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[Digital Foundry] The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening Switch Remake - Absolutely Unmissable
#Phonepunk#
Banned
DF time! give me the straight dope.
CyberPanda
Banned
Awesome. Will watch later.
#Phonepunk#
Banned
the good looks beautiful. not gonna lie, i see the framerate issues, but i don't care. can't wait to play it.
no d-pad support tho? that is bullshit. hope they fix that. i want to play this with my SFC-Pro controller.
no d-pad support tho? that is bullshit. hope they fix that. i want to play this with my SFC-Pro controller.
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#Phonepunk#
Banned
the music sounds pretty nice. lots of orchestration.
iconmaster
Banned
An option to lock at 30 would go a long way here.
Interesting that, apart from the swamp, most of the drops are related to area transitions.
Interesting that, apart from the swamp, most of the drops are related to area transitions.
#Phonepunk#
Banned
sounds like the swamp is the new Blighttown. must be the slime!
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iconmaster
Banned
No. Drops to 30 when transitioning between areas (e.g. village to forest) and minor drops throughout. The swamp struggles to stay above 30.
Resolution is also below native most of the time.
MMaRsu
Banned
No, it's constantly stuttering.
Fake
Member
Christ... Any review complain about that or 'Zelda'?
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
Reviews rarely touch on technical anymore like they used to back in the 90's and early 2000's.
Half the reviewers are not even technically adept to even notice.
Ulysses 31
Member
Constantly is a stretch unless you're constantly exiting buildings and going back and forth between areas.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
Just saw the video. Framerate is absolutely trash. It's a 20 minute video and i saw framedrops ever few seconds. its incredibly distracting. Even John admitted as much.
Game looks fantastic and John did a great job comparing it to the previous versions. His videos are getting better and better in terms of production values. Though thats true for all DF videos in the past few years. They have really done a great job standing out.
That said, the framerate is absolutely horrible and is simply inexcusable. You cannot release a game that looks stunning but comes at the expense of such a drastically poor framerate. We saw this recently with Control and now this. The DF video title is Absolutely unmissable. I would rename it to Absolutely Inexcusable. i got a bad headache just watching that vid.
Game looks fantastic and John did a great job comparing it to the previous versions. His videos are getting better and better in terms of production values. Though thats true for all DF videos in the past few years. They have really done a great job standing out.
That said, the framerate is absolutely horrible and is simply inexcusable. You cannot release a game that looks stunning but comes at the expense of such a drastically poor framerate. We saw this recently with Control and now this. The DF video title is Absolutely unmissable. I would rename it to Absolutely Inexcusable. i got a bad headache just watching that vid.
Weilthain
Banned
when I was growing up games would often stutter, take fucking ages to load and would even crash and it was fine and we look back fondly on that. Some framerate issues now and it's embarrassing to watch some reactions.
Yes perhaps with this game they could have resolved the framerate if they delayed it.
But its links awakening on the switch remake, honestly some of you lot don't realize what a classic Nintendo era we are living though right now.
Yes perhaps with this game they could have resolved the framerate if they delayed it.
But its links awakening on the switch remake, honestly some of you lot don't realize what a classic Nintendo era we are living though right now.
D
Deleted member 17706
Unconfirmed Member
I think it looks great in this and Octopath Traveler, at least.
Seriously. I don't let this shit bother me that much.
I've got a pretty decent PC (6700k, GTX 1080) with a 165hz G-Sync monitor, so I certainly love me some fast and smooth frame rates, but I'm generally not going to let a poor or uneven frame rate get in my way of enjoying a game if there's no other way to play it. I would have missed stuff like Demon's Souls, Bloodborne, Days Gone, and tons more.
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The Cowboy
Member
With how the framerate/resolution changes, it's a shame they didn't put a mode that matches the original games single screen loading setup - with less loaded at any one time, that would have possibly allowed a more stable framerate/resolution.
