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Forum - View topicGAME: Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition Nintendo Switch 2 Edition
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AiddonValentine
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60 FPS has never been, at will never be, an industry standard. Anyone who told you otherwise either doesn't understand technology or were just outright fibbing. |
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tuxedo-melvin
Posts: 51 |
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Correct... the industry standard was 60.0988 FPS back in the day  This is actually important for speedrunning because many emulators will run the game at exactly 60 FPS, which means a time loss of a few seconds per hour of gameplay. While it may seem inconsequential this can be a significant time loss and why all serious speedrunners play on original hardware rather than emulation.
in all seriousness though if people don't care about FPS that's one thing but it's just flat out untrue to say 60fps was never a common thing unless someone is just too young to have played console games before the PS3. Although even if you're not a purist who turns their nose up at 30fps things like a game chugging and straining to do 15fps should still be downright condemned or seen as unacceptable. Never played the Switch ports of these Xenoblade games but I do know Pokemon Scarlet and Violet and Mortal Kombat 1's infamously bad framerates which I'd say warrant a question of 30fps should be the minimum |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 5304 |
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It may not be an "industry standard," but it should certainly be a basic customer expectation at this point. As tuxedo-melvin pointed out, the vast majority of console games in the 2D era were designed to push frames at the NTSC/PAL standard refresh rate (granted the way that CRT displays generated frames to display is completely different than modern display tech). It's really only when 3D games started being produced that framerates fell well below that, and this was simply because the hardware to sustain them would have been far too expensive for a gaming console (PC gamers made out much better at this point). As developers became more experienced at working with 3D rendering engines, and more powerful hardware became cheaper, the pendulum mostly swung back toward sustained higher framerates. But somewhere along the line it started swinging the other way, as lack of optimization and ginormous texture usage meant that current hardware couldn't keep up. There are solutions to be had that don't involve spending $1500 on a video card, but apparently most developers (or more accurately publishers) aren't interested in pursuing them. If your brand-new game is outputting only half the framerate that even the earliest flatscreens could display two decades ago, then something has gone very wrong. And really even 60 FPS isn't some holy-grail endpoint itself. My original desktop in college had a chonky CRT display with an 85 Hz refresh rate at 1280x960, and I could definitely tell the difference when it accidentally reset itself back to 60 Hz. That's not even counting the fact that for certain games that require precise inputs, there's still a tangible benefit to running at a framerate above what your display can actually output, in terms of reducing input latency. Just ask some old CS pros what their preferred framerates were. As tuxedo-melvin also noted, a big issue with optimization is making sure that your game runs at a consistent framerate. I've seen clips of Pokemon Scarlet/Violet, and the Pokemon Company should have been goddamned ashamed to release something in that pathetic state for full retail price. As far as I'm concerned no one should have spent a dime on those things. Even as much as I loved BotW/TotK to death, those things could absolutely chug on occasion, which wasn't exactly a good look for these prestige flagship titles. At some point these sorts of performance issues should be called out. |
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Heishi
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Am I the only one who doesn't see what the big deal is of "60fps"?
I mean, does a game not running at 60fps make a game automatically bad or even flawed in anyway? |
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AiddonValentine
Posts: 2973 |
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Higher the frame rate, faster the input basically along with smoother animation, but it's really genre-dependent. For stuff like fighting games, hack and slash, platformers, and racers it's a big difference because those are dependent on twitch reflexes. However, it's not as big a priority for stuff like turn-based RPGs, or even Xenoblade's battle system because those aren't really as dependent on action. It also tends to affect visual fidelity because, well, you're using twice the computing resources. There's a reason who big sandbox games tend not to prioritize frame rate Truth be told, the reason you see so many fights over it is because we've reached that "what is an objective quality marker?" point due to the plateauing of graphics no longer really being a marker for "quality." It's nerd stuff. |
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Fluwm
Moderator
 Posts: 1629 |
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It's a very tedious argument and there's no real merit in going into it, especially when it starts to be about perceptibility -- what is and is not perceptible is gonna vary from person to person.
Anyway, I do generally think there's a lot of value in the "original context" of a game, and as impressive as Xenoblade is, remastered now, displaying in crystal-clear HD, with a silken 60fps framerate, it's nowhere near as impressive as it was back on the Wii. That was the "underpowered" console, using last-gen tech, stuck with SD/480p output only, the console for the then-dreaded "casual gamers." But it was also a bigger, more expansive game -- telling a far better story -- than anything on the Wii's shinier, vastly more powerful (and more expensive) competitors. It was a bold statement on how the scope and scale of a game had very little to do with hardware or performance or any of those other things that gamers tend to venerate. Play it on the Switch 2, and without that context, and... it's still a great game, but far less impressive. I can't see myself ever replaying the Wii original (good god, those original menus alone are reason enough to avoid it forever) but I'm really glad I did, because it floored me. I imagine the 3DS port provided a similar experience (and I somewhat regret never managing to nab an N3DS to try it out for myself). Since we've already brought up Falcom's games here, I'll go ahead and mention that I felt something similar playing through the Trails in the Sky remake last year. Visually, it's the best-looking game Falcom has ever made. And the spell effects and animations -- a frequent pet peeve of mine with RPGs -- are some of the most elaborate and impressive I've seen out of this genre. Really, really good stuff. But at the same time, the transition to conventional 3D visuals has robbed the remake of some of the uniqueness that made the original game stand out so much. Those older Trails game feature some of the most incredible sprite-animation I've ever seen. The battles that'd play out with dozens of sprites jumping around the screen as the camera panned around the environments... astonishing stuff. And not something I'd ever seen in a game before. In the remake, those same battles play out with crisply-detailed models and far better animation than Falcom's ever even attempted before, which looks good, of course, but it's the same kind of good as I've seen in dozens of other games. There's nothing particularly unique or special about it. I can't say it's an improvement. |
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An Unchosen One
 Posts: 210 |
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"Far better" is a massive exaggeration. It's good, definitely well above average, but it also has enough faults and various PS3 (even a couple of 360) RPGs are good on that front that saying it had the best story of its era is a straight-up falsehood.
The original FC and SC never have that many sprites on screen at once, nor do Zero and Azure. Even when there were several enemies, I don't think they ever even get to double digits, and while there are many NPCs, they're spread out enough that you never see more than a few of them at a time. I like the original visuals myself, but playing them up the way you're doing does no one any good. |
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