i know conventional gamer wisdom says otherwise but i think this just goes to show how more horsepower just leads to diminishing returns at this point. people call the switch underpowered but it’s best selling game is a wii u port! gone are the days of each generation looking infinitely better than the last
Eh, I think this is more indicative of the power of Nintendo IPs. My wife has been playing a lot of Pokemon Scarlett lately and it visibly struggles and has crashed or frozen at least a couple of times. This isn’t the only switch game to do this either (none of them ports too).
People are just willing to put up with a lot of jank in order to play Nintendo games. If Nintendo didn’t have such strong titles and only released those titles on Nintendo hardware, the switch hardware probably would’ve failed. The winning move was to heavily invest in strong games and then lock those games into their walled garden.
The online critical fanbase is not the mainstream fanbase. Plus, the games are made by Game Freak, and Pokemon is owned by the Pokemon Company, so ripping “Nintendo” would be misguided.
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Pokémon games aren’t developed by Nintendo.
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Bad performance isn’t always caused by lack of resources. It’s more often bad optimisation / resource management.
Even Zelda is stuttering. Or Mario Kart 8 when you play with multiple people.
Not everything can be saved by optimization. Even if it could, throwing more horsepower at the game is cheaper than having every game-developer write assembly code. Switch hardware is tragically slow and it shows in 3d games even with optimization.
It’s an exclusive to Nintendo hardware. They only make these games for switch. If you want to play Pokemon, you have to buy a switch. My point was that people love games like Pokemon so much that they’re more than willing to buy sub standard hardware to play it, even when the experience of playing is obviously hindered by that hardware. The IP overcomes any negatives from the poor console hardware.
I play switch just because it’s fun. It’s portable, got the cute little remotes. Have no interest in Nintendo games.
The switch does struggle running higher resolution graphics; I can emulate BotW/TotK to look much better on PC simply due to having access to a stronger GPU.
4k gaming on PCs is still hard to accomplish without a high end machine, so I still think we will be seeing improvements with generations; at least until 4k gaming can be done on mid level hardware.
But you don’t need 4k resolution to have a great game. That’s what OP is getting at. When making a game for beefier hardware, you can use the better graphics as a crutch instead of focusing on better gameplay and story.
Lol don’t stress they are literally talking about 4k on a 720p handheld, clearly brain damaged.
i see comparisons of switch games on hardware and in emulators all the time and can never tell the difference, and same for all these recent 4k remasters. i am glad that there are options for people who can tell and do care but it’s nowhere near as noticable to your average joe compared to the jump from snes to n64 or n64 to gamecube. or perhaps i am just a spectacularly below average joe haha
This was already established with the gameboy vs… everything else.
Ancient hardware. Complete market dominance.
