This incessant nagging about fps is the most tiresome thing in gaming since gamergate.
I agree up to a point. If a game is at 30 and feels good to play, then I’m OK. For example, Zelda feels great. Controlling Link is tight and snappy.
On the other hand, if the game has bad frame pacing (like Bloodborne), playing at 30 feels real bad.
I try not to get too crazy about frames, but sometimes some games just don’t feel good.
I will say, though, that while I really like channels like Digital Foundry, I sometimes wonder if them picking apart games to show the most minor frame dips is slowly teaching us to see these things, and as a result we kind of subconsciously will be like, “Well now I noticed this game had some moments where the frames dropped during an explosion. Obviously it’s a bad game.” I know that’s some hyperbole, but still.
It’s also heavily dependend on getting used to it. There are games that have a quality and a performance mode where I sometimes start to think I’m at 60FPS until I switch to the actual 60FPS mode and realize that it’s a completely different feeling. Switching back lets those 30FPS seem pretty bad. But if I didn’t had the possibility of switching between those two, I would’ve been happy with the 30.
But as you said it has to be rock stable. I played GoW Ragnarök on my PS5 and that Quality 30FPS mode was just terrible and felt like 20FPS. That of the Final Fantasy 16 Demo is better but here it’s the overdone motion blur that bugs me enough to wan’t to switch to the 45-60FPS mode where the blur is weaker
What is the absolute most important thing about every video game? They all have it in common: there are zero video games ever made, ever, where this isn’t the absolute most important thing that there is.
The answer is: being able to play it. Is a game that crashes to desktop every time you move the camera a good game? No. If I can feel comfortable judging whether or not a video game is any good based on whether or not it passes that single metric, I feel even more comfortable to extend it to “being able to see it without motion sickness and eye strain”. Wanting your game to be optimized properly and not a juddery slide show isn’t entitlement, it’s the bare minimum of functionality.
Sure, but a game is objectively better if it can run at a higher framerate.
Bloodborne is excellent, but it would 100% be better if it ran on solid 60 FPS.
