This Nintendo developer removed this technology from its video game… so players can play faster!

Game news This Nintendo developer removed this technology from its video game… so players can play faster!

See Nintendo Switch OLED on Amazon

No time to waste

Sometimes all it takes is a simple decision to improve an entire video game. Indeed, despite all the qualities that one title or another may have, it happens that certain details can completely spoil the player’s experience. Inventory too small, durability too weak, fast trips poorly thought out… Many examples could confirm this observation, but Masahiro Sakurai chose to use a completely different one as improbable as it is obvious. In a live broadcast, the developer behind the Kirby saga and the famous Super Smash Bros. took advantage of a question to talk about a scourge that affects a lot of players: the waiting time before being able to access a game.

To mark the 10th anniversary of this service, the creators of Arcade Archives have in fact organized a live broadcast in which the developer from Nintendo was invited. Among the recommendations that Sakurai was able to make to improve the service, he notably mentioned a comparison with arcades which should be inspired by:

When we go to an arcade, we quickly move from one machine to another to change games. Why don’t we have the same feeling with Archive Arcade games despite the catalog full of different choice ?

Rather than inserting a coin and going directly to the game, you have to click on an icon, wait for the logo to appear, wait for the title to appear, look at the instructions on the screen, wait for everything to load, then we can finally arrive at the main menu, after which we can start playing.

You would need to measure the total time it takes and shorten it by even a single second.

A logo story

It’s hard to prove Masahiro Sakurai wrong. Over the years, the time required before being able to access a game has continued to increase, not to mention the famous Day One updates that are now essential to launch a video game. The days when it was enough to put a cartridge or a CD in a console and launch the game to play it directly seem to be over… but Masahiro Sakurai continues to want to do everything to make it last. As if to give a concrete example of his advice, the Nintendo developer spoke about his own experience while working on Kirby Air Ride.

Released on Gamecube in 2004, this racing game in the Kirby universe was originally supposed to benefit from sound technology Dolby Surround. In development, Sakurai, however, decided to skip the latter when he realized that it required forcing the player to look at the Dolby logo before accessing the game.

I feel bad forcing the player to wait. If you take one second from each user, that turns into 10000 seconds from 10000 users. The more we repeat this process from year to year, the more we waste players’ time.

Of course, we imagine that Kirby Air Ride did not really need Dolby Surroud technology given the type of game and the universe from which it came, and that this choice was therefore perhaps easier to make than in other games. other productions. However, it is true thatspeeding up the time needed to access the main menu of a game is a real positive point not to be overlooked. It remains to be seen to what extent it is possible to do this based on the needs of the games and the contracts that bind them to the companies whose logos appear at the start of the game.