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?
Yeah but even now you can go back and play Majora’s mask, and it not feel bad.
But as mentioned the real thing is consistancy, as well as the scale of action, pace of the game etc… Zelda games weren’t sharp pinpoint control games like say a modern FPS. Gameplay was fairly slow. and yeah second factor is simply games that were 20FPS, were made to be a 100% consistant 20 FPS. A game locked in at 20, will feel way smoother than one that alternates between 60 and 45
No more optimizations. This must then be compensated for with computing power, i.e. by the end user. These are cost reasons. Apart from that, the scope has become much larger, making optimizations more time-consuming and therefore more expensive. In the case of consoles, there is also the fact that optimizations have to be made specifically for a hardware configuration and not, as with PCs, where the range of available components is continuously increasing. Nevertheless, the aim is to cut costs while maximizing profits.