The PC elitist: The Frame Rate Police

Glad you still do this stuff. long time subscriber here.

I do a lot of programming across the spectrum and research into how game engines work. For a Triple A title, I expect to be able to run at 60fps at Medium settings even on a 5 year old system. I continuously upgrade my machine as hardware prices fall, so I have a pretty powerful system. When Assassin's Creed Unity came out, it barely could run at 30 fps on low settings on a system with dual Radeon R9 290X. I was pissed! For 2D type games, there should be absolutely no reason why the game can't run at 60FPS. Having a game run at 60fps doesn't change the art style or feel. The reason the steam curator group was started due to developers giving the reason of aesthetics. There's a lot that goes into measuring FPS and capabilities of monitors, but in general, the old consoles with analog video output had 50/60fps output. Some may argue that a SNES could only output 30fps, but a full image requires 2 frames. Older PC games like Doom TotalBiscuit's Video on 30fps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXJh9ut2hrc Doom Framerate: http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=40699 http://30vs60.com/ http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-the-case-for-30fps-pc-gaming

The group isn't meant to judge a game's value solely based on the frame rate so much as it's meant to give users easy and convenient way to access information that's important to them. While I do thing that it's important to do a bit of research before buying any PC game, I also don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for that info to be available right on the game's front page on Steam. This is actually why the group was started, as opposed to the "shame developers" story many people will tell you. Because Steam doesn't allow you to use "30 fps" as a tag, TB thought that a curator group would be the best way to mark 30 fps caps right on the front page. The way the group actually works is that the community lists games with a 30 fps lock (along with a source for verification), and if it turns out the game has that lock, it gets added to the curator group. It's nothing more than a source for factual information, yet somehow this pissed off a lot of people for no good reason. It's also worth noting that TB also started listing the genre for the games on the list, as a 30 fps cap is more detrimental for say an fps as opposed to a menu based card game or something like that. I myself am not a programmer either, but you're correct when you say that engines sometimes tie important game logic to a specific frame rate (game logic being physics, animations, AI functionality, etc.) A good example is Way of the Samurai 4: that game was originally a PS3 title, and when they were developing the engine/code base, they chose 30 fps due to the hardware limitations. During initial development, however, they tied the AI functionality to that 30 fps rate; this means it cannot be properly unlock without the developers going back and extensively re-coding the engine itself, which can be incredibly time consuming. All that having been said, we've had ways around this sort of thing for years. Fighting games crucially depend on staying at a consistent fps due to factors like frame data, which is why they are always locked at 60 fps, but almost all other genres can work at higher/varying frame rates if they're designed to do so. For example, Devil May Cry 4 is of a similar genre to Way of the Samurai 4 in certain regards, but that game can go all the way up to 120 fps (though it admittedly does cap at 120). A good portion of those locked games are from Japanese developers, because they're simply behind the times on these things and generally tie logic to frame rate instead of working around it the way a lot of western developers do. My opinion on the matter: unless you're making a fighting game, don't cap the damn frame rate! If a developer does so, it generally comes down to using dated programming techniques. As you said, you may not be able to hit 60 fps consistently in The Witcher 3 right now, but what about in 5 or 10 years when you're running on much better hardware? The biggest reason PC gaming is so great is because it's a modular platform and offers such a staggering degree of customization. Developers should always have this in mind when they're developing games for it, whether that be a port from consoles or a PC centric title. A 30 fps cap may prevent me from buying a game depending on how detrimental it is to the gameplay, but even if it doesn't I certainly won't pay full price for a game like that.

your ending statement is the reason for the group the group was made for the people that care about the frame rate, to warn them that the game might not run to their liking, so they don't have to check that on every game kinda like on some cereal (where i live anyway) there is a warning saying 'traces of peanuts' and even though most of us don't care it really helps out the people that needs it

I really don't see the problem with the Steam curator. They are just informing gamers, not condemning developers. TB has made this clear on multiple occasions. People always have to take it too far, on both sides. Members of that group by harasssing developers, and developers saying that it hurts their sales which hasn't been proven at all. And developers have the power to remove curators from their product's store page, Vlambeer already did that. And now there's complaints aimed against them for censoring. People can be exhausting...I'm pretty sure there are bigger problems in the world :P

Those kind of groups are great ways to put pressure on developers to stop doing retarded things, that was essentially what PCGamingStandards (now defunct) was about, I'd list lots of things that PC gamers find annoying like inability to set aspect ratios or FoV and then name and shame the worst. It's a crying shame that something so simply to implement in a game is done badly, in fact it tends to be the indy developers who actually in touch with their audience that get these things right, compared to AAA devs who just perpetually mess this stuff up. Locking at any frame rate is just downright unacceptable.

Get some inflammatory titles to videos! On the point about not playing multiplayer because idiots. I remeber the nightmare which was xbox live chat...from people blaring music so loud you can hear it in there microphone, to screaming crying children in the background, barking dogs, T.Vs you name it. On PC this has only been an issue a handfull of times. On console it is a daily onslaught of stupidity and nonsense.