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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

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Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#421

Post by sparsevector »

keenmaster wrote: post #410
Quindecillion wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I played Breath of the Wild, I felt ... nothing. Interesting. Opposite for me. Playing BotW reignited the feeling of playing OOT and MM for me.

I don’t know man. Compare the ambience of Zora’s Domain, music and all, to the equivalent area in BOTW. Compare the divine beasts to literally any temple in OOT. BOTW doesn’t even come close to the magic of Ocarina imo. The story in OOT was also much better imo. Seeing Hyrule as a kid and beginning to love it, then seeing it waste away as Adult Link, and being motivated to defeat an enemy with clear character develop…

For me the magic of BOTW was the way its design encouraged you to approach the game more as an environment for free form play. My best experiences with BOTW were when I turned the HUD off and just enjoyed the world, finding Koroks, clearing enemy camps, but mostly just wandering. There are a lot of design elements that come together to make this play style really rewarding and fun like the density of Korok placements and the way you can easily spot shrines from a distance. I think it's hard to compare BOTW to OOT since they have such different designs. OOT is like a carefully constructed theme park ride where BOTW is more like an enormous playground filled with toys. But BOTW succeeded at giving me the same childlike sense of wonder I had with OOT (despite now being an adult).

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#422

Post by thefz »

Accacin wrote: post #198
thefz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"30fps the vast majority of the time" in 2023 is just laughable.

It's not in my opinion though. I have a Gaming PC and a Switch. My gaming PC has a 6900XT and so I expect to be playing every game at 1440p @ 60FPS at a bear minimum - some games come out and surprisingly have trouble with that. The Switch is old hardware that was under-powered on release, therefore, I expect that I'm not going to be getting 60FPS. Basically, it's down to expectations. The Switch is absolutely great…

> My gaming PC has a 6900XT and so I expect to be playing every game at 1440p @ 60FPS at a bear minimum - some games come out and surprisingly have trouble with that.

You can't even compare an open market in which small teams have to cope with the myriad of possible configurations, ofthen lacking the technical skills for optimizing their software down to the bit with the supposedly top product of a trillion dollar company writing software for their own devices - and failing to make it decent.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#423

Post by _gabe_ »

Dalewyn wrote: post #188
GaelFG wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are serious (I do game development for a living and work on graphical assets daily so that seems evident for me, but I totally understand it can be arcane stuff) it's simply that they choose a stylized graphical style avoiding a lot of costly details you generaly find in hight end games. They use low poly models, as far as I know there is no baked lightmap (these are pretty expensives but are mandatory in a lo…

>If you are serious I absolutely am serious; a lot of games and software in general today demand far more system resources than they have any reasonable right to. Don't give me "but the textures!" and the like either, optimize that stuff better instead. Whether it's Windows 10/11 or Call of Duty or Elite: Dangerous or Chrome or whatever strikes your fancy, software today has no business demanding the resources they d…

> You want to tell me that will choke and croak just doing mundane stuff like playing games or browsing the internet?

The fact that you're comparing browsing the internet with playing AAA games speaks volumes. Browsers are capable of making insane amounts of optimizations because the "geometry" of a website is (mostly) completely static, there's no physics, there's no sounds, there's no AI running client side, there's no game logic, etc. This means they get to cache 90% of the view and only update the changed portions of the screen.

Contrast that with a game, which has the entire view of the 3D world changing every 16ms when the user moves their mouse, has thousands of physical interactions happening (most likely at a higher framerate), is buffering and mixing sounds in a 3D world, is animating and loading large 3D assets in real-time, is creating photo realistic lighting in real-time, is handling all game logic and AI client side, etc. It becomes clear that the two fields, while both difficult in their own ways, don't overlap very much. Of course AAA games take a super computer to run. It's doing all that in 16ms, sometimes 7ms!

Plus, if you don't care about all the visual fidelity and stuff, most games allow you to turn a ton of that off. Games have never been mundane, whether we're talking about the original tetris or the remastered version of the last of us, they are pushing the boundaries of the hardware they run on to the limit to achieve incredible immersive experiences.

Not only that! They also have increasingly helped improve the state of the art rendering in offline renderers! We're seeing the improvements that games have been able to make to achieve real-time photo realistic rendering slowly make their way to large Hollywood studios. This allows the movies we watch to have higher fidelity CG, because the artists have quicker iteration times. And it reduces the compute load required for these massive CG scenes since they are using more optimized rendering techniques. Saving money, and our environment.

Lest we forget, these "mundane" games have led to huge breakthroughs in all sorts of fields because of their willingness to push the boundaries of our machines to see what's truly possible. As opposed to 90% of the software created today which runs orders of magnitude slower than it needs to because people can't or don't know how to write efficient software.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#424

Post by wodenokoto »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #73
selectas wrote: post #70

Haha I still remember seeing "A Link to the past" the first time, watching my big brother playing it. Immediately fell in love and the whole series is still one of my favorites ever!

It has aged incredibly well. A Link To The Past is still almost as fun to play as it was back then.