Plus, I would have liked to play similar to how it was.
Plus, I would have liked to play similar to how it was.
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RPGCrazied
Member
I think I'm more concerned with the resolution at 720p docked with no AA.
Huge Zelda fan, so of course I'll buy it. But here is hoping they can at least patch it.
Huge Zelda fan, so of course I'll buy it. But here is hoping they can at least patch it.
Shagger
Banned
Is anybody else a bit bored of people getting worked up over frame rates and resolutions and judging games buy that instead of "trivial" stuff like gameplay, story, design, interface fluidity, style and challenge? A game needs to run at a suitable resolution and smooth enough to not hinder gameplay and I'm not discounting how important that is but there's more to life as a gamer than to get so uptight over this.
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Thaedolus
Gold Member
I definitely care more about how a game plays than its framerate, but there are choices made here like double buffering that significantly worsen the performance issues by cutting it in half any time it drops below 60. 30 FPS itself isn’t unplayable or anything but jumping back and forth between 30 and 60 is jarring and does impact gameplay IMO.
#Phonepunk#
Banned
yeah i had an SNES. i remember slowdown. it was a problem on NES as well. can you imagine if we still had slowdown? how annoying that would be? i'll take stutter over that. tho it might be funny if the game just played at 1/2 speed whenever things got too demanding.
the alternative might have been worse graphics. this game looks really nice even at a lower res. if they implemented a downgrade in graphics or effects that would kind of suck. at least with this, they can still patch it to fix.
only 4 hours to go now...
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Animagic
Banned
chromatic aberration is this generation’s lens flare
BlackTron
Member
After this DF vid I'm actually a lot more sold on this game. Also, slowdowns when entering/exiting an area or a house? I don't know how it would feel in practice but since the original Link's Awakening paused to change/shift every screen, this could almost add authenticity lmao.
Allnamestakenlol
Member
This is gonna look amazing emulated.
grfunkulus
Banned
If the game looks good who cares? I seriously doubt the 576p in this will look anywhere near as blurry as Wolfenstein or Doom.
S
SLoWMoTIoN
Unconfirmed Member
That'll be 60 dollars
SonGoku
Member
Quite the standard you got there, 360p games...
The game looks beautiful despite its technical shortcomings, but it would look so much better at native resolution of the display
Its a damn shame such beautiful game is hindered by a mediocre presentation. Nintendo should have used a 540p screen, 720p is clearly too much for the switch
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grfunkulus
Banned
Right because sacrificing screen quality (what lcd maker makes quality sub 720p screens?) because the more ambitious titles on the platform can't meet native resolution makes so much sense smh.
I'll keep enjoying Mario Kart 8 Deluxe at 720p instead of the Wii U gamepad's 480p, thank you very much.
Lionel Richie
Member
I may be asking something stupid here, but why didn't they just lock it at 30 fps and called it a day?
SonGoku
Member
Most games are subnative rez on switch, subnative resolution has a huge impact on IQ that a lower rez display is preferable
A 540p game on a 540p display, will look better than a 600p game on a 720p screen
Codes 208
Member
Yups, whereas this and a literal handful of games have used this effect, its not even that bad. Chromatic aberration and forced motion blur are far worse.
S
Shodan09
Unconfirmed Member
Framerate is significantly more important than story as it directly interferes with input times for the player. I get more worked up at people who prioritise story, which is completely irrelevant to the actual 'game' part of being a game.
daninthemix
Member
I like the look of the world but not the characters. That character design makes me feel like I'm playing something aimed at 7 year olds.
Gavin Stevens
Formerly 'o'dium'
Lots of chat about the game running smoother/faster/better if you buy the digital copy on installed memory over buying it retail... Great...
Evilms
Banned
Summary
- The game runs in dynamic resolution.
- In docked it goes from 720p to 1080p, the interiors are mainly in 972p, the exterior in 720p.
