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

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

#411

Post by ianlevesque » Thu, May 18, 2023, 5:46 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #346

mrguyorama wrote: post #143

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…

I agree with your general point but I don't think Tears of the Kingdom is a good example of it. They have clearly poured a mountain of design and engineering effort into squeezing every last drop of graphic fidelity and art out of the Switch. It looks really really good. Some of that is having the wisdom to choose an art style that works well on the Switch—a little cel-shaded, not a ton of texture detail. But, also,…

Yeah honestly they’ve exceeded what the Switch can do at this point and areas of the game drop to 20 fps. The game wouldn’t be worse at 60. 30 is widely viewed as the bare minimum.

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

#412

Post by pawelduda » Thu, May 18, 2023, 5:53 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #83

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.

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…

FPS drops throw people off. Just like TV that drops signal, car that sometimes doesn't accelerate, or maybe a website that sometimes loads 10s. It's perfectly fine to care about it.

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

#413

Post by soulofmischief » Thu, May 18, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

pb7 wrote: post #378

dkersten wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 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…

As someone that first played it on a PS4 and then again recently on a maxed out PC, I can confidently say the immersion was superior on the better machine. In fact, I was salty that I first experienced it on such a gimped device.

Yes, RDR2 is closer to a simulation than a game, and fidelity matters.

Rockstar knows their community. They spent around $1 in marketing for every $1 spent on the development of the game itself, totalling around $500mil, and the game paid for itself opening weekend with over $700mil in sales.

The studio has managed to master this sort of high-fidelity development while fully recuperating all costs, and fostering an incredibly loyal fan base. (Personal data point; replayed every single Rockstar title last year)

You cannot criticize such a company for delivering high-fidelity projects and pushing the edge. (You can criticize their working environment, however)

And without such companies blazing ahead, we wouldn't be currently undergoing a revolutionary phase in tech history as we explore the power of massively-parallel, computationally-intensive AI algorithms.

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

#414

Post by giobox » Thu, May 18, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #408

giobox wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have got to be kidding. Why? play the two games side by side - there is a truly enormous amount of gameplay and visual overlap. > The ability to build machines by connecting basically anything to anything is a very impressive mechanic both from a gameplay perspective and from a technical perspective. The fact that they built this to run this nicely on an 8 year old tablet is frankly incredible. Many reviews (an…

> I found this to be the least impressive of all Link's new abilities personally, and fail to see it in terms of being some unreal technical breakthrough? It's literally just a jump through the surface directly above the player's head. Implementing Jumping through one-way platforms is easy. Implementing Jumping through anything , no matter how deep, and detecting the first safe place for him to stand, as well as havi…

> Implementing Jumping through anything, no matter how deep, and detecting the first safe place for him to stand, as well as having the ability to back out at any time to return to your original position, especially in a huge open world game like this? I'd say it's pretty technically impressive. Especially how fast it loads when showing the little upwards swimming animation.

Its 2023, if this blows you away wait until you see what else even 8 year old computers can do...

> But it's definitely not shallow, you only have to look for videos showing the crazy things people are building to see how it's mechanically super deep.

Building things for the sake of building is not really adding depth to the "game" as such, the mechanic contributes very little to the gameplay of the game. Indeed, you can almost completely avoid it save for a handful of mandatory sections. IMO, the best mechanics add depth to the gameplay and make the whole game richer, which this feature doesn't really do, its a very ancillary feature to the game.

FWIW, the part list on nuts and bolts was pretty good, and had great physics while being a core conceit of the game.

> https://banjokazooie.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_parts

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

#415

Post by s1artibartfast » Thu, May 18, 2023, 5:57 PM UTC

moffkalast wrote: post #358

s1artibartfast wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is odd too. Why do people care? It seems like the reasonable response to a product you dont like is to not buy it and then ignore it. Why do people get fixated, angry, and shit on products they dont like.

It's not odd, it's the result of false marketing and frankly very much the direct fault of publishers. They spend an untold amount on promotional campaigns showing prerendered footage, gameplay running on workstations with unrealistic specs, and buy endorsements. All together that makes people invested and makes them expect too much. It's very easy to feel lied to and betrayed when the final result doesn't even close…

Thanks for adding some clarity. I can understand a complain about false advertising. I thought a major part of the complaint was game development focusing on graphics opposed to gameplay, which makes less sense to me.

I still don't get buying a game primarily for the graphics without looking at representative gameplay. I thought it was generally understood that promos and ads would show the best.

