There are so many things being tracked all the time in the game for puzzles and the power arm. Yet despites literally tracking sunshadows for some puzzle completion for example it runs almost smoothly with (in my 170h) no crashes. On a 6 yo portable console??
Botw was already impressive but I could grasp it with the shaders and also there weren’t that much physics puzzle. Objects were more static, there wasn’t the two other maps, enemy diversity was limited, same for weapons. There was less of everything overall but I thought it was the limit of the console and the possible engineering around it.
Is there any resources on how they managed to pull this off? White papers, behind the scenes, charts, …?
Digital Foundry has a great video on the subject
Just a lot of visual tricks and sacrifices that people won’t notice due to the great artstyle. The textures are really low quality, the game is often foggy to hide how low quality objects in the distance are, etc.
It’s really a shame to me that more people don’t experience it fogless at 1440p+/60+FPS. It’s BEAUTIFUL.
The best way to play any switch game is via emulation. It’s pretty funny IMO.
You should go read up on the small optimizations that developers do to seemingly surpass the limits of earlier hardware. Stuff like swapping palettes in between scanlines to give the impression of more available colors, or reusing palette swapped cloud sprites in place of bushes to save on limited ram. Good engineers are really, really good. They seem to find a solution for everything.
When I was extracting sounds from the sound banks from the Nintendo 64 game F-Zero X I simply couldn’t find certain sound effects. It turns out that some effects are created during runtime by taking a sound sample and applying certain effects or filters, for instance pitch shifting the sample and looping it in rapid succession.
It’s a clever way to save on memory and the player doesn’t notice if it’s well done. The original Pokémon Red/Blue on the gameboy is an example where it’s not so well done in some places. If you pay attention you’ll notice that some Pokémon’s battle cries are simple pitch shifts of other ones and they didn’t apply any other effects to obfuscate this.
I mean, pokemon needed 151 different battle cries. There is bound to be some overlap.
Pokemon is very optimised. In order to have the feature to give your pokemon nicknames, they had to scrap the other 105 pokemon just so they had enough space to write the code.
Sure, it’s a marvel how they managed to achieve a game of such scope within the constraints of a single cartridge. Still for the cries they could have managed to simply arrange them a bit smarter. For instance if you’re going to have pitch shifts the best place to use them would have been within evolutionary lines (grown up version simply has a lower pitch). So you could probably simply rearrange the existing sounds to make more sense without needing extra storage.
I’m not sure what your experience levels are with code, but breath of the wild source code is decompiled and available online. it was truly eye opening how that game is designed, everything is very modular and parameter based to work within just a few generalized shared systems. I’d guess TOTK took those same systems and expanded the parameter data that can be applied, and added a whole lot more modules using them.
I am happy to read that there are still game devs around that give a fuck about optimizing their code. I am so sick of that whole “hardware is cheap” excuse for wasting resources.
Thinking about it… it’s probably more prevalent in game dev in general than in application software dev. But I digress.
I am so sick of that whole “hardware is cheap” excuse for wasting resources.
When you’re developing a flagship AAA game for the Switch you can’t use that excuse since you’re stuck with 6 year old mobile hardware.
The console was released almost 7 years ago, the chip used is even older at almost 9 years old
The thing is, that it works.
Optimisation is what brought us Pokemon, an open world RPG with 151 different characters, each with their own stats, special abilities, strengths and weaknesses, on a freaking handheld that before only ran Tetris.
Game devs are overworked and underpaid af, so all those layers upon layers of abstractions just handed to you by game engines, at the cost of a ton of performance in order to save brainpower and time, look VERY enticing. Sure, you could spend more time and also spend more money in order to keep devs from leaving your company (because if you don’t keep giving your devs lucrative deals, they WILL jump ship as soon as they can get a better deal, that’s every job in tech) so you can maintain modular, decoupled, high-performance low-level code, but why do that when it’s just as profitable, even more profitable actually, not to?
