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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

#231
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also Nintendo has a long history of developing games for outdated hardware, their consoles were never that powerful

With exception of N64.

Even that had limitations regarding textures.

See the third paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229447

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

#232
post #120

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?

I think it's great that it maintains a solid 30 and seems to have very few issues. Another interesting perspective is that it—a game made at the end of the Switch's life (we hope)—is only marginally prettier and more polished than BOTW—a launch title. I would still hold BOTW as one of the prettiest Switch titles, including third parties (I realise this is subjective). I'm not sure of another console where you don't m…

I think sometimes we conflate "graphical fidelity" with "beauty". I agree that BotW is one of the most beautiful games I've played, and that's an artistic achievement not a technical one. They do of course go hand in hand to some extent - sometimes you need technical tools for artistic vision, but you don't need high-tech for beauty.

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

#233

I was listening to a gaming podcast last week and they were talking about how this release was pirated and available for the last week or so on torrents. That in itself wasn't surprising, but the interesting point they talked about is that the game is much more enjoyable when played on PC with an emulated copy because modern gaming PC hardware is much smoother and higher resolution than the stock Switch. It really ma…

I stopped my BOTW playthrough recently after seeing game being rendered in 4K RTX. I'm usually not a stickler for visuals, but swith is getting a bit too dated.

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

#234

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…

What are you talking about long load times on a PS5? Isn't it supposed to revolutionize gaming by dropping load times altogether because of it's ridiculously ( for a consoles anyways ) fast SSDs? That's what I have heard anyways, don't have PS5 myself.

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

#235

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…

Did you get a chance to checkout Horizon: Forbidden West (the sequel to Horizon: Zero Dawn)? I have been gaming for a few decades now, and this is the most impressive technical achievement I have seen in a game. For me, everything else pales in comparison after this experience (The studio develops their own game engine Decima)

Horizon: Forbidden West is an amazing technical achievement, I just wish I had found it more enjoyable, instead it was "fine". Elden Ring coming out 2 weeks later kinda made me forget all about it - it gave me a feeling I haven't felt playing games in decades that I had been really missing.

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

#236
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What makes them unplayable that a doubling of framerate would fix?

Have you played games at 30 and 60 FPS ? I'm not one of those competitive 120+Hz gamers but try setting your desktop refresh rate to 30Hz - you can see mouse trailing and text delay while typing.

30FPS for an interactive experience is really bad. And them saying some regions are locked to 20 FPS - holly shit that's a slideshow.

I used to game on budget PCs when I was a kid, I rarely got to play at 60 FPS, but going down to 30 was just "OK I'm not playing that".

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

#237

I wish I have the time to sink 100+ hours on this game. I still haven't finished BOTW after playing it on and off for a few years. Hoping the next Zelda would be more brief like the old Wind Waker.

On an off for a while too but I'm hoping it keeps this way and it never finishes. It's not the destination, it's the journey

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

#238
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a game and games are nice. why can't it be on HN? HNers shouldn't play games? This is a great AAA title from a famous franchise of a famous company. Ofcourse everyone is excited about it!

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. It's not that I can't find this news elsewhere, and how does it gratify my curiosity? It's the most discussed news item today.

It doesn't gratify your curiosity but it does for others. They're curious about how this game is going to be, is it going to live up to their expectations, what do other people feel about it. If you need every conversation to revolve around software engineering, there's even a sub-thread about how they manage to keep this series so high quality.

Demanding that things should justify their existence to you is a symptom of main character syndrome.

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

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Nintendo's whole philosophy is all about doing more with less. They make money on every device by not putting out overly engineered / performant systems. So they have always been lagging in terms of cutting edge hardware, but they make up for it by focusing on joyful content.

I wouldn't say that's always been the case. Both the N64 and Gamecube featured relatively cutting edge tech during their time. Of course, those two are their weakest selling home consoles, so they've definitely shifted their strategy afterwards. But for two generations, they did try and keep up with their contemporaries.

They made some stupid decisions back then. N64 was cartridge based and didn't play CDs like its competitors.

The PS2 was the cheapest DVD player that also could play games, but GC could not play DVDs - its games were released on weird mini-DVDs that could store only ~1.4 GB.

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

#240
post #52

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.

We need this power because companies need to keep selling us new stuff and also because developers nowadays can't optimize their games too much since their managers make them do ten times the work, in half the time, and for one third of the pay they had on the 1990s.
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