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.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release
161–170 of 782 posts
Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release
#162I've attempted to play through BOTW a couple times and ended up giving up due to weapons breaking, endless shrines, generally rather boring gameplay. The hype here is fascinating. I guess nostalgia and liking what everyone else says they like is a powerful thing. I just finished Horizon Zero Dawn, which I found to be a far superior open world game, the graphics alone are jaw dropping, the gameplay is exciting, quite…
I have yet to complete it but I fully enjoyed the game though that said the weapons durability always felt way to low and that admittedly did end up being very annoying
Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release
#163I slowly grinded my way through BOTW over the last years, every few months a few steps forward, then getting bored. Left the plateau, tamed a horse and have now the full picture of the princess and a long sleep. Nice, but still little curiousity what happens next. I wish I could feel what everyone else seems to enjoy…
I feel the same. Don't get the hype around BOTW. Super boring game.
Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release
#164I've attempted to play through BOTW a couple times and ended up giving up due to weapons breaking, endless shrines, generally rather boring gameplay. The hype here is fascinating. I guess nostalgia and liking what everyone else says they like is a powerful thing. I just finished Horizon Zero Dawn, which I found to be a far superior open world game, the graphics alone are jaw dropping, the gameplay is exciting, quite…
I've played both, and liked BOTW much more, although I also liked Horizon Zero Dawn. I also have the 2nd part of Horizon Zero Dawn (don't even remember the name) and tried to start it twice, but I guess I didn't get hooked into it and dropped it in favor of something else.
I guess they're two very different games. Even though both are "open world", I feel Zero Dawn is much more "on rails" than BOTW. I felt there's much more exploration and finding out by yourself on BOTW, while in Horizon is more about "go there, do that. Then go there, and do this other thing. etc".
Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Switch combines lower powered A57 (a soc from..2012 on a 20nm process) with a Maxwell GPU (9+ years old at this point) Honestly this is the time to start working on a Switch successor, they could easily more than double the current compute capabilities while keeping the same or lower power envelope. That doesn't even counts the untapped bonuses from much higher memory speeds. I would instantly buy this, we would…
> I would instantly buy this Why? Will it make the games more fun to play? Does it enable more fun games? I don't see it. Nintendo has always thrived on underpowered hardware.
By your logic, why move past the Wii U or Wii or any console before it?
The machine I descrive is already quite underpowered compared to Nintendo's competition by magnitude of orders.
This limits my enjoyment of Nintendo games and I prefer emulators.
Anyway hardware limits are already apparent and yes some games aren't as enjoyable due to very low stuttering performance.
Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release
#166Has 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 w…
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 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.
Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's excellent for some popular games, decent at many others, and garbage at some.
That's good enough, thanks!
Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release
#168I've attempted to play through BOTW a couple times and ended up giving up due to weapons breaking, endless shrines, generally rather boring gameplay. The hype here is fascinating. I guess nostalgia and liking what everyone else says they like is a powerful thing. I just finished Horizon Zero Dawn, which I found to be a far superior open world game, the graphics alone are jaw dropping, the gameplay is exciting, quite…
I’ve played both and I’ve also enjoyed Horizon more than BOTW. BOTW’s world felt more organic and I loved that the game encouraged having curiosity and rewarded them (Can I go there? Can I solve this puzzle this way?).
But in the end, I enjoyed Horizon’s tight combat system much more than BOTW.
Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Switch combines lower powered A57 (a soc from..2012 on a 20nm process) with a Maxwell GPU (9+ years old at this point) Honestly this is the time to start working on a Switch successor, they could easily more than double the current compute capabilities while keeping the same or lower power envelope. That doesn't even counts the untapped bonuses from much higher memory speeds. I would instantly buy this, we would…
> I would instantly buy this Why? Will it make the games more fun to play? Does it enable more fun games? I don't see it. Nintendo has always thrived on underpowered hardware.
A lot of games get limited to 30 fps (and even dip lower) on the switch which makes them unplayable for me. I don't care about graphics at all, I'd rather play in some extremely low poly/low texture mode at 60 fps (ideally higher) than at 30 fps.
If they released a new version with a 120hz display that could actually run games at 120hz, I'd be ecstatic. I don't even mind the 720p resolution, it's fine on such a small screen in my opinion.
Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 platfor…
And also Nintendo has a long history of developing games for outdated hardware, their consoles were never that powerful
With exception of N64.