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GAF Breath of the Wild Wii U performance impressions

atr0cious

Member
The is some stuttering and completes stops in the forest with moblins, but that was like a small annoyance as it's never gotten me killed or lost.

Either my Wii U is busted or you guys have a strange definition of short loading. 15 seconds isn't short.

edit: just tested it.

First loading = 32.5s
Fast-traveling = 20s
Is this disc? Digital is already half this, and only a few seconds if you die.
 

mojo2

Neo Member
I could tolerate the towns but when I hit the first ancient and I got 15 fps on an action scene, I went out and bought Switch.
I'm playing docked and the difference is enormous! Wouldn't have believed it after DF videos.
 
The game chugs quite a bit. I play primarily on PC these days so you would think the FPS would be an issue for me. It honestly hasn't bothered me all that much. I have had bigger issues with just the controls. I can't put the game down.
 

oni-link

Member
So I have it!

17191322_1425594094138935_7182896479532418655_n.jpg

I've only had time to sink 3 hours into the game so far, but it's already an amazing experience, and I can't believe how good the Wii U version looks
(Off screen pic but still)

I've yet to get into any of the villages, but so far the performance has been fine.

There has been the odd drop here and there but considering the graphics and draw distance I'm blown away it runs as well as it does

I'll post an update when I get into the villages and later areas, right now I'm
off to find Impa
 

cyress8

Banned
Bought the Wii U version since no one is stocking the switch in my area. Game looks pretty damn good and only really notice the fps dips in towns or when a decent amount of npcs are around. Load times are pretty great too especially after playing Nioh.

Now just need to beat the game so I can toss in some cheats.
 

The Hermit

Member
I could tolerate the towns but when I hit the first ancient and I got 15 fps on an action scene, I went out and bought Switch.
I'm playing docked and the difference is enormous! Wouldn't have believed it after DF videos.

Even though I am over 40hr in, the constant bad framerate is making me buy a switch much earlier than I anticipated. I was holding until June/July, but I will get it as soon as my friend goes to US ( the switch in my country costs almost 1000 dollars)
 

Lasty95

Member
It really isn't that bad at all.

When i think back to Dark Souls on the 360, or even Bloodbourne more recently, this doesn't even come close.

Yes, it jitters a bit occasionally but it's really no biggie.

It's so spectacularly wonderful in so many ways it seems churlish to complain about relatively minor technical problems.
 
I can tolerate ~25fps, when it hits 30fps it almost feels glorious. The towns and forests are a write off, easily sub 20fps maybe even half that in certain scenarios. Very poor and a shame, but I'm glad I haven't experienced this in combat yet.

However.. I had an instance last night where I had to get somewhere in a time limit which utilised quite a few platform mechanics, the frame rate hindered game play and caused me to fail multiple times.

A massive shame and the thought is constantly there that this may become more common later on in the game.

Loading times for me are also below par in my opinion. Others in this thread have posted curiously fast times, which will lead me to swap my caviar black for some other drives, I'm intrigued. I'm not calling bullshit but I don't get anywhere near as quick loading times compared to the faster numbers posted here.

It's a wonderful magical game but ratings for games sometimes need a bit of cold hard fact over warm personal feeling and it's a depressing shame that the frame rate does effect the game play. This alone means this otherwise perfect game is a 9/10. A rough diamond, but my god what a final gem for the wii u.
 
Even though I am over 40hr in, the constant bad framerate is making me buy a switch much earlier than I anticipated. I was holding until June/July, but I will get it as soon as my friend goes to US ( the switch in my country costs almost 1000 dollars)

Holy shit, which country would that be? And is that the equal of $1000 USD?
 

Sydle

Member
Put about 30 hours on it so far and have been everywhere except Gerudo desert, Hyrule Castle, and inside the Lost Woods. The FPS in the villages drops low, but I wouldn't say it's unplayable. The only place where I've seen it go into low single digits is on Death Mountain, the first magma bomb made it turn into a slideshow.

The game is so good though that I can look past the performance drops that make up a tiny portion of the overall game.
 
The game chugs quite a bit. I play primarily on PC these days so you would think the FPS would be an issue for me. It honestly hasn't bothered me all that much. I have had bigger issues with just the controls. I can't put the game down.
Same. I can deal with dips in towns when there's rain but the controls are pretty bad.
 

Mohasus

Member
The is some stuttering and completes stops in the forest with moblins, but that was like a small annoyance as it's never gotten me killed or lost.


Is this disc? Digital is already half this, and only a few seconds if you die.

Digital, external HDD.

