things to protect themselves and profits and blah blah blah, but nobody else does this stuff to the level and in the anti-consumer manner they do. The control and manipulation of Nintendo is even beyond Apple and Marvel/Disney levels, on par with Tesla. It’s literal insanity.
I know this is already way too long, but just a couple other interesting things you’d learn by reading up on their history - neither Sega (who positioned themselves and became a household name as the anti-Nintendo) nor PlayStation (Sony and Nintendo originally were working together on a CD-based system but their draconian behavior led to the partnership being called off by Sony and them going into gaming alone) would have existed in the way they have the past 3 decades if it weren’t for Nintendo being a POS company. Another interesting story involves Square Enix (then SquareSoft) at the end of the SNES generation, basically declaring they’re never making a game for Nintendo again (which didn’t hold up obviously but they still don’t release mainline Final Fantasy on them) and jumped to PlayStation for FF7. There is a two page advertisement for FF7 from back in the day that straight up makes fun of Nintendo by claiming the game is too advanced for them and would have taken up like 20 cartridges lol.
So, for their behavior resulting in these things and others, I do sincerely thank them (and anyone else who somehow got to the end of this)! :D
I think it proves that nostalgia and brands matter more than anything. I find it very hard to find much novelty in the art direction, the world seems empty, not unrelated to the technical limitations, and the gameplay seems just okay.
Just like the Mario movie I think it's less of an artistic feat and just shows the sheer power of Nintendo's franchises and very, very, enthusiastic fandom.
> I think it proves that nostalgia and brands matter more than anything.
No. That is a western view point of someone that did not play the core nintendo games. It feels like projecting what is happening on every streaming service out there, or on every AAA western studio.
People are not praising new Zeldas because they are new games with the Zelda title, BotW was a complete revolution, it did open world like no other game did before it. It combined really well a huge a amount of features and fun things that no other game was able to do so before. Games like these are very rare.
Saying that is nostaligia when these 2 zelda play like no other Zelda. Saying that's it's because of brand when i've seen so many friends and colleagues that never gave a shit about nintendo buying a switch or emulating it and praising the hell out of this game.
It’s both, but your theory doesn’t explain why breath of the wild was so good. I hadn’t played a Zelda game for 15 years before that, and it had no real relevance to those games, yet it was the best game I’ve ever played in terms of the world and story and gameplay (with the possible exception of the first deus ex).
Nintendo know what HBO does too, which is how to make exceptional content. That override absolutely every other value.
(I also suspect that part of the success is the mythical aspects of the Zelda games, and the reaching into the historical and religious past and traditions. Western companies seem to actively want to avoid this, but it’s extremely good for building content. Archetypes are archetypes for a reason, it’s evolutionary)
I'm often discouraged by comments on Hacker News that downplay the importance of great design in a design-heavy medium.
This game isn't succeeding primarily because of great marketing, franchise, or blind loyalty to Nintendo (though all of those help!).
It's succeeding primarily because it's the follow-up to a game that critics and players universally found enormously fun. Before Breath of the Wild previous Zelda entries did not sell this well.
I disagree; Zelda games have always been a major draw for Nintendo audiences. Link to the Past was the best-selling game of 1991; Link's Awakening - released in 1993 on the Gameboy - was a defining game for Nintendo at the time and was directly responsible for a massive uptake in Gameboy sales (and was the best-selling game of the year.) OoT was an absolutely industry-defining success; it was the best-selling game of 1998, and it's the highest-rated video game of all time on Metacritic. Zelda games have always moved consoles and sold well; in terms of Nintendo's unit-movers, it's second only to Mario.
Of course the raw numbers look more impressive for BotW - there are 122m Switch units worldwide (and 30m BotW sales), but the N64 only shipped 33m units worldwide over its 8-year lifespan, and OoT still sold 7.6m copies (with another 6.4m on the 3DS).
My point is that it's the strength of the design, not the loyalty to the franchise or other factors, that is the primary driver of sales.
The titles you cite (Link's Awakening, Ocarina of Time) also made sales records because they were so good they reached a wider audience. But if you look at historical sales a mainline Zelda entry usually sells 6m to 10m.
Breath of the Wild sold 30 million and Tears of the Kingdom looks to be on a similar trajectory. That's due to the strength of the game design that's broadened the appeal well beyond the typical Zelda gamer.
I think the point the person you replied to was making was that BotW and TotK aren't just selling due to Zelda nostalgia.
There are lots adults with college degrees now that are playing this game who weren't even in kindergarten yet (or born!) when the games you mentioned were released.
BOTW has the same attachment rate as Windwaker and Ocarina of Time, which nullifies the argument that Zelda has sold poorly until BOTW. Attachment rates are important, better than pure sales, because it tells you how many potential buyers bought the game.
BOTW and TOTK are still huge successes, but it's not really about great design (unfortunately). If it was, every one of Nintendo's games would be record smashing sellers, but they aren't. They have plenty of games that don't make a dent despite their insane attention to detail. We saw this with Mario Maker 1 & 2, not even cracking 10m copies to this day, and one can't even blame lack of name recognition, it's literally Mario!
Where great design does have impact is on long term word of mouth sales. Which we saw with BOTW and are likely to see here again.
I did not say that the Zelda franchise has sold poorly, just less well than BOTW / TOTK.
I don't think attach rates offer the full picture. Early on the audience for BOTW was so eager for the game they were buying the Switch just for BOTW. For a period the attach-rate was greater than 100%! But the Switch has broad appeal and the attach-rate of BOTW has declined as more types of gamers buy-in to the Switch. The Gamecube and (to a lesser extent) the Nintendo64 had less success than the Switch outside of core Nintendo fans which naturally means franchises like Zelda would have higher attach rates.
