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?
Haha that’s an interesting 20fps cap option.
I want to give an example of Final Fantasy VII for the PS1. The battles in that game have very low frame rate, about 18 FPS. I modded the game on steam a couple of years ago and unlocked the frame rate, so it was running at 60fps.
I remember it was transformative to the point where it was unsettling to look at, because I had become so accustomed to 18 FPS for that game.
Absolutely after a few battles I preferred it, but it did strike me that some aspect of the games’ identity was tied to that low FPS. Nostalgia is a powerful thing for me.