Silentpony said:
Again, not trying to start a flame war, but how do the two principles exist side-by-side?
The great framerate debate:
A lot of people argue that they don't enjoy playing games which are below [X] FPS. No matter how pulling the story might be or how fun the gameplay is, they don't enjoy the relative sluggishness of the controls. See also: People who can't play shooters on console controllers.
And I don't necessarily blame them. I had a hankering to play the old
Ultimate Spider-Man game a few days back, and discovered that it had a PC release. But upon further research, I also discovered that the game was forcibly locked to 30 FPS with absolutely no feasible way to change it, and on top of that it would experience even further slowdown during large combat/boss encounters. In an action game that focuses pretty heavily on movement and area awareness, that's kinda just not acceptable. It can easily turn a good game into a tedious one, and that just isn't fun.
Also, a lot of people who are fine with 30 FPS take issue with, again, the forced lock of a game
to 30 FPS. Especially on PC, it's not so much that people are absolutely furious they can't play everything at 120+ frames-per-second (though some people certainly do get that way) but rather the fact that game developers and publishers are actively negating one of the inherent benefits of playing on PC in the first place. And when they phrase it the way Ubisoft has here, it comes across as incredibly patronizing and insulting to the intelligence of their audience. As far as it goes on console, I think a lot of people were just hoping that the power of the new systems would allow for a much greater jump than we've gotten so far.
Personally, I don't really define "next-gen" games by the resolution or framerate of them, I'm going to define it by how much more interactive the game worlds can become. As of yet, I haven't really seen a "next-gen" game because they've all just kinda been continuations on the pattern and formula we've had for years already.
As far as resolution or the graphical fidelity is concerned, I personally don't give much of a toss about them. It's far more about aesthetics and optimization to me.
The Witcher 2 is still one of the most beautiful PC games I've seen, even from a technical standpoint, and my laptop can play it far better than games released this year which are only barely even beginning to reach the same level.