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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

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Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#171

Post by fbnlsr »

waingake wrote: post #157

I'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…

Played both, and they have their own quirks and irks. I agree Horizon's story is much more interesting, but the constant backseat and marked objectives are a bit of a turnoff for me. I've yet to finish it but I'm the kind of player who rarely finish the games they start.

Zelda, I just had to drop. The weapons breaking alone was just so annoying, and most of the shrines feel like a chore. I liked the exploration, but it felt like every game mechanic the game had to offer was here to get in the way of me progressing.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#172

Post by genocidicbunny »

Tepix wrote: post #156
epolanski wrote: post #147

Earlier 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.

> Nintendo has always thrived on underpowered hardware.

Correction, Nintendo has more specifically thrived on cheap hardware, which is often correlated with 'underpowered' but does not mean the same necessarily. The Wii's remote wasn't 'underpowered', but it was relatively cheap and added an interesting feature.

> Why? Will it make the games more fun to play? Does it enable more fun games?

These are not the only (though they are important) factors to consider. With a portable platform, battery life, size, weight, heat, all matter much more than with a stationary console. A 2x more powerful Switch with the same power envelope as the original would be able to play games for longer using the same battery due to being more efficient. If you're playing a significantly demanding game, that might mean the difference between only being able to do short sessions on battery, and being able to play for a satisfying amount of time. Or it might mean that you can play it with the screen at a higher brightness, and thus make the game accessible in more environments.

And if the games are have performance issues, having more powerful hardware can make those problems less frequent and more bearable. You can argue that gamedevs need to do a better job, but that doesn't eliminate reality where most people just want to play the game and don't particularly care about the specifics of how to get the best experience.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#173

Post by GaelFG »

Dalewyn wrote: post #52
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #10

Apparently the game is just 16GB and runs seamlessly on a decade old hardware with no loading screens between game areas. How does Nintendo pull it off?

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 :)

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#174

Post by pjmlp »

felipc wrote: post #77

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 w…

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.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#175

Post by eloisius »

waingake wrote: post #157

I'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…

The weapons durability bothered me at first. I kept thinking I'd eventually be able to repair them or something. Eventually I realized it was kind of fun because it forces you to try new weapons constantly. The only mechanics that I find tedious are buying/selling and cooking. I'd way rather a Skyrim style interface to set up a transaction with all the items you want and then confirm it. BOTW is exhausting when you want to unload a bunch of junk or cook 100 hearty durians.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#176

Post by Cthulhu_ »

vorticalbox wrote: post #162
waingake wrote: post #157

I'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

I did see a good video on why they have the weapons breaking; it's so that there's always rewards to be found when you go exploring. If you keep finding a weapon you already have, it won't be rewarding to go exploring.

This video was IIRC comparing it with Elden Ring, which has so many weapons, spells, armor pieces, summons, weapon skills, etc etc that it is able to fill up its world to a satisfying degree without having to resort to breaking weapons so you need to find a new one.

But it also pointed out that a lot of the items you can find are asset reuse; weapon skills were already present on certain weapons, but now you can find the skills separately as well. Most, if not all of the summons are also existing enemies or bosses, just with different AI. And a lot of enemies' animations and behaviours were lifted / borrowed from previous From Software games.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#177

Post by crimsontech »

waingake wrote: post #157

I'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…

Opposite experience for me, I preordered Horizon Zero Dawn and was really looking forward to it but quickly got bored and never went back to it.

I’ve played Breath of the Wild for many hours. I agree on the weapon breaking thing, probably one of the most frustrating parts of the game and I still don’t understand why they did that.

This new game looks even better too from what I have seen.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#179

Post by Cthulhu_ »

zimpenfish wrote: post #132
sspiff wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> striking a deal with Samsung for using their Exynos chips The fantasy world where they do a deal with Apple for M2 SOCs (or even just get bought wholesale by Apple.)

> (or even just get bought wholesale by Apple.)

This is a crazy idea but... it might end up becoming reality. I don't see Nintendo selling any time soon though, it's been very independent for a very long time, to the point where it was huge when they released some things for smartphones (pokemon go, super mario jump, etc).

That said, Apple's been trying some things with gaming (they pushed gaming as one of the use cases for the Apple TV), but then I realize they already have one of the biggest gaming platforms in the world with the iphone.

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