Archive link: https://archive.ph/NF2r0
At some point, getting Nintendo would be a career moment and I honestly believe a good move for both companies. It’s just taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off of their own hardware. A long time… :-)
Something I dislike is bad. I dislike things because I subjectively find them to be bad. But don’t confuse poor performance with being old. We’ve done 60 FPS long before 2017, but they didn’t make it a priority for Zelda. They didn’t even seem to care about making sure 30 FPS was stable. The game they made is too big for that hardware to ever hit that metric, or the native 720p that the Switch supports. Metroid Dread, on the other hand, doesn’t break a sweat.
It’s objectively a flaw in an interactive game to remove interactivity for a minute and a half on a frequent occurrence like someone joining or leaving an island, and I think you’d have a hard time finding someone who thinks manually crafting the same item 30 times in a row rather than being able to do it in bulk is somehow better for the vibe the game is going. It’s not my preference for weapons to break as quickly as they do in Zelda, but at least I understand why they made that choice, and it’s not a fault of the quality of the software. It would be objectively better for Smash Ultimate to have less input delay and be more responsive. People have measured it at 6 frames, and Street Fighter V had a rough time back when it had 8. 3 or 4 is manageable. The most responsive fighting games have 1 or 2.
I dislike good things. I dislike Dark Souls, a game made with vision and care that a lot of people love, because to me it looks ugly, feels clunky and just utterly miserable. But sometimes you have to understand that things are not made for you specifically. Yeah, subjectively it is bad for me, but it’s also good overall, no matter what I feel about it.
If Tears of the Kingdom was a native 1080p 60 fps game, it wouldn’t have a whole system of physics-based interactive modular devices. Game developers are amazed that Nintendo even managed to get such complex systems running. Of course it’s more demanding than Metroid Dread, does anything in it even remotely compare? That game doesn’t even need to render distant landscapes, it’s all small rooms and predetermined backgrounds. Do you think that was a lack of wanting to make it happen?
Maybe if a new console comes along and it’s ported to that it will run better and look better, but for now, everything it can do comes at a cost.
I already acknowledged and agreed with you that Nintendo’s online is bad. But there’s more to those games than that. Aside that aspect though, what about Smash’s gameplay, visuals, music? It’s not like that game is only playable online, and thank goodness for that.
What about the variety and detail of Animal Crafting’s clothing and furniture, or the behaviors of the villagers, or how customizable is the island this time around?
Ugly, clunky feeling, miserable games are things you’d find to be bad. You don’t have to acknowledge that other people like it if you find it to be bad. You can just say you think it’s bad, at least with a clarification of why, or understand that when I say something is bad, it doesn’t mean you can’t like it, especially since I clarified why. I’m not obligated to say that something is good just because other people like it.
It could on hardware that they don’t legally allow me to run it on! And that they don’t let me do so is bad.
No, I said that it was for lack of designing a game that can run well on the hardware they restricted themselves to. And if we were still in the 2017 world where the Switch is the only way to play a game that demanding portably, or even here in 2023 where it would be the cheapest way to play a game that demanding portably, it would be acceptable, but not when it’s the only way to play the game at all.
I love Smash. But I also don’t live in a dorm room anymore, and online is the primary use case for most fighting games. I go to locals, but if I get my ass beat at a local and go home to practice, my way to practice it is to go online, and its online sucks. Having bad online in a multiplayer game these days is about as bad as not having subtitles in a story-driven game or missing any other standard feature. The input delay is also rough even when you play locally.
I’m not the target market for Animal Crossing, so don’t worry about what I think of it. My girlfriend was the one who played it. I played that first one on the Gamecube, and even back then I eventually became a little grossed out by how they wanted to make that game a habit like mobile games do today by making you afraid of weeds piling up. I do feel pretty confident in evaluating how bad those two aspects are when I could frequently walk through the living room and see the same few flaws over and over again.
If Nintendo games weren’t trying to sell you on a console, do you really think they’d be trying so hard?
I’m old enough to remember the Dreamcast era Sega and their output after that. Sega’s software teams went fucking hard trying to create awesome new experiences that you could only get on Sega’s console. Their output quality dropped considerably and they played it boringly safe after they dropped out of the console market.
It’s interesting that your example is Dreamcast, because while every company that doesn’t put out a console also has an incentive to make great games, this also shows that making great games isn’t enough.
Kind of. A big part of Sega’s situation is that they shot their reputation in the ass with a 12 gauge in the mid 90s. They were pumping out platforms left, right and center only to discontinue them within a year or two (Sega CD, 32X, Saturn).
Nintendo have been very careful not to make the same mistakes, but even then a lot of people initially had little faith in the Switch because of the WiiU. Even Gamefreak didn’t want to release Pokémon games for Switch initially.
As for other companies, their goal is to make titles that sell well on the platforms it releases on. They can afford to rely almost completely on what has come before, all they need to do is do it well.
The goal of a first party game is to sell itself and the platform. So they need to be doing things that other games aren’t, in order to sell the idea of ‘you can only get this experience with platform X’.
I think this is the exact idea that Sony and Microsoft realized doesn’t make financial sense anymore, and that Phil expected Nintendo to come to late.
Phil Spencer of Microsoft thinks this idea doesn’t make sense because they haven’t been doing it well in years. The big innovation with Halo Infinite is live services and an open world. Their exclusives aren’t doing anything other games aren’t.
Sony is a bit better and covers a few more genres, and if you’re into heavily-cinematic games, Playstation is your no-brainer choice, they’ve got you covered in all sorts of genres. And they’ve got the Spiderman games.
Nintendo, meanwhile practically owns the kart racing genre. There is literally no other AAA effort that isn’t cash in crap or loaded up with so much MTX crap that even Fortnite would blush.
Mario Oddesey might have a bit more competition nowadays but in 2017, your only options were Oddesey, a (very good) indie game, and a neutered reboot of Ratchet and Clank.
Breath of the Wild came at a time when most open world games were very rigid when it came to how players dealt with tasks and enemies. BoTW gave players a lot more options thank simply going in quiet or loud, and ToTK took it much further. They practically changed how other companies look at open world games.
Nintendo puts AAA efforts into entire game genres that most other companies ignore entirely, even if the audiences do not. This is how they’ve maintained crazy Switch sales.
Sony’s games are on PC now. Final Fantasy restricted itself to PS5 and underperformed. Games that those platforms use to sell their platforms also come out on PC because they just cost too much to make, and there are too few of them because of how long they take to make now. Nintendo generally spends less, but they’re still running into the same problem with development time, and that means their exclusive offerings will dwindle as they have to ramp up fidelity on more powerful hardware, just like what happened with Sony and Microsoft, which means fewer and fewer games that can only be played on that specific set of hardware. Third party exclusives mostly disappeared because, for the same reasons, restricting yourself to one platform is generally a stupid idea these days.
As an aside, racing games in general are rare these days, not just kart racers. My options are Mario Kart, sim racers, one step down from a sim racer like Forza Horizon, and little else. I like racing games, but not any of those. The market will come back around; I’ve got Trail Out right now and Aero GPX in the near future that will hopefully tide me over until someone makes racing games for me again.