Shrines aren't that bad (no idea about continuing, haven't done that recently), but the initial loading is the worse.
Here is a video that also shows 30s+ to load the first time.
http://www.siliconera.com/2017/03/05/wii-u-faster-loading-shrines-breath-wild-switch/

I was fast traveling a lot trying to find all the shrines. That's when I noticed how slow it was to load the game.
 
I can tolerate ~25fps, when it hits 30fps it almost feels glorious. The towns and forests are a write off, easily sub 20fps maybe even half that in certain scenarios. Very poor and a shame, but I'm glad I haven't experienced this in combat yet.

However.. I had an instance last night where I had to get somewhere in a time limit which utilised quite a few platform mechanics, the frame rate hindered game play and caused me to fail multiple times.

A massive shame and the thought is constantly there that this may become more common later on in the game.

Loading times for me are also below par in my opinion. Others in this thread have posted curiously fast times, which will lead me to swap my caviar black for some other drives, I'm intrigued. I'm not calling bullshit but I don't get anywhere near as quick loading times compared to the faster numbers posted here.

It's a wonderful magical game but ratings for games sometimes need a bit of cold hard fact over warm personal feeling and it's a depressing shame that the frame rate does effect the game play. This alone means this otherwise perfect game is a 9/10. A rough diamond, but my god what a final gem for the wii u.

Just to add to this, considering this is an impressions thread, the fact the Wii U pad isn't utilised in the slightest is criminal. I'm over 50 hours in and it still gets on my nerves I can't look down and see the map. Beyond annoying.
 

Seik

Banned
I started a game this week end, about five hours in.

It is very tolerable, at least the framerate sections are quite spaced out and the in-between runs pretty well.
 

Melon Husk

Member
Frame rate gets rough in towns. Two-thirds of the time it's like 20-25FPS. Outside of towns it's fine.

Loading times don't bother me. There's time to read a hint or two, which I do.

Disc version, installed on internal storage.
 

Social

Member
It's been playable for me 90% of the time, but I had a moment where I knocked a Moblin with one of my hammers on the way to scaling higher for a tower and then the game fell to 0 FPS during the ragdoll. I really thought that the game froze until a few seconds later where everything was back to normal after it fell off the edge.

Just like on Switch
 

lherre

Accurate
Frame rate gets rough in towns. Two-thirds of the time it's like 20-25FPS. Outside of towns it's fine.

Loading times don't bother me. There's time to read a hint or two, which I do.

Disc version, installed on internal storage.

Same here.

I think it runs fine for me. Not bad at all.
 

Metalgus

Banned
One thing that I think is great, is how fast the original loading is. I mean, I can pretty much boot my Wii U, launch the game and start playing in like 2-3 minutes? (I haven't timed it though). I think this is pretty good for an open-world game.
 
You can play it alright on Wii U. Though I'd suggest not playing it on a very big TV, because the lack of antialiasing makes the game look very ugly sometimes (the 720p to 1080p scalating doesn't help either). Also, don't play it with the Wii U Game Pad, it's a very unconfortable way of playing it when you need quick responces.

Aside from that, the games is very enjoyable on the platform. And right now, for those who already had a Wii U, it's the cheapest way of playing the game.
 

oni-link

Member
One thing that I think is great, is how fast the original loading is. I mean, I can pretty much boot my Wii U, launch the game and start playing in like 2-3 minutes? (I haven't timed it though). I think this is pretty good for an open-world game.

The game saves really fast as well, to the point where it worries me a bit

I save before turning it off and the game takes about 2/3 seconds to save

I'm used to that whole process taking at least 10 seconds

I've made it to a village as well now, and yeah it's a little rough with drops, but it's not unplayable, just less than ideal (though it is still a little disappointing, but it must be pushing the system to the max)

Palabragrís;231963958 said:
You can play it alright on Wii U. Though I'd suggest not playing it on a very big TV, because the lack of antialiasing makes the game look very ugly sometimes (the 720p to 1080p scalating doesn't help either). Also, don't play it with the Wii U Game Pad, it's a very unconfortable way of playing it when you need quick responces

I don't have a PS4 or gaming PC yet so the game still looks stunning to me, even with the lack of antialiasing

I'm playing with the gamepad even though I'd prefer to use the much better pro, but the pro lacks the gyro for aiming so annoyingly I'm stuck with the gamepad
 

PtM

Banned
I fear the rag doll shenanigans are bugs in the Havok backend and Nintendo won't be able to do much about them.
 

bengraven

Member
I'm having a blast with it. It skips a bit if you swing the camera too much, but only the first time in a new area. Frame rate is solid. Controls work great though I wish they could have utilized the game pad instead of a big flashing "touch here to enable pad viewing" message.
 

Dash Kappei

Not actually that important
How are those playing it on Wii U finding the game?

