Like I’m not one of THOSE. I know higher = better with framerates.
BUT. I’m also old. And depending on when you ask me, I’ll name The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask as my favourite game of all time.
The original release of that game ran at a glorious twenty frames per second. No, not thirty. No, not even twenty-four like cinema. Twenty. And sometimes it’d choke on those too!
… And yet. It never felt bad to play. Sure, it’s better at 30FPS on the 3DS remake. Or at 60FPS in the fanmade recomp port. But the 20FPS original is still absolutely playable.
Yet like.
I was playing Fallout 4, right? And when I got to Boston it started lagging in places, because, well, it’s Fallout 4. It always lags in places. The lag felt awful, like it really messed with the gamefeel. But checking the FPS counter it was at… 45.
And I’m like – Why does THIS game, at forty-five frames a second, FEEL so much more stuttery and choked up than ye olde video games felt at twenty?
I think player expectations play a big role here. It’s because you grew up with 20fps on ocarina of time that you accept how it looks.
I’m pretty sure that game is not a locked 20 FPS and can jump around a bit between 15-20, so the argument that it is locked 20 and so feels smooth doesn’t really convince me.
If that game came out today as an indie game it would be getting trashed for its performance.
Funny
I played a lot of Lunistice some time back. It’s a retro 3D platformer that has an option to cap the framerate at 20 for a “more authentic retro feel”. Fun lil’ game, even if I eventually uncapped the framerate because it’s also a high-speed and precision platformer and doing that at 20FPS is dizzying.
And yes absolutely Zelda 64 chokes on its 20 frames from time to time. I played it enough (again, yearly tradition, which started when I first finished the duology in the mid-aughts) to know that.
But it wouldn’t change the fact that its absolute maximum is 20 and it still doesn’t feel bad to play.
Haha that’s an interesting 20fps cap option.
I want to give an example of Final Fantasy VII for the PS1. The battles in that game have very low frame rate, about 18 FPS. I modded the game on steam a couple of years ago and unlocked the frame rate, so it was running at 60fps.
I remember it was transformative to the point where it was unsettling to look at, because I had become so accustomed to 18 FPS for that game.
Absolutely after a few battles I preferred it, but it did strike me that some aspect of the games’ identity was tied to that low FPS. Nostalgia is a powerful thing for me.