Comment by yifanl
4 days ago
The Nintendo Switch on a chipset that was outdated a decade ago can run Tears of the Kingdom. It's not sensible that modern hardware is anything less than instant.
4 days ago
The Nintendo Switch on a chipset that was outdated a decade ago can run Tears of the Kingdom. It's not sensible that modern hardware is anything less than instant.
That's because TOTK is designed to run on it, with careful compromises and a lot of manual tuning.
Nintendo comes up with a working game first and then adds the story - BotW/TotK are post-apocalyptic so they don't have to show you too many people on screen at once.
The other way you can tell this is that both games have the same story even though one is a sequel! Like Ganon takes over the castle/Hyrule and then Link defeats him, but then they go into the basement and somehow Ganon is there again and does the exact same thing again? Makes no sense.
> That's because TOTK is designed to run on it, with careful compromises and a lot of manual tuning.
Should I draw from this conclusion that modern software is not designed to run on modern hardware?
Indeed it isn't. That's hard when everything is fighting against it.
Nintendo can do it because they only have one hardware target (unlike multiplatform games) and they can spend an extra year or two doing performance work.
The framing device for The Legend of Zelda games is that it's a mythological cycle in which Link, Ganon, and Zelda are periodically reborn and the plot begins anew with new characters. It lets them be flexible with the setting, side quests, and characters as the series progresses and it's been selling games for just shy of forty years.
ToTK is a direct sequel to BoTW set a few years later and supposedly starring literally the same people though.