Bayonetta Origins Director Weighs in on the “30fps vs 60fps Situation”

With Endless Ocean Luminous out this week, shortly followed by Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door on May 23, 2024, the 30fps vs 60fps debate is heating up again.

With Nintendo remaining coy about the new changes that have been implmented for the Switch release of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, complaints are coming in hard and fast regarding Nintendo’s decision to opt for 30fps. However, a professional opinion on that matter has appeared, as Abebe Tinari, the director of last year’s Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon, has weighed in, taking to X to share his thoughts across 7 tweets. We have rounded up his full comments here:

I can empathize with the devs of Paper Mario: TTYD on Switch with the whole 30fps vs 60fps situation. We tried for a long time to get Cereza and the Lost Demon running at a stable 60fps.

We were able to maintain 60fps inside the Tír na nÓg stages, but it just wasn’t possible to keep the same visual fidelity and hold 60fps in the forest. My choice was either to have an unlocked framerate with frequent dips to 30~50 fps, or cap it and hold a stable 30fps.

The most difficult part of game dev is making choices about what to prioritize. Everything has a cost, both in terms of dev time to implement it, and in terms of processing time when the game is running…ultimately you simply cannot have everything.

CatLD may not look visually complex, but there is actually a ton of post-processing going on under the hood: the colours fading in like ink as you move through the world, the shading patterns on objects, the way the world curves to allow you to see further into the distance.

All these visual effects have a processing cost. I felt the picture book look was integral to the overall experience, so it was not worth throwing it away to hit 60fps. I imagine the team making Paper Mario faced a similar dilemma.

It would be one thing if this were an enhanced port of the original game (i.e. the version of Pikmin 1/2 for Switch), but this is a full rebuild of the game. I am sure they wanted to use modern techniques to really make the paper aesthetic shine…and these have a cost.

All I an say for certain is that the team made the choice that they felt would lead to the best overall experience for players. I promise you, it was not a decision made lightly or out of “laziness”. I missed out on the original, so I’m looking forward to playing it on Switch!

Source: Abebe Tinari