60 FPS is not automatically better (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Monday, July 03, 2017, 13:51 (2701 days ago) @ Blackt1g3r
edited by CruelLEGACEY, Monday, July 03, 2017, 13:55

BUT... go play nothing but Titanfall 2 for a couple weeks, then jump back into Destiny. You'll feel like you're trying to move while underwater for the first hour or two, until your brain and hands get used to the slower response time again.

Having actually done this, I disagree entirely. I highly enjoy Titanfall 2, but I find still find Destiny's controls feel smoother even though it's only at 30 FPS.

This is where personal preferences kick in, I'm sure :) And from a certain point of view, it could be a semantic thing as well. For example, I can see how Destiny would be described as "smoother" in that the movement and stick controls carry more "inertia". Turning, looking, moving... all these actions have a silky-smooth appearance. But that appearance comes at the cost of responsiveness. Bungie has also done some absolutely brilliant work when it comes to the way player movement is communicated from a 1st-person perspective. The subtle nuances of head bob, limb-animation, field of view particulars... all that stuff is masterfully tweaked to create a smooth appearance, and to avoid disorienting the player.

Titanfall is more stripped back with regards to some of those features, favoring responsiveness above all else. When you combine Titanfall's player-speed with its gameplay verticality and traversal options, it is critical that the player be able to look and move exactly where they want, when they want. To watch someone else play both games, Titanfall will certainly appear to be more "jerky" than Destiny, but that's because the game responds to the slightest little twitch of the thumbstick faster and more accurately.

*edit*

But when it comes to the raw moment-to-moment gameplay, Titanfall's responsive controls allow me to aim better, move with more precision, and maneuver deftly, all at much higher speeds than Destiny. When it comes purely to control accuracy, Titanfall is superior and largely so because of the higher frame rate. But as we've said before, you then get into the discussion of priorities, and where precision ranks on each player's personal ladder.

The point I was trying to stress is that games running at 60fps will inherently control better than games that run at 30fps (unless something else related to input response goes horribly wrong). As you said, that fact will land higher or lower on each gamer's personal priority scale.

I know some people can't tell the difference between 60 and 30 FPS (I can, personally) but 60 FPS doesn't automatically make a game better or control better because there are a lot of other factors in making controls feel smooth. As a practical example, take Halo 2 auto aim. If you drag the cursor from one side of an opponents head to another while you shoot, then the game automatically corrects your aim for the headshot. 30 FPS or 60 FPS is not going to make much of a difference in that case, and could actually make it harder to land headshots depending on how that auto-aim behavior works. Just bumping to 60 FPS might actually reduce the amount of time you have to adjust your aim for the headshot and thus make it harder to kill your targets.

I see this issue from a slightly different angle. To me, this is not an example of "30fps being better than 60fps"... rather, I see it as an example of a flaw in the game's auto aim that was being partially clouded by sluggish controls, and only fully revealed by more responsive controls.

Either way, it's not a black and white issue. I myself have made the argument that the PS3 version of The Last of Us looks better than the PS4 remaster, because the higher in-game resolution only makes it easier to see many of the game's (now) dated textures and environmental details. But my takeaway from that I wish the PS4 version had better textures, not that 1080p isn't an improvement. (And yet I could argue against myself by saying 'but in this specific case, I like the way the game looks better at 720, so 720 is better for this game').

I'm so confused lol