Nintendo
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom has a big problem, but it is not in about its gameplay
While The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom has been extremely well received by critics and players, it’s still got a pretty big issue that can sour your experience.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom was released this week to extremely positive reviews, already being enjoyed thoroughly by fans. With the 2D aesthetic of the Link’s Awakening remake for Nintendo Switch, the new adventure puts Princess Zelda as the star of the game, letting players control her as she goes around a massive Hyrule with new abilities that let her interact with the world in never-before-seen ways.
And while the game is exceedingly fun, there is one big issue with it that can’t be ignored: its performance. As it turns out, while the title looks and sounds fantastic, the Switch seems to be having some issues when it comes to rendering the land of Hyrule during gameplay with frequent frame drops and slow-downs during gameplay. The specialists at Digital Foundry took a deep dive into the game to figure out what’s wrong and it seems like they may have found an answer.
However, before watching their video below, be aware that they do into some spoilers for the beginning of the game. If you want to go into the experience completely blind, consider coming back to this article after you’ve started playing the game.
Echoes of Wisdom has some memory issues affecting its performance
The tech specialists at Digital Foundry discuss their thoughts about the newest Zelda game in the video above, and while they agree that the title is a wonderful experience, building upon what the previous games in the series have managed to do, the image quality and frame rate suffers “even more” than its predecessor.
They theorize that the issue could stem from memory issues with the game in the Nintendo Switch, as when you’re standing still you can move the camera around and the title will stay at a stable 60fps. However, when you start moving around the overworld, the frame rate falls down to 30fps, with constant hitching. This appears to be caused by the game streaming the map as you move around the world, which is much larger and more complex than the previous title in the same engine.
Just as well, the resolution of the game is very inconsistent, switching on the fly from 1080p to 720p when going from indoors to the overworld in Docked mode. In handheld mode, the title switches from 720p to 480p in the same situations.
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