Mario Mario 1 & 2 are both well-designed executions of a concept that appeals to a more limited audience (building and playing user-made Mario levels). BOTW / TOTK hit that sweet spot of widely appealing concept and excellent execution.
> Before Breath of the Wild previous Zelda entries did not sell this well.
Breath of the Wild was certainly the best-seller, but nearly every Zelda game has been a knock-out success selling millions of copies. I think Breath of the Wild is an outlier among them in part because it was out during the pandemic. I know a whole lot of people who bought a Switch during the lockdown and poured hours into escapism with that game.
Tears of the Kingdom is selling crazy numbers even without the lockdown boost. Other factors make a difference but the core of what drives the sale of these two titles is that they're great games people strongly want to play.
That's not a counterpoint. More serious gamers have always loved Zelda and the series has always sold well amongst that audience.
But this game (and Breath of the Wild) is selling above and beyond previous entries because it's such a great game that its appeal reaches well beyond Zelda's traditional audience.
The big story with this new Zelda game, and why it is able to include so many deep and interlocking systems on top of a staggering amount of content, comes down to institutional knowledge at Nintendo. Many of the people working on or giving input on this game have been making Zelda games for decades. Eiji Aonuma, the current producer of the Zelda series, directed every mainline Zelda from Ocarina to Twilight Princess. Hidemaro Fujibayashi was at Capcom when he directed Oracle of Ages/Seasons, Four Swords, and the Minish Cap in the late 90s and early 2000s. Skyward Sword was the first Zelda he directed and he went on to direct Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. While Western games studios crush their developers with crunchtime and pursue flashy graphics over deep systems, Nintendo nurtures and retains its internal talent and as a result they do far more with technically inferior hardware. Contrast Tears of the Kingdom's smooth launch with the ongoing debacle of Overwatch 2 from Blizzard, whose devs just announced they won't be delivering one of the core promised features of the sequel. Obviously not every Western studio is as bad as Activision/Blizzard, but Nintendo running circles around everyone on 7 year old mobile phone hardware should prompt some serious soul searching for Western games execs.
Why is every one saying seven years ago? I remember the Switch coming out around March 2017. We're in May 2023. That's six years (and change) ago, not seven.
I don't play modern games and am hardly a connoisseur but I seem to recall this being a mostly-solved problem via "level of detail" and hardware fog effects... has pop-in been an issue in the last decade? Saturn/PS1 games having it was par for the course but modern hardware is so powerful that it seems unnecessary.
For those not in the nintendo ecosystem, 'Immortals Fenyx rising' is a Zelda esque game to try. It's on game pass and is the best game ubisoft has made in some time.
This is the reason I don't find the game compelling. I don't want to sound like a hipster, so I'd like to recognize the incredible art direction and world design and that this is the first time console players are getting something like this.
But honestly all of the physics builds I've seen for TotK were being done in garrys mod circa ~2008 in multiplayer. My friends and I were racing rocket cars where the only steering was more side mounted thrusters. Great fun but feels like really old news.
“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” — Edsger W. Dijkstra
Game is about how fun the game is. Totk is easily the best game I've played this year. Definitely an upgrade from Botw. Costco is like $59, cheaper than preorder with $5 credits from GameStop which was $69 I think.
I love how every top level comment is all about how this is because Nintendo made an amazing game. Yet... with how fast this is selling, there is literally no way that folks know it is an amazing game ahead of time.
More, odds are high that if they had made this as not a sequel, it would not be selling as well. Go bolder and make it a new franchise? Same game would basically not be noticed.
I think it is fair to like the game. I go ever farther and think it is a fun game. But the lessons to learn from how fast and well this is selling is as much about the power of franchise as it is anything about this particular game/system.
> Yet... with how fast this is selling, there is literally no way that folks know it is an amazing game ahead of time.
Advanced copies to reviewers, gameplay footage, developer commentary, etc...
> But the lessons to learn from how fast and well this is selling is as much about the power of franchise as it is anything about this particular game/system.
There are plenty of popular franchises that release games that don't sell well.
Certainly some folks are reading the reviews. I guarantee most are not. Heck, I'm interested and I haven't read any. (And, yes, I prepurchased the game.)
There are, certainly, franchises that tank. Usually not after a successful release, though. That said, this one is odd, as the prequel didn't seem to generate near as much buzz?
This. They made BotW to sell the Switch, and this sequel doesn't add any novel elements to it. This game deserves the success if BotW didn't exist, but as a sequel the hype is pure marketing.
If game of the year awards were reserved for new, non-sequel games, maybe franchises would be discouraged from selling the same game multiple times.
There has basically never been a Zelda game that wasn’t amazing. Also this is a sequel to a game that people were buying before they even had a switch (because switches were hard to get for the first year or so.)
So yeah, everyone assumed it’d be an amazing game and it is.
Stating the obvious, yes being a sequels helps, and not leveraging a sequel and be bold just for the heck of it is pointless. Also a sequel that sucked and get 65% reviews won’t get you these numbers
That sounds like a criticism that would apply if this were just some generic game that had the Zelda IP slapped onto it. But that doesn’t seem at all the case here, right?
I don't really mean this as a criticism. Yes, I think it is a good game. No, I don't think there are any real lessons others can capitalize on from it.
> More, odds are high that if they had made this as not a sequel, it would not be selling as well.
