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Are Frame Rates Really More Important Than Gameplay?

Are Frame Rates Really More Important Than Gameplay?

Some gamers seemingly can’t see the forest for the digitally rendered trees.

Everywhere you look nowadays, a new piece of tech is popping up that promises to innovate how we interact with our media and entertainment. Our video game consoles are no exception, as the advancements of the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC platforms are nothing short of amazing. Both visually and technologically, hardware today boggles the mind in how it can produce content. However, I’ve been left wondering one important question: what has the cost been?

Take the upcoming release of Uncharted 4 : Thief’s End , for example. It would appear Naughty Dog is struggling to keep their promise of hitting the full 60 FPS mark, with the realities of development making themselves readily apparent. In hopes of managing the gaming community’s expectations ahead of time (flowery talk for avoiding an inevitable s**t storm), game director Neil Druckmann recently spoke with Game Informer about the challenges of pushing the frame rate of Thief’s End so hard.

“It’s really f**king hard. That’s true for any game. It was really hard on The Last of Us Remastered , and that’s a game we had finished and we knew exactly what the end result needs to look like. And here with Uncharted 4 we’re trying to push the boundaries of what this game can look like; and do realistic, real-time cutscenes; and trying to do 60fps is really hard…the objective for us is just to make the best experience. And right now we’re trying to push the look. Then we’ll see where we’re at and reassess. We’re constantly making choices to our production about what’s going to make the game feel best and look its best.”

While I admire the tenacity of Druckmann’s never say die attitude in battling against these FPS issues, his line about “constantly making choices to our production” sounds dangerously similar to cutting just for the sake of visual fidelity (which I truly hope is not what’s happening here). I think any gamer would agree this is a piss-poor reason to make any decision in regards to design. Fortunately, Bruce Straley (also of Naughty Dog) sang a very different tune not long ago pertaining to this same debate. His take was slightly more reassuring. He says the studio will do “…whatever it takes to make the game we want to make. If it means we could go for 60 but lose something that would really impact the player’s experience, then it’s our choice as developers to say, ‘Well, we’re going to go for the experience instead of the 60 frames…there’s things that have been issues in the past that aren’t issues at all right now. And it’s funny because how quickly you forget that that used to be an issue. That being said, just like every piece of tech, what Naughty Dog does is we push the limits to anything and everything that’s in our eyesight, in our reach.”

Are Frame Rates Really More Important Than Gameplay?

So here we have two directors from the same studio, both desperately trying to reconcile the importance of creating a great gaming experience while simultaneously juggling the flaming torch that is modern technology. In this, I feel we as a community bear some of the blame for the current status quo. We’ve bitched and moaned so loudly in the past about things like HD visuals and frame rates, it’s quite possible we’ve set a bar too high for the average developer to consistently hurdle. The hoops we expect them to jump through certainly would explain the mini panic attack Naughty Dog seems to be having regarding the magical number of 60.

Ask yourself this question, readers. At what point did we put the technical specs of a title before the importance of story, characters and richness of gameplay? Seems ass-backwards to me. What about you?

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