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Tears of the Kingdom is out, and it feels like everybody is playing it. I’m not, and I probably won’t try it for a very long time. Like Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley, Breath of the Wild simply doesn’t click for me, despite my best efforts to understand what everybody loved so much. Things that others enjoy, like the ability to do whatever I want and explore with no set objective, make me feel overwhelmed and aimless. That doesn’t mean I think it’s a bad game – it’s just not for me, but what made me feel like I was banging my head against the wall made others feel like Breath of the Wild was the best game ever made.

Tears of the Kingdom is more of the same, but better, which got it a five-star review from our own Jade King. In fact, it’s now one of the highest-rated games on Metacritic with a 96 rating. Reviewers have been very impressed with how it improves on its predecessor, making it one of the most creative games of all time. (Apparently. I wouldn’t know.) But on Twitter, people are saying it’s hypocritical for reviewers and players to be fine with Tears of the Kingdom being locked at 30 frames per second but still complain about Redfall running at 30 frames per second instead of 60, as it was initially supposed to.

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There are several reasons why people were pissed off about Redfall’s 30fps lock on Xbox consoles. Redfall is a first-person shooter, and some people, like TheGamer’s Eric Switzer, consider 60fps to be an accessibility necessity for those who have trained their eyes on high frame-rate shooters. For him, playing on a low frame rate could be nauseating, but for others like me, it might feel completely normal. That aside, 60fps is widely considered an industry standard for triple-A games on the newest generation of consoles, and it’s a bad look for Xbox when even first-party games aren’t hitting that frame rate on a console advertised as one of the most powerful on the market right now. Of course, it didn’t help that the game just wasn’t very good overall, and even on PC, Redfall was having frame rate issues.

link running towards the edge of a sky island in tears of the kingdom
via Nintendo

Tears of the Kingdom, in contrast, is very much not a first-person shooter. It is an open-world game where you play a twink running around the Kingdom of Hyrule, building things and exploring the land. It’s built to run on a handheld console that was first released in 2017. The majority of people who play this game are not expecting 30fps (though maybe there’s a conversation to be had about our expectations for triple-A games across the board) and are not going to be upset that they can’t play at a higher frame rate. Like Redfall, Tears of the Kingdom has a few frame rate issues, but they’re far less serious and persistent.

These situations are not at all the same, and it’s silly to say they are. Tears of the Kingdom is a gigantic game running on old hardware, and Redfall is a more linear shooter on a very powerful current-gen console. The debate does bring up an interesting point, though, that people will be more tolerant of a game running on a lower frame rate if it’s actually good. We saw that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor got better reviews than Redfall despite running terribly on PC, and that’s because it was overall a better-made game. For the hardware it’s built for, Tears of the Kingdom is doing much better than Redfall, and we’re focusing on the wrong things when it comes to deciding how good a game is.

Next: Please Take Your Time With Tears Of The Kingdom