Probably. I’m not sure by how much though, there really aren’t many original games getting made with similar budgets. The story/dialog/acting definitely would not cut it without decades of nostalgia and backstory.
While I have no doubt it’s a great game because it’s Nintendo, AAA headliners tend to be sort of immune to criticism. It only becomes possible to determine decades down the line if one of these “10/10” games was actually top-tier or just middling and highly polished.
Nintendo first party games are reliably good. Bad Nintendo franchise games are the exception. After 30 years, and six after a huge hit, trust/prepurchase isn't absurd.
The marketing was insane as usual. Nintendo performed excellent.
Multiple front page reddit posts, multiple 10/10 reviews from big name outlets. Nintendo rivals Apple as the best company in marketing.
Nintendo has done some sort of mass psychology that allows them to have sub 30fps with no complaints, I was born too early to see this reviewed in business schools, but we are starting to see a bit of the innerworkings of how Nintendo has created IP that is worshiped.
Nintendo didn't really need to do any marketing beyond "Hey we are releasing a new Zelda game, it will run on the Switch you bought years ago mostly in order to play the previous Zelda game".
I've been playing games for 30+ years, at no point have I cared deeply about the difference between 30fps and 60fps. I do not like 5fps-stuttering, which happens sometimes in poorly optimised AAA games no matter how good (within reason) the GPU.
The new Zelda runs well and looks good. I like it, though it's very much "BOTW Continued" which maybe we didn't need, I might have preferred a completely fresh world & characters instead of the same Hyrule a few years later.
I'm in Warsaw and I see countless of zelda ads: whole walls of huge buildings are covered with them. They probably spent insane amount of money if they advertise it like this everywhere
I care about the difference between 30fps and 60fps, but only in certain games. If I'm playing a PC first-person shooter, I'm gonna want 60fps (or preferably 144fps). For an RPG or strategy game, 30fps or less is good enough.
I agree on the stuttering though - the only thing worse than low framerate is slightly higher average framerate + big dips.
Not to mention, Good products sell themselves. Nintendo's marketing isn't that much different from anyone else. They just make products that people want to talk about.
It’s really tempting to see the success of something you don’t understand or value as “marketing” or “mass psychology” but I suspect that path doesn’t usually lead to any interesting or useful insight.
well put. it really is fascinating to see how common that is on HN, where I imagine most of the posters imagine themselves to be worldly and open-minded, see for example every iphone thread.
> Nintendo has done some sort of mass psychology that allows them to have sub 30fps with no complaints
I've put in about 15 hours and haven't noticed it. I've sorta been looking, too, because I read everyone complaining about it on here before I picked up the game. But I keep getting distracted by... playing the game.
> Nintendo has done some sort of mass psychology that allows them to have sub 30fps with no complaints, I was born too early to see this reviewed in business schools, but we are starting to see a bit of the innerworkings of how Nintendo has created IP that is worshiped.
I don't think I've ever known the fps of any of the games I've played.
I do remember having to zoom in on Doom II on some levels because my computer was very slow for that game, yet I still loved the game (of course, I did enjoy it better when I played at a friend's that had a better computer and a sound card, but that's another story).
I only care about the playing part of playing games. Like, when I played marbles (yeah, I've been around ...), while I did have a favorite marble or two, I only cared about playing.
I don't say this to discredit you, of course, just that I think by the time a game makes it so big as this one, it's because it's reaching ordinary people like me who couldn't care less about fps and just like the game if playing it lets them have a great time, so if there is any mass psychology involved, I suppose it's the mass psychology of coming up with a compelling game that people enjoy playing. Anyone who has that doesn't need to fool people into not noticing how low their fps rate is.
It has nothing to do with psychology. FPS is a meme, Nintendo makes good games and always had and they’ve basically never cared about having the best hardware.
That's not quite the right lesson. NES, SNES, N64, and Gamecube were all highly competitive, from a technical perspective. By having the best hardware, Nintendo learned that making good games on good-enough hardware is really what they're interested in.
"Mass psychology" is an odd way to interpret "people are having fun." I think the opposite is true — its easy to sell people on the importance of powerful hardware when the success and exclusivity of your games is a not a guarantee.
I think Nintendo is unique in that, when selling a console, your customers at least know they'll get a few good exclusive games out of it.
(But like most, I wish they did more with their IPs)
Nintendo sucks at marketing, it’s why the Wii U failed. Apple barely does marketing in my country. They are doing well right now because they make superior products and people are noticing.
Which country do you live in? A company doesn't have to actually market in your country as such, they do it where it matters and the rest flows in other places.
Seriously. Nintendo has put quality games out like clockwork for decades now to the point where the biggest IP is almost instantly given top rating from everyone any time it's released, no matter how many glaring technical flaws exist.
It's kind of nauseating, but impressive nonetheless. I can understand why - their games are fun, colorful, and (for the most part) very family friendly.
All that said I wish Nintendo would dive back into some of the more underutilized IP, such as making a new first-person Metroid game, or a new Star Fox or F-Zero game. All 3 would have a lot of replay value if a proper multiplayer element was added. Yet Nintendo can straight up ignore multiplayer for the most part and still sell well, so what do I know?
I don't think Nintendo knows how to make StarFox. They haven't been able to actually make a successful improvement to the formula since it was first released. StarFox 2 actually could have been that successful iteration, but they canned it for StarFox64, which is a remake of Starfox. Starfox Adventure pissed off everyone because it shouldn't have been a starfox game, Starfox assault did not do well for a multitude of reasons, Starfox command was fun, but shat all over any semblance of a story the universe had and didn't scratch the itch people were desperate for, Starfox zero was a half assed expansion to a tech demo that had a terrible gimmick the producer was married to but nobody wanted and made no sense (I can't focus on both screens at once), and they've basically called the time of death at this point.