It's undeniable that it has performance issues.
How heavy differs from situation to situation: rain/thunderstorms, area, multiple enemies, on horseback, weapons elemental effects, fighting near a lake with all its reflections... so there's really many things affecting how smooth or not an instance of the game is.

I managed to play the PS3 versions of Far Cry 3 and Dragon's Dogma, and enjoyed them despite the performance, is Zelda Wii U worse than those games?

Edit: Can we try and avoid spoilers if possible, thanks

In my experience they're both worse, very much so even. Btw, if you managed to beat TLG and its abysmal performance like I did then Zelda is smooth as a pie in comparison to that lol; it helps a lot that command inputs are nowhere near as laggy as your TLG or PS360 GTAV, not even talking about Dark Souls...
the worst dips are in towns, framerate goes to total shit there (talking about near constant sub-20fps) but at least is the "best" place to suffer the "worst" the game has to offer performance-wise.

I'd say TLOU PS3 has maybe a similar performance to Zelda in the long run as a whole experience, if I had to pick a major AAA release to compare it with; although I still have to beat Zelda and I'm saying that going by memory considering I haven't played the PS3 version of TLOU since the PS4 port debuted.
 
I watched a friend play the Wii U version for a while last night and it looked great, but it seemed that the framerate was worse than what I'm used to seeing on the Switch.
 

PillarEN

Member
After what I'm guessing has been 70 hours of play time there are frame rate drops. They are usually in the cities and stables. I haven't seen any of the ones where the game appears to freeze for a second. Overall it has not impacted my moments of combat and it hasn't taken away from my experience with the game.
 
About 10 hours in, Digital, framerate is about what I expected, but not as gamebreaking as a lot of people seem to make it out to be, imo.

Playing on a 60' 4k samsung and I think it looks good, though I started it up on a UHD enabled input that destroyed the colors. Once I turned off that setting it looked much better. The jaggies don't really bother me, and this is coming off playing Horizon on a Pro for 60 hours.
 
I've put about 20 hours into it so far. I haven't reached any towns yet, after leaving the plateau I just sort of wandered wherever I felt like. There have been sporadic drops with combat etc, but there was one forest area where the frame rate was consistently low the whole time and it really soured my mood. Didn't help that the area was kind of ugly.

Also oddly, I generally find the game looks fine on my 4K Sony TV. It looks more washed out on the gamepad for me. Sometimes the game can look quite good, other times not so much!
 
I've had the frame rate drop and sometimes freeze completely during combat, but that hasn't been as annoying as switching between the game pad and the pro controller and having the game glitch and not be able to move Link at all and have to reset the game.
 
It's bad.

Most towns/ranches consistengly run at 20fps or lower, continued drops during combat are commonplace and sometimes, depending on how you fight, the game might even collapse to the point of "freezing" for a few seconds... What seems to consistently trigger this for me is doing headshots against moblins, especially when there are two on screen.

People will tell you it's not unplayable, and I mostly agree, but it definitely gets in the way of gameplay. And note that I consider this one of the best games I've ever played... But I can tell you that if it were any other game, I'd think of dropping it.

I'm not saying you're wrong but it's just crazy to me how these things that you describe hinder you so much and I so little. I only notice it in towns really. Though I'm sure it happens in combat, I don't catch it while I'm playing.

The gamepad definitely holds up a lot better than the TV, not to mention Nintendo uses some strange color presets I think. It takes a lot of bullshitting with my TV to match the gamepads.

I thought I would care about the performance but it hasn't been an issue for me. My one pet peeve is this tiny little moment of lag the SECOND you step outside the first cave (
the shrine of ressurection
) and it's only because it's so goddamn picturesque and the lag takes me out. The ONE super tiny thing I am looking forward to when I finally rebuy this on the switch is that part not having the little dips it has.
 

AzaK

Member
I'm about 5 hours in on my Wii U version. The drops are definitely noticeable but in my experience only 1/10 of them had me reacting "yurggh". None of them were what I'd call game breaking but the bad ones where when I'd've needing the smoothness for something like accurate jumping.

It's a little sad to have it happen as I tend to consider Nintendo good at constant frame rates and I love Zelda so much this does mke the game feel a little janky.

However I'm enjoying it so far and I'd almost say that what I feel is worse Is te textures. I realise that Wii U is effectively 12 year old hardware but some of the textures are so blurry it ruins the otherwise beautiful aesthetic.

I was temporarily tempted to wait for CEMU but fuck that, it's ZELDA!
 

Amirnol

Member
The framerate in towns and near stables is really unacceptable. With rain it absolutely goes lower than 10fps. It's really hard for me to accept this when the image quality is so poor to begin with. Random framerate drops out in the field aren't too bad, mostly because they happen only here and there. But the consistency of poor framerates within towns is what makes this issue so much more egregious to me. I feel like avoiding towns because of it.

