Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by mrguyorama » Thu, May 18, 2023, 3:11 PM UTC

ericzawo wrote: post #66

hospitalJail wrote: post #5

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…

Nintendo has been the gimped hardware in the marketplace for, what, 30+ years now? This is not surprising.

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.

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

#212

Post by jquery » Thu, May 18, 2023, 3:11 PM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #149

speeder wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

You are proving their point. Nintendo switched to the "don't care about tech" strategy because they had been pushing tech for 2 generations and only doing worse as a business. People preferred the Playstation 2 over the Gamecube because it had more and better games, and Nintendo spent the n64 and Gamecube console generations losing their third party support. That's also why the doubled down on their first party games…

The Gamecube and N64 were both nerfed by Nintendo's insistence on using proprietary storage formats. The N64 cartridge size ranged from 4mb to 64mb (64mb being the maximum at the end of the console's lifespan).

The GameCube used minidvds that had only 30% of the storage space of standard dvds.

The result was a generational game like FF7 was only possible on the PlayStation.

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

#213

Post by edgyquant » Thu, May 18, 2023, 3:12 PM UTC

hammyhavoc wrote: post #68

edgyquant wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Nintendo makes good games and always had Have you played Paper Mario: Sticker Star?

Sure there’s a few bad eggs, even in the Zelda series there’s a couple, but the trend is not in that direction.

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

#214

Post by surgical_fire » Thu, May 18, 2023, 3:13 PM UTC

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…

Good graphics don't save a lame game. It at most improves an already good one.

A great game on the other hand cam have outdated graphics no problem. People will still love it.

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

#215

Post by hammyhavoc » Thu, May 18, 2023, 3:13 PM UTC

edgyquant wrote: post #213

hammyhavoc wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nintendo makes good games and always had Have you played Paper Mario: Sticker Star?

Sure there’s a few bad eggs, even in the Zelda series there’s a couple, but the trend is not in that direction.

Which Zelda games are bad in your opinion?

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

#216

Post by Jcampuzano2 » Thu, May 18, 2023, 3:13 PM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #205

moffkalast wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It never fails to amaze me how quickly the hate train starts or how fast it gets going when it comes time to blame technical artists for the shortcoming of others, even though they are arguably the best in the industry at reliably accomplishing amazing deeply technical feats that deliver joy. I'm glad I figured this out before spending much time going down that path, but I still know people who did, they're the smart…

To be fair, I don't think anybody is undermining the effort/ingenuity some of these technical artists/engineers have. Its moreso the overwhelming focus of AAA game studios on this over gameplay.

These artists/engineers have accomplished absolutely amazing things and really pushed the limits. But somewhat ironically... gameplay/story is still king when it comes to 'games.

I will say, when a game does blend the two, they are usually highly applauded, it just rarely happens nowadays that a game has both very good graphics, and very good gameplay.

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

#217

Post by shadowgovt » Thu, May 18, 2023, 3:14 PM UTC

AlwaysRock wrote: post #189

dzonga wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thos…

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.

Specifically CPU. The Wii's internals weren't much more powerful than the GameCube's.

... but as peer threads have noted, this is a relatively new vector for them in terms of value brought to the marketplace. They were competing on grade-A computing and graphics tech in the console space, but did the math and (IMHO wisely) concluded they weren't going to win that fight against Microsoft and Sony (and the manufacturing deals MS and Sony could cut and the manufacturing they could do in-house). So they instead noted those two firms were competing on making the same kind of game and pivoted to providing a platform to make the kinds of games they couldn't put on those consoles (but were starting to show up in arcades, where the inability to compete with the home console market had led to the need to incorporate more interface gimmicks).

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

#218

Post by byby » Thu, May 18, 2023, 3:15 PM UTC

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…

The budget and scale of totk is triple A. Also the amount of art in totk is triple A levels.

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.

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

#219

Post by 01100011 » Thu, May 18, 2023, 3:15 PM UTC

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.

Especially ironic given the direction of the company who makes that 8 year old phone GPU. Nintendo is thriving with RTX-off.

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

#220

Post by mrguyorama » Thu, May 18, 2023, 3:15 PM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #37

veryfancy wrote: post #3

...and it's actually very good.

Is it? It plays like a clone of the first game without a lot of meaningful improvements over the criticisms of the first. Weapons still break, the story still sucks, the dungeons aren't dungeons... It plays more like Minecraft. I grew up on SNES and N64 Zelda, so admittedly I'm biased towards the old gameplay loop and mechanics.

Hate to break it to you, but n64 zelda had a bunch of rough spots everyone just chooses to ignore.

And in 15 years, people will have the same level of adoration for this game and ignore any rough spots, like FPS or weapons breaking