Rail shooters aren't exactly knock out hits anymore.
I love F-Zero and dumped a lot of time into it when I was 13 but F-Zero GX was so insanely inaccessible to new players. None of my friends ever wanted to play split-screen because it required intimate knowledge of the controls, tracks, and machines in addition to crackerjack timing on the controller. Mario Kart is a lot more successful because it's the exact opposite. Although I'd love another F-Zero game I understand why they aren't bothering.
I'm not a mega gamer, but I've been playing console games since the original NES and I have never, not once, known or given a shit what a game's fps was. Maybe I just don't play the kind of games where it matters, but my guess is that most Switch users are in the same boat. People who care about FPS are more likely to go with Playstation or Xbox anyway.
BOTW was the first Zelda game I've played since the SNES days. I've never been a big fan of the franchise, but I still love these two games because they are fun to play. Everything else is window dressing.
Graphics have stopped making any meaningful difference in the total experience since the PS2 era. The move to HD and 4k is nice, and things look a bit more realistic, but they don't make games any more fun, and they hardly even make them any more immersive. I will take a fun 20fps game any day over a 4K 60fps game that sucks.
Hmm, this is a bit of an exaggeration. The Gamecube was considerably more powerful than the PS2, (and Microsoft took a huge dive on the original XBOX hardware in order to compete - although it was indeed more capable than the GC).
The Wii was the first time Nintendo explicitly entered the market with hardware knowingly less powerful than their competition, and that was... 2006? So like 17 years, not 30.
You could make a case that their handheld hardware was always "underpowered" compared to the competition, like the Game Gear and PSP, but the justification at those times was better battery life and pocket-ability. The market results seem to speak for themselves, though
A lot of western pundits (and major studio executives) have been expecting Nintendo to "go third party" like Sega ever since the Gamecube, and yet they're still around. They seem to know what they're doing.
No? The n64 was a graphics powerhouse, literally SGI tech in a cheap box you put in front of your TV. The gamecube too was very powerful, at least compared to the PS2. The GameBoy Advanced was a pretty powerful 32 bit ARM system.
It wasn't until the Wii that Nintendo gave up the tech arms race, because making games people want to play and marketing to the people who aren't turbo-nerds about half true specs turns out to be way more profitable.
FPS is important for some titles. I tried dishonored 2 on the ps4 slim (not pro), and it was an awful experience so much that I bought it a second time on PC.
But yes, TOTK is one of those titles which work great at 30 FPS.
Eh, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese constantly shipped 24fps and people were still very happy with their work. FPS does not good entertainment make.
I honestly don't even notice that it's sub 30fps and I'm a longtime Melee player and therefore 60fps nut. If anything, it makes this game more impressive lmao.
I am very much enjoying this game. It would rate my favorite game for the simple fact that I just feel zero desire or need to finish it. Not in a bad way!
I am just having fun in this world, I feel like I can get lost in it. The new mechanics with the abilities is just insane and I could easily just spend hours building things.
Sure the frame rate drops a bit, but the core gameplay is so good that I honestly don't care. It never gets bad enough that I can't play it or I feel like the drops are why I died.
It is just a beautiful game to look at.
I am getting really frustrated seeing the complaints that it's "the same game". No... no it's not. Not anymore than the countless COD games that come out every year. This feels like a sequel that takes place in the same world that has been drastically changed that actually deserves to be a sequel.
Readit News
Nintendo proved again that gameplay and art direction matter more than anything.
AAA studios whine and cry about how expensive games are to make (completely glossing over the fact that they are 100x as profitable as they were in the 90s because videogames are no longer niche) but nobody asked them to! Linus Tech Tips water cooling a 4090 isn't the normal consumer! Most consumers want to have fun when they pay $70 for a game, not play the exact game they bought a decade ago with more detailed scenes, and more detail doesn't make a game better
They have clearly poured a mountain of design and engineering effort into squeezing every last drop of graphic fidelity and art out of the Switch. It looks really really good. Some of that is having the wisdom to choose an art style that works well on the Switch—a little cel-shaded, not a ton of texture detail. But, also, they really are getting as much detail and graphic complexity as they possibly can out of that little machine.
This isn't some cheap 2D pixel art game that spent their whole budget on game mechanics. It's a AAA game that maxed out their budget along every single axis. They just happened to target hardware with lower specs.
Yes, I'm still slightly salty about the train wreck that KSP 2 turned out to be.
It's true that gameplay trumps all, and it definitely didn't push me off the (excellent) game, but the Switch hardware really _substantially_ impacts the experience.
A great game on the other hand cam have outdated graphics no problem. People will still love it.
It is impressive to make a great game with broad appeal. It isn't easy or trivial to do and companies that get it right should be recognized with good reputation and customers. I haven't heard other Studios whine and cry, but if they do it's not my problem so I don't care or mind if they do.
Nobody is forced to buy bad games, so I don't really understand the complaint there.
Also realistic graphic != good graphics, we need more stylized graphics like these recent 2 Zelda titles! It's a shame we already lost the great graphics of the 3ds era Pokemon (which I think is peak cell shading aesthetics) to a generic 3d look of recent titles.
Often, you can't tell what is that you're supposed to be looking at in order to advance or understand a gameplay mechanic.