But Nintendo, despite treating their consumers like shit, is EXTREMELY good with workers (especially in the context of Japan which is probably one of the worst countries on this planet for workers). They make good games because their employees aren’t overworked and underpaid as hell. They don’t have high turnover, they keep their employees over decades because they keep enough funding and effort into their current employees, rather than pumping all of that into hiring like most companies do. That’s why they can even exist despite the Switch being kind of garbage, why they can succeed where Sony and Microsoft are failing, because they attract and keep experienced, quality employees, so they can make quality games.
Game development & design can be one of the hardest jobs in the software engineering industry, and it’s the biggest entertainment industry on Earth by far, yet game devs have some of the worst conditions of any software engineers, dare I say the worst… So by buying shit games from shit companies, people are just affirming their shit practices.
This made me think we need an independent 3rd party to certify games that are “ethically sourced” , so to speak, like they do with cacao and palm oil.
I’d be more likely to buy games where the workers are treated well as opposed to ones from developers that are meat grinders.
Institutional knowledge at Nintendo is pretty good since they don’t do routine layoffs and most people work there their whole lives.
By just copying the last game they spend half a decade on.
“Mer mer mer I didn’t play the game at all and hate it for no reason…”
I did play both games. I just really didn’t like totk because after years of development there were zero changes to the parts of the game that bothered me in botw.
Rant incoming: Combat still sucks ass, 90% of the enemy types are still the same (underground just colors them red), There is no point fighting anyone since you don’t get anything for them, even the chests are useless since all weapons are dogshit without the right fusionite. Dungeons felt less inspired than the divine beasts. World didn’t feel as rewarding to explore since many of the locations are the same or just slightly altered or now just floating in the sky. Performance was even worse prior to overclocking.
In the end im happy I spend €20 on a picofly instead of buying the game.
Rant outgoing: Counterpoint, combat is amazing and you’re just used to it because of breath of the wild. They absolutely did change the enemy types, and besides just being red the enemies in the depths permanently break your heart containers with gloom. Figuring out which enemies drop the best fusion materials is an essential part of the game, which I guess you just ignored. How did you not feel like jumping from floating ships in the sky up to a thunderstorm containing the entire wind temple was just not inspired enough? I’m seriously curious to know what temple designs would have satisfied you.
Counter counter rant: Idek what to say if you find the combat amazing, good for you I guess.
For me the main problem is that it’s way too easy/simple once you learn the counter or jump timing (1st fight if you played botw) and except for the bosses there is just 0 reason to engage in it, since the only thing you’ll gain from it is a replacement for the weapons you broke while doing it.
Don’t get me wrong figuring out the best fusionite weapons is cool but I’d rather have it be an addition to a nice weapon instead of everything you find being dogshit and only worth using once it’s upgraded. Btw It’s still weird that only the melee weapons were affected by the degradation and not shields and bows.
Yes there are some different enemies than in botw, but many are reused and I still feel like there’s not enough of them, and 9/10 times you engage them in the same way.
The dungeons don’t feel inspired enough to me since they all have the same premise, walk around for a bit doing a puzzle and have a fight. The devine beasts were 4 unique experiences at least.
The whole sky island shit is boring as hell since except for the first one you get to they are all the same few parts copied around.
Don’t get me wrong it’s not a bad game, its just not different enough from botw after 5 years. It’s just botw 1.5 maybe even 1.25, but definitely not a 2.0 If they had released it as a large dlc at a lower price I wouldn’t feel as strongly about it.
Fair points, and for sure they did recycle a ton of the content. I think really they were just banking on the completely new ultra hand and crafting mechanic to carry the majority of the gameplay. Cheers.
Ultrahand is definitely insanely cool feature to play with, I just hoped they’d flesh out the basics a bit more. That’s one thing I’d be sad to see go in the next zelda installment, although I’m not sure how they would keep it around. Hopefully the switch 2 allows for even more possibilities but I’m not that optimistic about Nintendo made hardware.