I also think it still looks great

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#425

Post by ska »

Gareth321 wrote: post #317
rjzzleep wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks beautiful, but I tortured myself through zero dawn and then dropped forbidden West an hour in. The story is dumb, the dialogues are a nightmare and I feel like the more they try to paint the female protagonist as some kind of strong woman the worse it made the whole thing. Instead of making her seem strong she's like a petty person, constantly complaining and badmouth everything. The game mechanics make it h…

> The story is dumb, the dialogues are a nightmare and I feel like the more they try to paint the female protagonist as some kind of strong woman the worse it made the whole thing. Instead of making her seem strong she's like a petty person, constantly complaining and badmouth everything. The Mary Sue trope has infected Hollywood and now the gaming industry. Every woman needs to be perfect; flawless. Every man serves…

I think this is an idiosyncratic use of the trope “Mary Sue”, which isn’t really gendered, or wasn’t originally. Unless the usage has drifted a lot more that I’m aware of?

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#426

Post by flatiron »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #322
felipc wrote: post #77

Has Nintendo ever talked about how they do software development? Can we all drop the thousands of books that have been written about software engineering in general and just figure out what they do? Game aside, the reviews have been pointing out how the game performs well (after day 1 patch) and is not pestered with bugs, which is an impressive feat for such an open world game where most things are able to interact w…

There is no big secret to this. They just don't go all out. They don't take big risks. They just see what works elsewhere and polish it until it shines brighter than everything else. And they only add (or take away?) until they have the necessary minimum of gameplay. For example, Zelda BotW is by far not the best survival or crafting-game which was around at release, but it was the most pleasant experience for casual…

Personally I think BOTW wasn’t “seeing what works everywhere else and polishing it” it really felt like a new game nobody had ever done before.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#427

Post by codq »

keenmaster wrote: post #410
Quindecillion wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I played Breath of the Wild, I felt ... nothing. Interesting. Opposite for me. Playing BotW reignited the feeling of playing OOT and MM for me.

I don’t know man. Compare the ambience of Zora’s Domain, music and all, to the equivalent area in BOTW. Compare the divine beasts to literally any temple in OOT. BOTW doesn’t even come close to the magic of Ocarina imo. The story in OOT was also much better imo. Seeing Hyrule as a kid and beginning to love it, then seeing it waste away as Adult Link, and being motivated to defeat an enemy with clear character develop…

Again, ‘as a kid’ is what’s going on here.

I also grew up with OoT, absolutely obsessed and life-defining in many ways. Now I’m a certified Old, and while BotW didn’t click for me initially, I grew to love it and soon understood it to be one of the greatest games I’ve ever played.

That did require me to consider the context though, and force myself to play it with a type of ‘beginner’s mind’.

A few months ago, I decided to give Ocarina a play via the Nintendo Switch Online N64 emulator and—I couldn’t do it. With modern games to compare it to, the graphics, the frame rate, the controls, etc. was just not a good experience and I had to stop.

Same thing happened with Goldeneye. I can’t believe this was tolerable way back when. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

The kids growing up on BotW/TotK will have the same rose colored glasses for those games as many of us have for OoT.

I can’t wait to get off work today and fire up TotK.

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#428

Post by incahoots »

Tepix wrote: post #156
epolanski wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Switch combines lower powered A57 (a soc from..2012 on a 20nm process) with a Maxwell GPU (9+ years old at this point) Honestly this is the time to start working on a Switch successor, they could easily more than double the current compute capabilities while keeping the same or lower power envelope. That doesn't even counts the untapped bonuses from much higher memory speeds. I would instantly buy this, we would…

> I would instantly buy this Why? Will it make the games more fun to play? Does it enable more fun games? I don't see it. Nintendo has always thrived on underpowered hardware.

Something to note is Nintendo makes profits on their hardware where as the other two (Microsoft & Sony) typically take a loss on their hardware, until about midway point of the console's life.

I believe the other two make up the loss on the hardware with licensing rights on the software side of things.

https://www.gamesradar.com/unlike-playstation-and-nintendo-x...

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#429

Post by esprehn »

zac23or wrote: post #415
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #10

Apparently the game is just 16GB and runs seamlessly on a decade old hardware with no loading screens between game areas. How does Nintendo pull it off?

Priorities. For Nintendo, size matters. Time also matters. In an old interview, Someone from Nintendo says that the time to put the disc in the Wii and be able to play Zelda needs to be less than 30sec. A great example is the size of Super Mario Odyssey being 5.7GB and a save file from NBA2k18 being 5GB. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/09/super_mario_odysse...

Apparently the save data was really only 75MB. I'm not sure what could use 5GB in save data... dynamically generated FMV?

Re: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

#430

Post by ascagnel_ »

prmoustache wrote: post #277
kenhwang wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather, I wish it'd have closer to PS5 performance while docked. Mobile performance is totally understandable given the battery/heat limitations. Even smartphones have been thermally limited for performance for the last couple years. What I'd like to see is a much stronger CPU/GPU that gets severely undervolted/underclocked while on mobile (or the big cores in it's big.LITTLE design being way bigger), but a dock that…

That would be counterproductive. Game DEVs would optimize for docked mode primarily and it would clash with the usage of the customers. Many users like the Switch for its portability. My kids only dock the switch when they want to play dance games.

People have been asking for a docked-only/screen-less version of the Switch since it was announced, but I don't think that market is big enough to sustain itself (or would be particularly happy with the result.
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