I want to play a game. If I wanted to watch a movie, I would buy or stream a movie.
Absolute realism is a tedious goal.
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life, art .. is complex and you need to cultivate, nurture people caring about making beautiful complex subtle things.
Totk is your classic AAA game it just was programmed for older hardware.
>more detail doesn't make a game better
Have you played red dead redemption 2? The detail elevates the game to one of the greatest masterpieces of all time.
Dead Comment
Except in the case of this Zelda sequel you sort of are playing the exact same game you bought 5 years ago, and with little/no improvement to detail, for an even higher price (69.99)... While I've bought it and am enjoying it, its hardly some huge shift in any way (technical, gameplay or story) from BOTW, and virtually all the mechanics are identical. I still think it worthy of great reviews to be clear, but it is not some genre shaking release.
Most games coming on current gen hardware are utterly forgettable.
Zelda games, especially cell animation ones tend to age so well. Like WindWaker on the Game Cube. Such an amazing and fun game even on almost 20 year old hardware.
For all the amazing hardware on PS5 and Xbox Series ... most games releases are barely even an event that register in the cultural zeitgeist.
A few exceptions exist of course. But for the most part, yes the graphics are pretty but the game is not that fun.
And also, another thing Zelda has going for it and this cannot be said enough: it is a full freaking game. Not a broken game that needs to be patched up later (though there are always patches but the game isn't unplayable).
Nor is it pay to win. You unlock stuff by just playing and progressing. The Amiibo content is optional.
You get a full game with tons of stuff, ready to go. With a solid single player campaign and no online bullshit needed to experience it to its fullest. I cannot stress how much this needs to be said. But lately, broken or partial game experiences at triple A prices is a thing that people tolerate.
I don't make any strong claim that the proportion hasn't shifted, but that has absolutely been the case at every point in my awareness of games. Flip through an old Nintendo Power or Game Pro.
Meanwhile, some very interesting games are coming out these days - some of my favorites are from the past 5 years; time will tell how well they hold up, but I am optimistic.
which means their focus is only on gameplay mechanics, story and art direction. not focusing on bugs that are well not known cz of using something too new, expensive etc.
not fancy graphics, or other modern fancy things - that don't really add anything to the game.
wish the software industry would learn to bet on old technologies and develop novel experiences on those.
not the current - move to the latest framework, hardware etc. while presenting shit.
The NES, SNES, N64 and GameCube were part of the "bits race" and kept pushing forward in hardware power. Mario 64 is credited along with Wing Commander for creating the AAA graphics race at all costs behavior in the industry.
The Wii wasn't entirely a direction change, Nintendo felt competing on CPU power now was not interesting and went for motion controls, that later all other consoles imitated.
Then we had the Wii U that tried to mix TV with handheld. Wii U kinda sucked so they just tried it again with the Switch and made it portable. This again is spawning clones (steam deck for example).
I am not a Nintendo fan (I was on Sega camp during console wars and currently I prefer the Playstation) but Nintendo hardware always is impressive.
PS4 and 5 for example are boring, just mostly normal x86 computers with custom OS.
Their [Nintendo] art-books are so cool - while a game-art-book isn’t necessarily unique to Nintendo I do appreciate the value in them being so well done and expansive. Don’t have the time to play Zelda sadly but the books have been a really neat thing to page through.
As a kid, going to Barnes and Noble and grabbing the Emerald/Sapphire/Leaf Green official strategy book was, and still is, one of the coolest “books” I have.
I also bought the Dragon Quest Builders game and hated that. It turns out I like classic RPG and action puzzler games but I don't like crafting and sandbox games. Now I know.
Nintendo knows how to lure in casual gamers.
I would argue gameplay. Look at how insanely successful Minecraft is. It needs to be accessible to anyone who plays the game, nobody cares that you can emulate a fighter jet perfectly, you'll get your niche crowd, but if you want everyone, it needs to be adoptable by everyone.
Quick Edit: Remember Flappy Bird? It was simple graphics, a rip off of old old browser game from the 2000s (idr name) but everyone was hooked overnight.
Also to some extent 2048 though I felt that was niche to geeks.
"That's how we make games at Nintendo, though: we get the fundamentals solid first, then do as much with that core concept as our time and ambition will allow" - Shigeru Miyamoto
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u6HTG8LuXQ
They also take into consideration the limitations of the hardware from the very beginning, and not just the engineers, but the designers as well.
"...Although I am not an engineer, I have always included in my designs consideration for the technology that will make those designs a reality. People have paid me a lot of lip service, calling me a genius story teller or a talented animator, and have gone so far as to suggest that I try my hand at movies, since my style of game design is, in their words, quite similar to making movies. But I feel that I am not a movie maker, but rather that my strength lies in my pioneering spirit to make use of technology to create the best, interactive commodities possible, and use that interactivity to give users a game they can enjoy and play comfortably. "
This game would be an objectively better experience if it ran on a PS4/5 or Xbox if you don’t care for the handheld mode.
The game is an absolute masterpiece despite hardware, not because of it.
I think Nintendo should be lauded for experimenting with hardware, but ultimately they’re a games company and I almost wish they’d get out of the hardware business. I gave my kid my 3DS last week and showed him how the 3D worked. It took him no more than 30 seconds to ask me to turn the 3D off.
It looks fantastic for the compute budget
Single digit fps at times when using ultrahand.
I think a sparsity of sky islands could be partially attributed to performance issues. Those need to be visible from almost everywhere, so cannot be really culled out from the drawing pipeline. Even with aggressive LoD, this will take a considerable performance budget if you put hundreds of islands given a high level of drawing distance requirement in TotK.
