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.

  • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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    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 not their fault it’s lesser hardware.

    • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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      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
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        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
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            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
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              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.

        • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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          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
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            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
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              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
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                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
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                  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
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                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
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                  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
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                    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)

    • clanginator@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah I looked and idk what to say - it looks like a switch game.

      If you bought a switch, which was an extremely underpowered when it was released 6 years ago, and then get upset when AAA games releasing on current gen consoles look like dogshit… You have nobody to blame but yourself.

    • stillwater@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Isn’t a PS5 vs Switch comparison kind of like a PS4 vs Wii comparison? They’re not even the same hardware generation, it’s a wonder they’re even dedicating resources to this.

    • ThisIsNotHim@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      It doesn’t look like a hardware issue. Yes, the less powerful hardware is what forced graphical changes, but it looks like an art direction problem.

      The changes mostly fail to capture the essence of the original design. The characters look like they were ripped from the SIMs.

      No one is expecting the same lighting, textures, or poly counts, but they do expect something that looks like Mortal Combat. That isn’t an unreasonable expectation.

      You’re right that this may be a budgeting issue of sorts, but if they can’t set aside enough resources to make it look like some sort of Mortal Combat game, then maybe they shouldn’t have made the port.