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Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

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Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#161

Post by mrguyorama »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #56
savant_penguin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+ optimization It looks fantastic for the compute budget

30fps cap and drops to 20fps and below at times at 900p in docked mode on actual Switch hardware. Are we really calling that "fantastic"? It runs . Single digit fps at times when using ultrahand.

Millions of games on the playstation and n64 were sold despite running at 12 fps, having horrific graphical artifacts (stupid texture mapping on the playstation, god awful smeary "filtering" on the n64), and everybody has fond memories of it, to the point that it's currently popular to emulate those artifacts.

If you make an actually good game, people will cross broken glass to play it.

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#162

Post by htag »

alexjplant wrote: post #87
eru wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even seven years ago the hardware was already quite underpowered, and only really made sense because it's a hybrid console. 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.

> 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.

Pop-in essentially exists because the draw distance is too low. As the player get's closer to an object, it is more likely to be drawn, and the level of detail it is drawn at is higher.

While it's not Saturn/PS1 levels in modern games, in very large and very open maps you can have this problem where you know in the distance there can be things that you simply cannot see because of draw distance. If your running towards something in the distance, there can be noticeable 'step-ups' as it decides to draw the model with more and more details. So it comes up in exploring very large and very open areas. This happens to various degrees even on PS5+ level hardware.

There's a similar issues with movement speed, but instead the limit is how quickly can the game load new content.

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#163

Post by hammyhavoc »

mrguyorama wrote: post #161
hammyhavoc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30fps cap and drops to 20fps and below at times at 900p in docked mode on actual Switch hardware. Are we really calling that "fantastic"? It runs . Single digit fps at times when using ultrahand.

Millions of games on the playstation and n64 were sold despite running at 12 fps, having horrific graphical artifacts (stupid texture mapping on the playstation, god awful smeary "filtering" on the n64), and everybody has fond memories of it, to the point that it's currently popular to emulate those artifacts. If you make an actually good game, people will cross broken glass to play it.

This does not negate the statement made whatsoever: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35987936

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#164

Post by [deleted] »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #56
savant_penguin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+ optimization It looks fantastic for the compute budget

30fps cap and drops to 20fps and below at times at 900p in docked mode on actual Switch hardware. Are we really calling that "fantastic"? It runs . Single digit fps at times when using ultrahand.

[deleted]

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#165

Post by mrguyorama »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #90
jerf wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I hate to break it to you all, but all y'all obsessing about FPS are the minority. By a lot. While it has by no means killed the XBox or the Playstation line, I think they've obsessed over that segment of the market more than they should have to their own detriment, particularly due to the expense of keeping up with it. As a side effect it has also convinced that segment that they're bigger than they actually…

Who says I'm obsessing about it? The comment made an exaggerated statement about the visual aspect of a video game on a community known for being sticklers for detail and spec because they're technical as a demographic, their jobs are also technical. You cannot bullshit this demographic and ass-pull subjective hot takes on something measurable. Address the point at hand, don't go off on some tirade about how much som…

The Minish cap had a gacha machine, it was cute. The important part is you can't use real money on it, which means it HAS to be designed as an actual in game reward.

Nintendo's actual microtransaction garbage is the amiibos, which are shameless and often explicitly pay to win.

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#166

Post by tm-guimaraes »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #90
jerf wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I hate to break it to you all, but all y'all obsessing about FPS are the minority. By a lot. While it has by no means killed the XBox or the Playstation line, I think they've obsessed over that segment of the market more than they should have to their own detriment, particularly due to the expense of keeping up with it. As a side effect it has also convinced that segment that they're bigger than they actually…

Who says I'm obsessing about it? The comment made an exaggerated statement about the visual aspect of a video game on a community known for being sticklers for detail and spec because they're technical as a demographic, their jobs are also technical. You cannot bullshit this demographic and ass-pull subjective hot takes on something measurable. Address the point at hand, don't go off on some tirade about how much som…

> So you're just going to ignore the gacha mechanics?

No money involved. It's as much gambling as going to random.org and guess a random invocation. It's as much gambling as random encuonters on JRPGs, or quest/mission rewards, or really anything else in gaming with random chance. Is catching a pokemon in any pokemon game a gacha mechanic? You use a pokeball and might or might not get the pokemon. What about any game ability with a miss chance or a critical hit chance? D&D is peak gacha.

Really, it's just "drop some common stuff and get some random util back"

Gaming nowadays is full of "games" that are actually just live services trying to extract as much money as possible from you. This mechanic is completely unrelated. Your comment seems an over reaction from someone that never actually tried the game, or doesn't know how bad current big budget or mobile games are.

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#167

Post by moffkalast »

mrguyorama wrote: post #143
arnaudsm wrote: post #8

It is impressive that a game running on an 8-year-old phone GPU will likely be game of the year. Nintendo proved again that gameplay and art direction matter more than anything.

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 th…

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.

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#168

Post by joseda-hg »

jameshart wrote: post #15

There are over 118 million Switches out there. So they hit nearly 10% of their total addressable market in three days.

That's if you think every single switch sold in the last 8 years still works, which, specially for a mobile console doesn't seem too sensible

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#169

Post by econnors »

taeric wrote: post #142

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…

> 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.

Re: Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

#170

Post by gizmo686 »

system16 wrote: post #41
Madmallard wrote: post #20

[flagged]

This is not my experience at all. I have noticed some FPS drops when using the 'ultrahand' to move many objects around, but other than that I've been pretty impressed with the performance. It still blows my mind that I can walk for what seems like hours from one end of the map to the other while the weather and environment changes drastically and not experience any loading screens.

From watching BoTW speedruns (which, I assume is the same engine), the game simply does not do loading screens in the overworld. If you move to quickly, you get to experience an area that is not fully loaded.

Having said that, looking at what it takes for speedrunners to accomplish that, you will likely never see even that in casual gameplay.

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