I also noticed that TotK has lots of unusually aggressive performance optimization which seems to be done at the very last moment, and even with that a considerable level of frame drops on specific areas. I suspect this to be likely due to the reported delay of the Switch successor. They would still launch it on Switch with possibly worse visual fidelity but that would be fine if they got the successor at the launch time.
So yeah "how to use it" is what really matters, but having more performance budget can allow more freedom for developers. It's a really nice time to have the successor platform for Switch, possibly with backward compatibility.
Nintendo’s games _work_, and, even though many would say they can overlook glitches, I believe that maintaining a “seamless” experience - not breaking the flow - is an much, much, more important part in maintaining the subconscious ‘this game is great!’ feeling than people give it credit for.
“It just works” is just as important a part of gaming as it is of other things.
Absolutely. I'm sure the PS5 has great graphics but some of the game creators don't pay attention to this enough, it's basically like throwing heavy computation at an average directed game and to me that's not appealing at all. "Look at how realistic the water looks" is not enough for me to play a game.
If you really want to be all "gameplay matters most of all, therefore we don't need to improve on anything else" then tetris is still being bought even to this day. Doesn't mean we should stop pushing the limits in new games.
More like- Nintendo proved that in spite of barely listening to the fan base over literal decades, a solid brand will still get sales with just bleh content.
They barely caught onto the open world concept and sandbox - and it took years and years.
Like I get that they aren't anywhere close to as detailed or sophisticated as the graphics available in other games, but they appear to facilitate gameplay quite well.
Like "poor" has a connotation of "bad", where in this game they just weren't a focus and clearly are good enough to not be distracting, at least in the videos I've seen.
BotW was completely different than the zelda before. The only similiar enough zeldas mainline were Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, and these Switch Zeldas. And still both MM and TotK changed enough things from the previous game they they feel very completely different.
Same applies for mario main games for example. Check 64 -> Sunrise -> Galaxy -> 3D world -> Odyssey. They are all very different games.
Formulae changes, that something that most companies don't risk with their big IPs. And still, nintendo does occasionally comes up with new IPs like splatoon or arms.
Meanwhile, other ignorant people: WHERE's THE NEW IP???
Nintendo has a significant chunk of fans on that cultist level where they go ballistic and come for your throat when you point out they’ve been making the same games literally for 40 years. They have like half a dozen totally distinct IPs. LOL at the people bringing up side projects like BoxBoy, which could have shipped on all those old Nokias along with Snake. Mario + Rabbids is a MARIO game crossover and sells on name recognition. Literally nobody in 2023 would know what “Rabbids” even is let alone pay for a game centered on them without the “Mario” part.
The only thing that changes is technology, but they’re always behind too. Zelda is still using N64 single button combat and just sold 10 million copies of a copy/paste of BOTK with 20 year old Banjo and Kazooie Nuts & Bolts creation physics, and the vast majority of critics have to bow and praise. There are some real reviews with actual people out there unafraid to give BOTW/TOTK the 5-6 it deserves, but they’re too few and far between.
None of this is even getting into the gross superiority complex and behavior they show in their treatment of any third party studio even willing to port anything over to their systems, how they hold them hostage if they had ANY kind of involvement on any level financially (RIP Bayonetta 2 and 3), how they treat their own customers with crazy aggressive lawsuits and threats, etc. Just go look up their entire history - even that gold Nintendo label they put on boxes was for monetary and control reasons. Yes, companies do things to protect themselves and profits and blah blah blah, but nobody else does this stuff to the level and in the anti-consumer manner they do. The control and manipulation of Nintendo is even beyond Apple and Marvel/Disney levels, on par with Tesla. It’s literal insanity.
I know this is already way too long, but just a couple other interesting things you’d learn by reading up on their history - neither Sega (who positioned themselves and became a household name as the anti-Nintendo) nor PlayStation (Sony and Nintendo originally were working together on a CD-based system but their draconian behavior led to the partnership being called off by Sony and them going into gaming alone) would have existed in the way they have the past 3 decades if it weren’t for Nintendo being a POS company. Another interesting story involves Square Enix (then SquareSoft) at the end of the SNES generation, basically declaring they’re never making a game for Nintendo again (which didn’t hold up obviously but they still don’t release mainline Final Fantasy on them) and jumped to PlayStation for FF7. There is a two page advertisement for FF7 from back in the day that straight up makes fun of Nintendo by claiming the game is too advanced for them and would have taken up like 20 cartridges lol.
So, for their behavior resulting in these things and others, I do sincerely thank them (and anyone else who somehow got to the end of this)! :D
Just like the Mario movie I think it's less of an artistic feat and just shows the sheer power of Nintendo's franchises and very, very, enthusiastic fandom.
No. That is a western view point of someone that did not play the core nintendo games. It feels like projecting what is happening on every streaming service out there, or on every AAA western studio.
People are not praising new Zeldas because they are new games with the Zelda title, BotW was a complete revolution, it did open world like no other game did before it. It combined really well a huge a amount of features and fun things that no other game was able to do so before. Games like these are very rare.
Saying that is nostaligia when these 2 zelda play like no other Zelda. Saying that's it's because of brand when i've seen so many friends and colleagues that never gave a shit about nintendo buying a switch or emulating it and praising the hell out of this game.
Nintendo know what HBO does too, which is how to make exceptional content. That override absolutely every other value.
