Do players now value performance over graphical realism? | Opinion
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A friend sent me a pretty good meme this week.
It’s a picture of the scene from Iron Man where Jeff Bridges furiously pokes his finger into the chest of a hapless scientist, yelling that "Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave with a box of scraps!" – but in the meme version, Bridges is carrying a copy of Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It’s Nintendo that has built it in a cave with a box of scraps, and the scientist has Respawn Entertainment’s logo pasted on his white coat.
It got a laugh out of me; maybe you had to be there. It’s probably a lot less funny if you worked on the game the meme – and endless acres of Internet commentary – is taking aim at, Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, a keenly awaited sequel whose launch has been deeply soured by serious technical and performance issues.
The comparison, of course, is unfair in many regards. Tears of the Kingdom is Nintendo’s biggest game of the year and of crucial importance to the company’s platform; it was hardly built in a cave. You could make an argument for the box of scraps analogy, though, given that the game is running on a seven-year-old handheld device that wasn’t even cutting edge at launch.
There are a lot of reasons why TotK and Jedi Survivor perform so very differently, with optimisation and resourcing being arguably relatively minor on that list – but even given the very different goals, challenges, and priorities of these games, it is hard to ignore the final outcome.
One of them – running on a box of scraps – looks pretty great and plays smoothly and enjoyably. The other, running on the most advanced console hardware money can buy, is deeply technically compromised to
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