There's no doubt in my mind that this is an amazing game held back by the hardware it's on. I will gladly keep playing but the thought of a possible better experience on CEMU months from now will always be on my mind.
 

Blueblur1

Member
I found an enemy outpost at a northern edge of the map where the game straight up froze for about two seconds straight every 5 seconds or so if I aim the camera at the outpost tree. It's the worst performance I've encountered so far.
 

Astral Dog

Member
Its not ideal but tolerable,towns and load times will make you angry from time to time but as Zelda doesn't require high precision gameplay (the pysichs do most of the work in puzzle solving) in any way its not too bad.
 

coopolon

Member
Probably around thirty hour hours in. I guess I'm learning I'm not very sensnitive to frame rate because I don't mind the Wii U version at all. Also playing it on a 92 inch screen, when you first load it up you notice the aliasing but after awhile you're just playing the game.

Not going to lie, I regret a little not getting a switch (I had several pre ordered) but at the time I wasn't very confident I would be intrested. Now I do wish I had it, but more for the portability than the negligible resolution or frame rate boost. But Wii U version is great and now I'm not out $300 for awhile, now won't jump in until mario at the earliest.
 

Hopey

Member
I beat the game and overall the game is definitely playable, they did not skimp on any effects, its just all low res. It does definitely wish they had faster hardware to see all the details.
 

purdobol

Member
Clocked over 100 hours, right to "not true" ending. Will be playing more when time allows it.

The game is fine on Wii U with exception of towns and stables (at some angles). I think devs made the decision to compromise those areas since there's no combat there. But it still sucks. Kokiri and kakariko are the worst offenders. Gerudo, Goron and Hateno are better in that department.

In the overworld there are places when framerate dips for second and then gets back up to 30 fps. There are also places where framerate dips and stays at ~20/25, fewer but still.

In terms of combat it's all fine. People are saying that finishing blows on some mobs (bokoblins I believie?) hangs the game for a sec. To be honest i thought it was intentional as it bring more punch if that make sense. Feels like bullet time kinda.

In this 100 hours there was one time when it clearly choked for about 2-3 sec in combat. Encountered 2 bugs. One was when fighting giant skeleton, which punch me through the ground to the out of bounds area. The second i'm not sure it was a bug. Got struck 2 times by the lighting on a clear day, but it's possible that was a lynel i didn't see. Come to think of it there was also one instance when the music stuck in endless loop but it was very specific. Killed that big desert monster right before blood moon kicked in. And it didn't respawn, while the battle music still played. Fast travel fixed it though.

But other than that it was very pleasant ride. No blood moon bugs, no save corruption, game didn't crash once, Wii U didn't catch on fire.

It's not perfect by any means, hope they iron out those framedrops in the future. But it does not detract from the experiencie which is the main important thing here. It doesn't get annoying to the point "that's it i'm done..."
 
The worst thing I've experienced is a two-second freeze after killing a big Moblin. This has happened twice. Don't know why it's only with Moblins. The big cyclops guys don't have any trouble, and they're really dynamic.

Using Magnesis in a forested area...you're gonna have a bad time. The overlay it puts on the screen is a serious drain.

The towns having a low framerate is absolutely a thing, but it isn't terrible. I can't count frames, but it's not detrimental. Usually it's worse if you're panning the camera over a town, like when you come out of the shrine above Kakariko. Either my brain settles into it once I'm in the village myself or the performance gets better when it's close up and the system doesn't have to draw everything.

Just to add to this, considering this is an impressions thread, the fact the Wii U pad isn't utilised in the slightest is criminal. I'm over 50 hours in and it still gets on my nerves I can't look down and see the map. Beyond annoying.

This is absolutely valid but I have never felt like this playing it. I kinda hate the gamepad; it feels so heavy and chunky that I just don't like using it as a controller. For WWHD, I set it up on its stand and used it as a map on the coffee table, but played with the Pro. For BOTW, it gets used as an amiibo scanner, then it goes back to its charger.

That said, I do want to know more about the gamepad features they had to scrub out of the game. I'm sure one was a gyro-controlled scope function, which I would have hated.
 

hampig

Member
I'm at probably near 40 hours and have run into an area that actually did cause me problems.

One of the towers that had some of the purple goo on it and a few enemies caused my game to be basically unplayable for the duration of my time at this area until I cleared some of the goo and killed the enemies. It was really bad, like sub 20fps, maybe even sub 10 at moments.

Haven't ran into anything since then or even before that was that bad though. Still happy with the game overall, but that section was mighty annoying.
 
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