this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
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Mechanics alone don't need as much power as you claim. The most mechanically complex open world game I've seen is a Switch-exclusive: Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. The most beloved mechanically interesting Assassins Creed is on the Switch too: Black Flag. If you want complex fighting mechanics instead, there's Monster Hunter and Bayonetta too.
Yes, they do, especially in an appropriately populated open world.
Zelda is empty with obscenely basic combat and movement that would have been unimpressive on GameCube. If you think it's what mechanics mean, we can end this here, because it's a joke. It's an incredibly low fidelity, entirely surface level facsimile of complexity. Any interaction can be entirely mastered in 5 minutes, because there's not the tiniest shred of the tiniest hint of depth.
I'm not talking about movement or combat here. Once again, there are Monster Hunter and Bayonetta for that, both running great on the switch.
Zelda on the other hand got the most impressive amount of systems running in the background. We've got a dynamic lighting system, a day-night-cycle, a weather system, the most impressive physics engine I've ever seen, elemental interactions - just literal tons of shit you can interact with in many different ways. Most open world games aren't even close to that level of interactability with the world.
Having more movement options, combos and whatnot don't actually require much more hardware power. That was an intentional choice, not a limitation in the case of both Zelda games. (On top of that, did you even play the game? You have an obscene amount of combat and movement options if you try building interesting constructions.)
And, getting back to the actual topic: Neither Witcher game had complex movement or combat and a lot less systems running in the background. Witcher 4 won't play drastically different either, I'm quite sure. It's all about prepping the right buffs, not about having deep combat.
There is no part of Zelda that resembles complexity in any way. It can run on a potato because every system it has is multiple tiers below potato level. It's a criminally simplistic game by every reasonable standard.
Yes, I have played it. I had hoped they'd moved from the tech demo botw was into an actual game, and it was a crazy letdown. It doesn't even have much complexity by the indie standards Nintendo generally targets.
Having high precision movement and move sets in 3D absolutely does require a lot of math. Witcher 3 was still shallower than it should have been, just not compared to the absurdly low bar set by Nintendo. If they dumbed the Witcher down to Nintendo levels, it would be a crime to sell it for $5.
It's fine if you don't like them, but calling the most popular and genre-defining open world games in recent memory bad on the very thing they are praised for is simply a bad faith argument.
Zelda BotW and TotK are the literal poster childs for 'systemic games'.
They objectively do not have anything resembling complexity in any way. That is not a matter of taste. The math they do is simplistic because the hardware is not capable of running anything resembling a system with a hint of complexity.
Calling them complex is like calling 30 year old Madden as complex as modern Madden because the surface level is the same sport.
The actual 3D physics are a joke. They're empty, simple sandboxes. Popularity isn't complexity.
If you think there is no complex math behind your ability to freely build 3D machines with different propulsion methods, buoyancy, air resistance, light, particle emission and movable parts at any angle, then you know nothing about math in games.
Like everything else, you can do it in terrible quality with trivial math, or you can do it for real with heavier math.
Nintendos version is two steps down from trivial.
Name a single game that does it better. If it's both trivial and popular, there must be many examples!
Kerbal space program.
Except it's actually good.
That's a great game, I agree! Anyway, the developers themselves thought it could run on a Wii U - there's even an official trailer for it. While it was cancelled in the end, that happened to many other games too since the console itself was a monumental failure and the team had already much on their plate with every other port at the time being buggy as hell.