(I also suspect that part of the success is the mythical aspects of the Zelda games, and the reaching into the historical and religious past and traditions. Western companies seem to actively want to avoid this, but it’s extremely good for building content. Archetypes are archetypes for a reason, it’s evolutionary)
This game isn't succeeding primarily because of great marketing, franchise, or blind loyalty to Nintendo (though all of those help!).
It's succeeding primarily because it's the follow-up to a game that critics and players universally found enormously fun. Before Breath of the Wild previous Zelda entries did not sell this well.
Of course the raw numbers look more impressive for BotW - there are 122m Switch units worldwide (and 30m BotW sales), but the N64 only shipped 33m units worldwide over its 8-year lifespan, and OoT still sold 7.6m copies (with another 6.4m on the 3DS).
The titles you cite (Link's Awakening, Ocarina of Time) also made sales records because they were so good they reached a wider audience. But if you look at historical sales a mainline Zelda entry usually sells 6m to 10m.
Breath of the Wild sold 30 million and Tears of the Kingdom looks to be on a similar trajectory. That's due to the strength of the game design that's broadened the appeal well beyond the typical Zelda gamer.
There are lots adults with college degrees now that are playing this game who weren't even in kindergarten yet (or born!) when the games you mentioned were released.
BOTW and TOTK are still huge successes, but it's not really about great design (unfortunately). If it was, every one of Nintendo's games would be record smashing sellers, but they aren't. They have plenty of games that don't make a dent despite their insane attention to detail. We saw this with Mario Maker 1 & 2, not even cracking 10m copies to this day, and one can't even blame lack of name recognition, it's literally Mario!
Where great design does have impact is on long term word of mouth sales. Which we saw with BOTW and are likely to see here again.
I don't think attach rates offer the full picture. Early on the audience for BOTW was so eager for the game they were buying the Switch just for BOTW. For a period the attach-rate was greater than 100%! But the Switch has broad appeal and the attach-rate of BOTW has declined as more types of gamers buy-in to the Switch. The Gamecube and (to a lesser extent) the Nintendo64 had less success than the Switch outside of core Nintendo fans which naturally means franchises like Zelda would have higher attach rates.
Mario Mario 1 & 2 are both well-designed executions of a concept that appeals to a more limited audience (building and playing user-made Mario levels). BOTW / TOTK hit that sweet spot of widely appealing concept and excellent execution.
Breath of the Wild was certainly the best-seller, but nearly every Zelda game has been a knock-out success selling millions of copies. I think Breath of the Wild is an outlier among them in part because it was out during the pandemic. I know a whole lot of people who bought a Switch during the lockdown and poured hours into escapism with that game.
Breath of the Wild has sold 30.7 million total so far, Tears of the Kingdom sold 10 million in its first 3 days.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda
Tears of the Kingdom is selling crazy numbers even without the lockdown boost. Other factors make a difference but the core of what drives the sale of these two titles is that they're great games people strongly want to play.
Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/13jurfi/only_8_game...
But this game (and Breath of the Wild) is selling above and beyond previous entries because it's such a great game that its appeal reaches well beyond Zelda's traditional audience.
Contrast that with BOTW at 30 million and ToTK at 10 million in 3 days.
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The entire game is a fantastic example of well-designed map, gameplay, storyline / plot advancement, AND sandboxing all in one.
Incredible to think that its also running on seven year old hardware.
The emulation videos of the game running at 4K 60FPS on YouTube are astounding to watch.
Yes, the game looks good. They also seem to have fixed some issues compared to BotW, eg the pop-in of objects isn't as jarring.
I don't play modern games and am hardly a connoisseur but I seem to recall this being a mostly-solved problem via "level of detail" and hardware fog effects... has pop-in been an issue in the last decade? Saturn/PS1 games having it was par for the course but modern hardware is so powerful that it seems unnecessary.
This is the reason I don't find the game compelling. I don't want to sound like a hipster, so I'd like to recognize the incredible art direction and world design and that this is the first time console players are getting something like this.
But honestly all of the physics builds I've seen for TotK were being done in garrys mod circa ~2008 in multiplayer. My friends and I were racing rocket cars where the only steering was more side mounted thrusters. Great fun but feels like really old news.
Dead Comment
Game is about how fun the game is. Totk is easily the best game I've played this year. Definitely an upgrade from Botw. Costco is like $59, cheaper than preorder with $5 credits from GameStop which was $69 I think.
More, odds are high that if they had made this as not a sequel, it would not be selling as well. Go bolder and make it a new franchise? Same game would basically not be noticed.
I think it is fair to like the game. I go ever farther and think it is a fun game. But the lessons to learn from how fast and well this is selling is as much about the power of franchise as it is anything about this particular game/system.
Advanced copies to reviewers, gameplay footage, developer commentary, etc...
> But the lessons to learn from how fast and well this is selling is as much about the power of franchise as it is anything about this particular game/system.
There are plenty of popular franchises that release games that don't sell well.
There are, certainly, franchises that tank. Usually not after a successful release, though. That said, this one is odd, as the prequel didn't seem to generate near as much buzz?
If game of the year awards were reserved for new, non-sequel games, maybe franchises would be discouraged from selling the same game multiple times.
So yeah, everyone assumed it’d be an amazing game and it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda_CD-i_games
But for more official games, I find Phantom Hourglass to be the weakest entry in the series. It's... fine? Painfully easy and loaded with padding.
Probably. I’m not sure by how much though, there really aren’t many original games getting made with similar budgets. The story/dialog/acting definitely would not cut it without decades of nostalgia and backstory.
