Fans have taken to the likes of X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok to question NetherRealm’s decision to market Mortal Kombat 1 as a $70 Switch release. It has been called “robbery” and “disrespectful” to users.

  • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    28
    arrow-down
    9
    ·
    1 year ago

    Realistically it’s entirely possible it took more platform specific work to make the switch version viable than anything else.

    It’s possible, but that’s wild speculation, and I think pretty unlikely.

    It’s not their fault it’s lesser hardware.

    It’s their fault for releasing a 70$ game on “lesser hardware” while not spending the time to get it working and looking well-enough. They didn’t have to release it.

    • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      16
      arrow-down
      21
      ·
      1 year ago

      It’s not wild speculation. The CPU is 20 tiers worse than dogshit and getting anything that’s even a hint of demanding to even function at all on it is a lot of work.

        • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          arrow-down
          9
          ·
          1 year ago

          The game doesn’t cost them less and probably costs them more. Discounting it because the hardware is bad is not fair, rational, or reasonable.

          • thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            6
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            the point isn’t that it should cost less, it’s that it shouldn’t have been released to begin with AND it costs more than most games. the price isn’t really the problem, it just compounds on it to make it all seem worse.

        • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          13
          arrow-down
          8
          ·
          1 year ago

          What’s your point? It’s absolutely possible to make fun games that are simple and not demanding.

          It’s also extremely limiting. The vast majority of recent games can’t possibly be made to run on anything anywhere close to as underpowered as the Switch.

          • SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            6
            arrow-down
            14
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            I am just annoyed when people say the switch hardware is shit. It’s not shit, it’s just a completely different approach, that’s all. Also it’s annoying you’re using one of the shittiest ports ever to push this idea. They could have built this game from the ground up for switch and had something that looked and ran good. But that wasn’t their plan. The plan was a half assed port.

            • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              17
              arrow-down
              4
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              But it actually is obscenely underpowered, even for mobile, and the CPU is a massive limitation that keeps the vast majority of last gen games from being possible.

              It changed the space by showing low end open world games on handheld were possible, but it hit its ceiling extremely quickly. There’s a reason most AAA games didn’t support it, and it’s because it isn’t capable.

              • Who knew?@sh.itjust.works
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                7
                ·
                1 year ago

                Yeah I am a switch owner and also play on my Mac and on Windows with virtual machines, and the majority of switch ports are just garbage and should not have been released. I paid for the outer worlds on switch and it was awful, just a loading screen simulator.

              • ZOSTED@sh.itjust.works
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                arrow-down
                3
                ·
                1 year ago

                I have a PC, PS5, and Switch, and never felt like the Switch was underpowered. Samewise, my phone doesn’t feel underpowered compared to my laptop, because I recognise they’re completely different devices.

                You don’t get a Switch to play the latest God of War, you get it to play Mario and Zelda games, and cute lo-fi indie games

              • SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                4
                arrow-down
                7
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                Yes in a world that expects hardware to always get better and software to always be written sloppily and/or assuming those constant improvements I guess it makes sense to be angry at one of the greatest game consoles ever created

                Remember when games used a few KB of memory and they did smart things to make that work? No you probably don’t because you’d be angered by that hardware’s existence

                • clanginator@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  12
                  arrow-down
                  1
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  Right which is why first-party titles, which are built for the stupidly underpowered hardware found in a switch, run and look pretty damn good for the hardware inside. They are building the entire game around a singular shitty-ass chip. It can be optimized perfectly for just that.

                  But a developer creating a game for PC, Xbox, Playstation, potentially other platforms, AND Switch isn’t going to change the design of the entire game to accommodate the Switch’s dinky-ass hardware.

                  And yes old consoles and games used clever tricks to run well on slower hardware and it was amazing. But I guarantee that every single title you could think of as an example was either a first-party title, or in the case of something like Crash Bandicoot, was exclusive to that console.

                  You’re delusional if you think that third-party devs should be able to meet Nintendo’s level of polish on their console while creating graphically demanding games for current gen.