- In handheld is 720p indoors and 576p outdoors.
- The final game has improved compared to the E3 version, but there are still some framerate drops. It runs in a similar way to the GamesCom build.
- The game shows significant decreases from 60 to 30fps.
- The marsh area seems to be the most affected. On the other areas it rotates much better.
- The game uses double V-Sync buffered, the reason of the 30fps.
- Transition zones also cause framerate falls, John thinks it's possible it's related to the console processor.
- The handheld performance in terms of fluidity is identical to that in docked mode.
- The game runs in dynamic resolution.
- In docked it goes from 720p to 1080p, the interiors are mainly in 972p, the exterior in 720p.
- In handheld is 720p indoors and 576p outdoors.
- The final game has improved compared to the E3 version, but there are still some framerate drops. It runs in a similar way to the GamesCom build.
- The game shows significant decreases from 60 to 30fps.
- The marsh area seems to be the most affected. On the other areas it rotates much better.
- The game uses double V-Sync buffered, the reason of the 30fps.
- Transition zones also cause framerate falls, John thinks it's possible it's related to the console processor.
- The handheld performance in terms of fluidity is identical to that in docked mode.
Gavin Stevens
Formerly 'o'dium'
A brief explanation of what double buffering does. For vertical synchronization, or v-sync for short, the game will attempt to render the frame on the screen without any form of tearing. The downside of this is two fold; One, it will have increased input delay pretty much always, unless you are hitting way over the desired frames. And two, if you don't hit your desired frame rate, things tend to get messy. Now, double buffered vsync is just... Its just the worst. The game will attempt to render at 60fps, but if it can't hit that target it will drop it down to the next suitable field, 30 fps. Even if the game is hitting 59fps, if the frame time goes over 16.67 ms, the game will drop it down to 30fps.
The issue, from what I can see, is that the game is really having a hard time keeping that frame time, and as such you will go from a high frame rate to 30 in seconds. Now, why they picked double buffered is anybody's guess... This just isn't the type of game for it. They can't really do triple buffer that easy on Switch, the memory/bandwidth isn't exactly there.
So anyway, what happens, from what I can see, is every time the game loads in new data, the game can't actually handle this, and will drop frames. At this time, the fps drops to 30fps, because its missing its frame time minimum threshold. Instead, they should just scrap double buffering, because its just utterly dreadful. Either that, or cap the game at 30fps and level out the frame time. The fact that neither of these were done, and instead they picked the solution they went with, gives me no hope in them as full console developers.
Now, the GAME itself is utterly incredible. It always was. But from a technical point of view... Wow, this is really quite a poor showing.
Also, don't give me that "FPS don't matter, enjoy the game" shit. This IS the game. You try playing COD at 60fps and then dropping to 30fps at random times for zero perceivable reason, you will soon go crying.
The issue, from what I can see, is that the game is really having a hard time keeping that frame time, and as such you will go from a high frame rate to 30 in seconds. Now, why they picked double buffered is anybody's guess... This just isn't the type of game for it. They can't really do triple buffer that easy on Switch, the memory/bandwidth isn't exactly there.
So anyway, what happens, from what I can see, is every time the game loads in new data, the game can't actually handle this, and will drop frames. At this time, the fps drops to 30fps, because its missing its frame time minimum threshold. Instead, they should just scrap double buffering, because its just utterly dreadful. Either that, or cap the game at 30fps and level out the frame time. The fact that neither of these were done, and instead they picked the solution they went with, gives me no hope in them as full console developers.
Now, the GAME itself is utterly incredible. It always was. But from a technical point of view... Wow, this is really quite a poor showing.
Also, don't give me that "FPS don't matter, enjoy the game" shit. This IS the game. You try playing COD at 60fps and then dropping to 30fps at random times for zero perceivable reason, you will soon go crying.
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grfunkulus
Banned
And yet no one was crying when Cod 2 released on 360 (double buffered framerate).