371–380 of 539 posts
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Are you sure about that? I mean, boomers may have stolen all the wealth, but aren't 20-30 adolescents still the primary market for any AAA game?
> boomers may have stolen all the wealth I think this is unacceptable. I know it feels acceptable, but I think it's not.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charting-the-growing-genera...
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.
Actually I would say this is yet more proof of how awesome breath of the wild was, and the incredible strength of a good franchise. 10 million people instabought it just in the hope it will live up to its predecessor.
I'm often discouraged by comments on Hacker News that downplay the importance of great design in a design-heavy medium. This game isn't succeeding primarily because of great marketing, franchise, or blind loyalty to Nintendo (though all of those help!). It's succeeding primarily because it's the follow-up to a game that critics and players universally found enormously fun. Before Breath of the Wild previous Zelda ent…
> Before Breath of the Wild previous Zelda entries did not sell this well. Breath of the Wild was certainly the best-seller, but nearly every Zelda game has been a knock-out success selling millions of copies. I think Breath of the Wild is an outlier among them in part because it was out during the pandemic. I know a whole lot of people who bought a Switch during the lockdown and poured hours into escapism with that…
Breath of the Wild has sold 30.7 million total so far, Tears of the Kingdom sold 10 million in its first 3 days.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda
Tears of the Kingdom is selling crazy numbers even without the lockdown boost. Other factors make a difference but the core of what drives the sale of these two titles is that they're great games people strongly want to play.
I am sad that a great game like this is held back by being a Switch exclusive. Of course I know the whys, and that you can emulate it, but still. I just don't like Nintendo, nor do I like the Nintendo Switch.
It seems silly to me to adhere to cliques like that. Software makes the hardware. I like the Switch because it has loads of games I want to play.
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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.
For those out of the loop: think Garrys Mod (GMod) meets the Zelda series and yes, it was made by Nintendo themselves. The entire game is a fantastic example of well-designed map, gameplay, storyline / plot advancement, AND sandboxing all in one. Incredible to think that its also running on seven year old hardware. The emulation videos of the game running at 4K 60FPS on YouTube are astounding to watch.
This is the reason I don't find the game compelling. I don't want to sound like a hipster, so I'd like to recognize the incredible art direction and world design and that this is the first time console players are getting something like this.
But honestly all of the physics builds I've seen for TotK were being done in garrys mod circa ~2008 in multiplayer. My friends and I were racing rocket cars where the only steering was more side mounted thrusters. Great fun but feels like really old news.
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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…
> not play the exact game they bought a decade ago with more detailed scenes, and more detail doesn't make a game better Except in the case of this Zelda sequel you sort of are playing the exact same game you bought 5 years ago, and with little/no improvement to detail, for an even higher price (69.99)... While I've bought it and am enjoying it, its hardly some huge shift in any way (technical, gameplay or story) fro…
So the new Zelda game being similar to the N-1 Zelda game is exactly what they do. I remember defeating similar enemies in the original Zelda game, finding shrines to build health up, wandering a forest looking for hidden stuff. Its fun but the game concepts haven't changed much.
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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 RD…
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.
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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, th…
You're not being fair, you're making excuses. I was responding to a post that literally said "better graphics make a game worse." Bad writing and bad mechanics can absolutely ruin a game far beyond the ability of art to compensate -- but it's both absurd and cruel to blame this on art.
"often ... because they're at the expense of everything else,"
Which seems plausible although "often" may be harsh. Too high a proportion of your budget on art is rarely going to end up somewhere good, unless the art is the main point. There does seem to be a bit of a AAA arms race here, which isn't necessarily a net gain.