                  And yes it makes sense to be angry at “one of the greatest game consoles ever made” (okay fanboy) when that console was underpowered when it launched 6 years ago, has TERRIBLE controllers (joy cons are literally the least enjoyable controllers I’ve used, ever, and have serious drift issues), and has held back game development and caused headaches like the situation at hand for devs - they’re essentially in a no-win situation here.

                • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  4
                  arrow-down
                  3
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Who’s angry? It’s not game developer’s fault that it has 10% of the power needed to run a modern game.

                  There is no amount of optimization that could make most modern games run on the switch. It has nothing to do with laziness. If you were a first party making games built from the ground up to be comparable to other modern games, it could not be done.

                  There’s a reason Nintendo leans hard into simple physics and extremely arcade style sports games, and it’s not just to be more accessible to casual fans. It’s because it’s literally all the hardware can do.

                  • Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    2
                    arrow-down
                    1
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    Yeah, the physics on botw and totk are so simple. It hurts my brain how basic those games are.

                    Two of the highest rated games of all time.

                    On switch

                    The most underpowered console of our generation.

                    But yeah mortal kombat couldn’t make the game look even slightly better because it can only be as good at totk. That really basic shitty looking extremely popular and highly rated game.

      • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        No, it is wild speculation. Turning off graphical effects etc. until you get acceptable frame rates isn’t hard and doesn’t take long, definitely not as long as implementing them for the other consoles.

        You don’t need to rebuild the game because the CPU is slower.

        • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          9
          arrow-down
          4
          ·
          1 year ago

          Graphical effects have never been the problem. They’re completely irrelevant and not even sort of part of the discussion.

          CPU performance is exactly the entire problem, and yes, you absolutely do have to make fundamental changes to make it functional. The CPU is the reason the majority of last gen games are straight up impossible to port in any context, and current gen games are much worse.

          • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            4
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Graphical effects have never been the problem. They’re completely irrelevant and not even sort of part of the discussion.

            What? This whole topic is about the lower quality of MK1 on the switch. How is the CPU involved in the graphics of MK1? You’ll need to share a source that this is the problem.

            CPU performance is exactly the entire problem, and yes, you absolutely do have to make fundamental changes to make it functional. The CPU is the reason the majority of last gen games are straight up impossible to port in any context, and current gen games are much worse.

            Please share a source, or at least a detailed description of what exactly the CPU is too slow for to run MK1 with higher quality. It sure as hell isn’t involved in shader execution, which is where most of the graphical fidelity comes from (if you’re developing a game post 2000).

            • Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              6
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              Am not an expert but i think particles and physics are both calculated by the CPU. Both very intensive tasks. Graphic wise, from looking at the screenshot above, it seems they only lowered the quality of model and it looks awful because they went for realism. The not so easy fixable problem is the characters design, Switch games look cartoonish for a reason.

              • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                Physics are calculated by the CPU, but a game like MK1 doesn’t have many physics to calculate - almost everything is pre-made animations. Particles are updated by the CPU, but rendered by the GPU.

                And yeah, that’s why my point was that it’s not the CPU that is limiting the graphics.

            • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              5
              arrow-down
              4
              ·
              1 year ago

              The lower graphics quality is because the GPU can’t do math. There’s no way to mitigate that.

              It’s also absolutely none of the work involved in a port. The work on a port is entirely making the actual mechanics function on a CPU that was terrible for mobile years before the switch launched.

              • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                The lower graphics quality is because the GPU can’t do math. There’s no way to mitigate that.

                Yes, which is why the CPU isn’t the problem. It’s the GPU.

                It’s also absolutely none of the work involved in a port. The work on a port is entirely making the actual mechanics function on a CPU that was terrible for mobile years before the switch launched.

                Please share a source for this. A game like MK1 doesn’t need a lot of CPU power, because there just isn’t anything complicated happening. It’s all GPU that’s missing.

                • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  I spent like 15 minutes looking up and comparing the minimum requirements on PC for mortal Kombat 1 (a game I have no intention of ever playing) and the CPU and GPU of the switch, pointing out that the GPU and CPU of the switch are both so far below even the minimum requirements on PC (which are pretty low tbh)