Nintendo first party games are reliably good. Bad Nintendo franchise games are the exception. After 30 years, and six after a huge hit, trust/prepurchase isn't absurd.
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Multiple front page reddit posts, multiple 10/10 reviews from big name outlets. Nintendo rivals Apple as the best company in marketing.
Nintendo has done some sort of mass psychology that allows them to have sub 30fps with no complaints, I was born too early to see this reviewed in business schools, but we are starting to see a bit of the innerworkings of how Nintendo has created IP that is worshiped.
I've been playing games for 30+ years, at no point have I cared deeply about the difference between 30fps and 60fps. I do not like 5fps-stuttering, which happens sometimes in poorly optimised AAA games no matter how good (within reason) the GPU.
The new Zelda runs well and looks good. I like it, though it's very much "BOTW Continued" which maybe we didn't need, I might have preferred a completely fresh world & characters instead of the same Hyrule a few years later.
still they did.
I'm in Warsaw and I see countless of zelda ads: whole walls of huge buildings are covered with them. They probably spent insane amount of money if they advertise it like this everywhere
I agree on the stuttering though - the only thing worse than low framerate is slightly higher average framerate + big dips.
Or perhaps the game is really that good?
Good looking games aren't necessarily good games. This is just a good one.
60 fps is great for anything else.
If Inception runs at 24 fps, Zelda does not need to run at 60 fps.
I've put in about 15 hours and haven't noticed it. I've sorta been looking, too, because I read everyone complaining about it on here before I picked up the game. But I keep getting distracted by... playing the game.
I don't think I've ever known the fps of any of the games I've played. I do remember having to zoom in on Doom II on some levels because my computer was very slow for that game, yet I still loved the game (of course, I did enjoy it better when I played at a friend's that had a better computer and a sound card, but that's another story).
I only care about the playing part of playing games. Like, when I played marbles (yeah, I've been around ...), while I did have a favorite marble or two, I only cared about playing.
I don't say this to discredit you, of course, just that I think by the time a game makes it so big as this one, it's because it's reaching ordinary people like me who couldn't care less about fps and just like the game if playing it lets them have a great time, so if there is any mass psychology involved, I suppose it's the mass psychology of coming up with a compelling game that people enjoy playing. Anyone who has that doesn't need to fool people into not noticing how low their fps rate is.
Have you played Paper Mario: Sticker Star?
I think Nintendo is unique in that, when selling a console, your customers at least know they'll get a few good exclusive games out of it.
(But like most, I wish they did more with their IPs)
Nintendo marketing is good, no doubt. But they’ve also created 25 years of high quality 3D Zelda games to build up incredible good will among gamers.
It's kind of nauseating, but impressive nonetheless. I can understand why - their games are fun, colorful, and (for the most part) very family friendly.
All that said I wish Nintendo would dive back into some of the more underutilized IP, such as making a new first-person Metroid game, or a new Star Fox or F-Zero game. All 3 would have a lot of replay value if a proper multiplayer element was added. Yet Nintendo can straight up ignore multiplayer for the most part and still sell well, so what do I know?
Rail shooters aren't exactly knock out hits anymore.
I love F-Zero and dumped a lot of time into it when I was 13 but F-Zero GX was so insanely inaccessible to new players. None of my friends ever wanted to play split-screen because it required intimate knowledge of the controls, tracks, and machines in addition to crackerjack timing on the controller. Mario Kart is a lot more successful because it's the exact opposite. Although I'd love another F-Zero game I understand why they aren't bothering.
Or perhaps make new IP, instead of warming up the old stuff?
You'll never get anything like God of war, red dead redemption 2 or dead space out of Nintendo.
BOTW was the first Zelda game I've played since the SNES days. I've never been a big fan of the franchise, but I still love these two games because they are fun to play. Everything else is window dressing.
It's a generational IP, your parents played it and are likely to recomand/buy the game to their child
That's as simple at that
Zelda's "marketing" was full of Nintendo FUD (performance, old console, sequel), yet it sold very well
Marketing from Nintendo? where? they don't brag everyday about it being on Gamepass with bazillions of trailers and articles from the press
It's similar to Disney movies at this point, the name itself doesn't need marketing
The Wii was the first time Nintendo explicitly entered the market with hardware knowingly less powerful than their competition, and that was... 2006? So like 17 years, not 30.
You could make a case that their handheld hardware was always "underpowered" compared to the competition, like the Game Gear and PSP, but the justification at those times was better battery life and pocket-ability. The market results seem to speak for themselves, though
A lot of western pundits (and major studio executives) have been expecting Nintendo to "go third party" like Sega ever since the Gamecube, and yet they're still around. They seem to know what they're doing.
Edit: bad at math
It wasn't until the Wii that Nintendo gave up the tech arms race, because making games people want to play and marketing to the people who aren't turbo-nerds about half true specs turns out to be way more profitable.
But yes, TOTK is one of those titles which work great at 30 FPS.
/s Zelda is good, to the surprise of noone.
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I think it might be better when you play docked than in handheld mode, but I haven't rigorously checked.
I am just having fun in this world, I feel like I can get lost in it. The new mechanics with the abilities is just insane and I could easily just spend hours building things.
Sure the frame rate drops a bit, but the core gameplay is so good that I honestly don't care. It never gets bad enough that I can't play it or I feel like the drops are why I died.
It is just a beautiful game to look at.
I am getting really frustrated seeing the complaints that it's "the same game". No... no it's not. Not anymore than the countless COD games that come out every year. This feels like a sequel that takes place in the same world that has been drastically changed that actually deserves to be a sequel.