HiGame

During last week’s E3 extravaganza, Nintendo finally dove deep on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The upcoming installment in the 30-year-old franchise rejects much of Nintendo’s recent history, and embraces a massive scope with complex gameplay systems. This is good news for fans who’ve fallen away from the series, but Nintendo might be asking too much from the Wii U’s limited hardware.

Nintendo streamed a significant chunk of the game last Tuesday, and E3 attendees were given the opportunity to play the game for themselves. We’ve only seen a sliver of the immense world Nintendo has promised, but the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Our sister site IGN named Zelda the game of the show, GameSpot called it one of the best games of E3 2016, and it even made our own top ten list. Nintendo has definitely dropped the ball these past few years, but they’re still capable of impressing even the most skeptical among us.

The new mechanics and the gorgeous art direction are exciting, and Nintendo deserves praise for stepping out of its comfort zone, but the E3 demo suffered from some serious performance problems. Digital Foundry analyzed the gameplay footage from Nintendo’s stream, and found that the frame rate was far from a locked 30fps. When you’re simply running around in the open world, the frame rate is reasonably stable. But the moment you start battling foes or setting fires, the game can drop into the low 20s.


more...