this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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[–] Donut@leminal.space 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)
  1. Pokémon games aren't developed by Nintendo.

  2. Bad performance isn't always caused by lack of resources. It's more often bad optimisation / resource management.

[–] IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Donut@leminal.space 4 points 4 months ago

Optimisation has its limits, yes. The difference is that Nintendo is satisfied with targeting 30fps for a lot of games, and not caring as much about framedrops as long as the core gameplay is solid and works relatively bug-free.

They spent 12 months optimising Tears of the Kingdom, and it still has areas where there are slowdowns. It was not unfixable, they just decided it was good enough.

Its hard to compare games directly as each has their own constraints and dependencies. BotW for example was also released on Wii U, and that was a limiting factor. I don't remember stuttering in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, but they did make it run at 30fps when playing with 3-4 players, if you mean that?

I think a more egregious example would be Hyrule Warriors in co-op, but again this is Koei Tecmo and not in-housed developed so they didn't have access to the same resources and tricks that Nintendo has.

They could have spent 12 months getting those 10-20fps moments smoothened out, but it was probably not worth the investment as 99% of players don't care or don't even notice when a game slows down a bit.

[–] greenskye@lemm.ee 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Donut@leminal.space 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If The Pokémon Company decided to put some polish into those games instead of pumping out 3 within 15 months, I'm pretty sure most performance issues could have been solved or alleviated.

In the same vein, better hardware would not have automatically meant that the game would run without such issues.

[–] greenskye@lemm.ee 2 points 4 months ago

I mean they could. But just as Nintendo doesn't need to offer better hardware due to how much people want to play their games, Pokemon doesn't need to do better optimization because people play them anyway. It's honestly unlikely that a better optimized game would have significantly affected their sales numbers.