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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

#261
post #133

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…

Neither the Wii, Wii U or Switch have anything powerful from a hardware perspective - the last time Nintendo released a product equally powered to the competition was the Game Cube but that was over 22 years ago now. This is the 'withered technologies' playbook in action - use underpowered/mature technology in new and fun ways rather than relying on cutting-edge graphics technologies. As an example when the switch wa…

This is the the best take. When the switch was new, this was a refreshing take—and using "older" technology means proven SDKs and lower costs for volume.

It's just sad that the switch has become long in the tooth. Great for many, but now limiting. The problem is that Nintendo has tried and failed to succeed with spec bump consoles (see, the new Nintendo DS and the new Nintendo 3DS), so the fact that they haven't followed up the Switch with a spec bump makes gobs of sense.

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Minish Cap was 2004 before we had a better understanding of what is and is not a good thing to expose people to. Pokemon Masters is literally a gacha game. The Nintendo theme park will probably have gachapon machines in it now kids are softening to the mechanism of it.

It's hard to imagine a Japanese theme park without gachapon machines...

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

#264
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And the control schemes drag it back down into the quagmire of unplayable mess despite all that work. An excellent example of the broader point about development focus.

I played on PC. Mouse and keyboard. The controls were excellent.

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

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hi-Fi Rush is a perfect example of how a game should be It had all the details you want in a game to make it look awesome but the style and art was paid close detail

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

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Tri Force Heroes is bad. You can play it single player or with 3 players, but not with 2. And if you play it single player, you constantly have to reorder your stack of Links, which is a tedious process.

Compared with Four Swords Adventures, which is fun to play with 1, 2, 3, or 4 people.

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

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "poor" the right description for the graphics? Like I get that they aren't anywhere close to as detailed or sophisticated as the graphics available in other games, but they appear to facilitate gameplay quite well. Like "poor" has a connotation of "bad", where in this game they just weren't a focus and clearly are good enough to not be distracting, at least in the videos I've seen.

That graphics would not look out of place in a 2013 indie game from a well-established but not rich studio. It would have not been ground-breaking in 2003, but would grab some attention for sure. I bet they will use same level of graphics in 2033, maybe with some AI tricks slapped on top if they manage to get cheap hardware for that.

Have you actually played the game or just trolling? This game is impressive today. In 2003 it wouldn't have been possible.

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

#268
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> > 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.

Absolutely. Graphics do have their place, but most games don’t need to be that extreme level of detail. For one, I played RDR2 on a stock PS4 and the level of detail and immersion was incredible, despite the hardware already being underpowered by the time RDR2 was released. Ie you can achieve the level of immersion and masterpiece without pushing the limits of graphics.

And the most successful game ever is still minecraft.

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

#269
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And the control schemes drag it back down into the quagmire of unplayable mess despite all that work. An excellent example of the broader point about development focus.

I've never noticed this, but I also play on the PC.

The only control stuff I don't like is fabricating arrows, notching ammo, cooking food, etc. But that's not clunky, it's just time consuming. It's also optional, so I just don't bother.

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

#270
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.

It's also more than capable of running on other platforms via emulation, and there are visual tweak mods (increased draw distance, LOD tweaks, etc) that don't change the art style but make it far more beautiful than being limited to the underperformant Switch hardware.

interesting - i dont have a switch and dont plan to buy one, but would love to play the new zelda. Will need to look into this.
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