Tag: 60fps

1577: Resolutiongate

The absolute most tedious thing about the new generation of games consoles is the endless parade of news stories with the headline “[game name] runs at [resolution] and [frame rate] on [platform]”.

This has happened before, of course, back when the PS3 and Xbox 360 first came out. Billed as “HD” consoles, people were quick to jump on any games that didn’t run at the full, promised 1080p resolution — usually for performance reasons. It was tedious and pointless fanboy baiting back then; it is tedious and pointless fanboy baiting now. And yet still it goes on and on and on, because, well, it’s fanboy baiting that attracts clicks and comments.

I do get the arguments why resolution and frame rate are important. 1080p resolution is noticeably crisper on a large screen, and particularly useful for games where you need to perceive fine details like first-person shooters where you do a lot of fighting from a long distance, or strategy games where you need to be able to parse a lot of information at once. Likewise, 60 frames per second looks lovely and slick — it’s almost impossible to physically perceive anything higher than 60 — and is particularly suited to games in which precision timing is important like, say, manic shooters, music games and driving games.

These two things are not the most important or interesting things about games, though. There are any number of interesting things you could say about upcoming games for Xbox One and PlayStation, and yet it always comes down to this, with the most recent example being Ubisoft’s upcoming Watch Dogs — a game which, embarrassingly, Sony bragged about running at 1080p and 60fps “only on PlayStation 4” only for Ubisoft to subsequently go “aaaaactually, it’s 900p and 30fps…” As the team behind The Witcher commented the other day, these numbers are little more than marketing figures, as Sony’s ill-advised use of them clearly demonstrates; I seriously doubt that Watch Dogs will be an inferior experience for running at a lower resolution and half the frame rate.

In fact, sometimes these things are almost irrelevant, or at least of significantly lesser importance than the universal “EVERYTHING MUST BE 1080p 60FPS” attitude that is starting to take hold these days. Take something like the visual novel Katawa Shoujo, for example, which I’ve been digging up screenshots for to post in articles over on MoeGamer. Katawa Shoujo runs at 800×600 — yes, the 4:3 resolution that your old 386 used to run Windows 3.1 in — and looks beautiful due to its gorgeous art style. Likewise, from a frame-rate perspective, heavily cinematic-inspired games such as Uncharted, Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls actually benefit from lower frame rates closer to the 30 mark because it makes them look more like — you guessed it — film, which has historically run at around 24fps. In these cases, bumping up to 60fps may look smooth and slick, but also looks very artificial and unnatural.

In other words, looking good is less a matter of technical proficiency and more a matter of art style and direction — picking the appropriate means of presenting your title, in other words. Like so much else in gaming, this isn’t a “one size fits all” situation, and I look forward to the day where the industry collectively stops assigning such importance to arbitrary numbers and focuses on the important things.

1381: The Hand You’re Dealt

There’s been a whole load of drama recently surrounding resolutions — exactly what resolutions PS4 and Xbox One games will run at; the fact that Deadly Premonition for PC only runs at 720p; the fact that Typing of the Dead renders at 720p even if you set its resolution to 1080p — and I find it very difficult to care.

I mean, sure, I acknowledge and accept the fact that if you’ve spent a thousand quid or more on a PC — or bought a brand-new next-gen console, for that matter — many people want everything they play to take full advantage of their hardware and look as good as possible… but if it doesn’t, I just shrug my shoulders and move on. It ultimately doesn’t matter; I can think of very few situations where technical deficiencies have significantly impacted my experience to such a degree that something becomes unplayable or even that word that NeoGAF appears to enjoy throwing around: “unacceptable”. (The last was Guild Wars 2, and that was an extreme case; something the game doesn’t like about my particular system configuration makes it run at about 5 frames per second, which really is unplayable.)

I wonder if part of the reason I feel like this is the fact that I’ve spent a significant proportion of time over the past few years playing games that aren’t at the technological forefront. I’ve played a lot of pixel-art indie games, for example, but I’ve also played low-poly stuff, games from the early 3D era, games on PS2, handheld games and even low-budget PS3 games. Hell, three of my favourite games in recent memory — the Hyperdimension Neptunia series — are some of the most technically flawed titles I’ve played for a while, struggling to reach even 30 frames per second at a resolution that I’m pretty certain is not 1080p.

It could also be the fact that I grew up with PCs that weren’t always the most powerful or the best and as such quickly learned how to optimise detail settings for a good balance between looking good and running smoothly. I remember playing Doom on a 386 and finding that balance; that said, I also remember us getting a 486 and it being like a completely different game.

Yes, it’s lovely when something looks beautiful and animates smoothly to boot — one of the best things about upgrading or replacing your PC is trying out something that brought your previous system to its knees and seeing that it runs butter-smooth — but it really doesn’t spoil my day in the slightest if something doesn’t run at 60 or even 30 frames per second. It’s just not something that matters to me in the slightest. For me, the important thing is the actual game itself: is it fun? Is it emotionally engaging? Do I like the characters? Am I enjoying the experience? Do I want to talk about it to friends? Whether or not I can give positive answers to any or all of those questions, “does it run at 60 frames per second?” is not something that even enters my mind at any point.

Note: I’m not saying you shouldn’t care about 60 frames per second or 1080p or whatever — it’s your decision what to care about, of course. I’m simply giving my take on all this — and it transpires that I don’t really give a shit about it at all. I’m happy just to play a new Typing of the Dead, or Deadly Premonition on PC, or… you get the idea.