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

#416

Post by yamtaddle » Thu, May 18, 2023, 5:57 PM UTC

dllthomas wrote: post #349

racl101 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Most games coming on current gen hardware are utterly forgettable. Zelda games, especially cell animation ones tend to age so well. Like WindWaker on the Game Cube. Such an amazing and fun game even on almost 20 year old hardware. For all the amazing hardware on PS5 and Xbox Series ... most games releases are barely even an event that register in the cultural zeitgeist. A few exceptions exist of course. B…

> Most games coming on current gen hardware are utterly forgettable. I don't make any strong claim that the proportion hasn't shifted, but that has absolutely been the case at every point in my awareness of games. Flip through an old Nintendo Power or Game Pro. Meanwhile, some very interesting games are coming out these days - some of my favorites are from the past 5 years; time will tell how well they hold up, but I…

The NES has somewhere around a thousand distinct games, if you count all markets and include unlicensed games (which there weren't that many of).

Maybe 200 of them aren't total trash. Perhaps 100 were genuinely good at the time. Low-tens of them are still at all worth playing for someone without nostalgia goggles—though, in some cases, that's because an entirely-superior remake exists; like, if you want to try the first three Final Fantasy games, you probably shouldn't play the NES versions, in 2023, unless you're aiming for some kind of "I want to experience them exactly as Old People did" sort of thing.

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

#417

Post by HideousKojima » Thu, May 18, 2023, 5:57 PM UTC

evantbyrne wrote: post #290

HideousKojima wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredibly easy to emulate, and at much higher resolutions than the switch. There are also patches to unlock the FPS (and to fix the occasional 20 FPS throttling that the game forces) though I haven't tried them yet. I've had a few minor graphical issues, and had occasional crashes until I updated the firmware and game version, but it's working amazingly well overall. Your GPU won't matter too much, so long as y…

I keep hearing that GPU doesn't matter, but I don't understand why. It uses Vulkan and OpenGL behind the scenes–wouldn't those rely heavily on the GPU?

They do rely heavily on the GPU, but the game was designed (in terms of poly count, VRAM usage, shader complexity) for a several year old mobile GPU.

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

#418

Post by slmjkdbtl » Thu, May 18, 2023, 5:58 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…

Recently I found good stuff actually sell the most in game industry, you have stuff like Elden Ring and Legend of Zelda, in indie space you have stuff like Pizza Tower, all selling huge. I wonder if big studios that makes safe copy 3As will actually think about innovation as an element to maximize profit.

Also realistic graphic != good graphics, we need more stylized graphics like these recent 2 Zelda titles! It's a shame we already lost the great graphics of the 3ds era Pokemon (which I think is peak cell shading aesthetics) to a generic 3d look of recent titles.

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

#419

Post by kettlecorn » Thu, May 18, 2023, 6:02 PM UTC

waboremo wrote: post #384

kettlecorn wrote: post #187

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…

BOTW has the same attachment rate as Windwaker and Ocarina of Time, which nullifies the argument that Zelda has sold poorly until BOTW. Attachment rates are important, better than pure sales, because it tells you how many potential buyers bought the game. BOTW and TOTK are still huge successes, but it's not really about great design (unfortunately). If it was, every one of Nintendo's games would be record smashing se…

I did not say that the Zelda franchise has sold poorly, just less well than BOTW / TOTK.

I don't think attach rates offer the full picture. Early on the audience for BOTW was so eager for the game they were buying the Switch just for BOTW. For a period the attach-rate was greater than 100%! But the Switch has broad appeal and the attach-rate of BOTW has declined as more types of gamers buy-in to the Switch. The Gamecube and (to a lesser extent) the Nintendo64 had less success than the Switch outside of core Nintendo fans which naturally means franchises like Zelda would have higher attach rates.

Mario Mario 1 & 2 are both well-designed executions of a concept that appeals to a more limited audience (building and playing user-made Mario levels). BOTW / TOTK hit that sweet spot of widely appealing concept and excellent execution.

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

#420

Post by tempoponet » Thu, May 18, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

evantbyrne wrote: post #296

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…

I don't think it is fair to hand wave away the performance issues like this. Frame rate drops down to 20 and below are very noticeable to the untrained eye. We're not talking about the difference between 30/60/120fps where you don't really know what you're missing until you get used to the higher frame rates.

The "Digital Foundry" tech analysis found that it's mostly stable 30fps, with occasional dips in villages but nothing that meaningfully impacts gameplay. My experience matches with that, so I'm inclined to believe their analysis. It isn't perfect, but I think a lot of comments in this thread are overstating the issue.