Quote:If there's been one developer who's taken a lot of flack over their console ports to the GameCube, it's been High Voltage Software. Charged with bringing Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance over from the PS2 and Hunter: The Reckoning over from the Xbox, it was a difficult task considering the change in hardware capabilities and the popularity that both releases enjoyed on their native platforms. Ultimately, critics weren't very receptive of their work. To be sure, according to statistics at Gamerankings.com, the GameCube version of Dark Alliance scored, across a variety of websites, only five percentage points fewer than the average maintained by the PS2 edition, while the Hunter port received marks about 10 percent lower than its sibling - not precisely a tragedy for High Voltage considering how tremendously well the previous incarnations fared. However, nearly every review attributed extreme frame rate problems to each of the ports, even if the extent of these alleged problems didn't seem to overly swing the results of their final ratings.

This had profound effects on the readership of these sites and the gaming community as a whole. Having had relatively good luck with supposedly troublesome ports in the past, I overcame my initial reservations and placed an order for Dark Alliance with an online retailer. Shortly after that, I mentioned my purchase on an Internet forum. Within minutes, another member had posted, expressing his shock that I had bought it, given the dire reports of the frame rate. Because of the fairly tight knit nature of the gaming community and its natural proliferation on the Internet, not all gamers need to even read reviews; the peer pressure that critics help to cultivate is often far more wide-reaching than the words of the reviews themselves.

The Great FPS Conspiracy image As the word "subjectivity" has become nearly a curse word in our society - especially amongst males, the chief demographic of the gaming community - objectivity has become polluted to the point where it's often unrecognizable. Many gamers claim to not read reviews for that same reason; they view them as subjective, and therefore, irrelevant. It's precisely because of this phenomenon that readers took more away from the scathing comments on Dark Alliance's frame rate than the largely positive ratings listed at the end of reviews; a poor frame rate, often listed as a range of two numbers, is seen as objective, while the final ranking is the result of the subjective whims of the reviewer. This is a fairly misapplied sense of both logic and vocabulary, however. After all, it seems unlikely that a human observer could accurately gauge that Dark Alliance slows down to an average of perhaps 10 frames per second during intense scenes with any degree of certainty, as they have no way of proving such an exact assertion. On the other hand, if one set 100 fans of action oriented role-playing games down with the GameCube version of Dark Alliance, it seems very likely that at least 80 percent of them would enjoy it, if polled. Hence, many readers actually mistook the most subjective portion of the review, the part mentioning frame rate, as being the more objective criticism.

To attempt some sort of definitive answer, it's necessary to approach the developer. Josh VanVeld, assistant producer of Dark Alliance for the GameCube, in correspondence with AVault, stated that there's indeed no frame rate problem in the title, and that it averages about 55-60 frames per second under most conditions, dropping to about 45 in extreme circumstances. He went on to say:

"The perception of a poor frame rate in BG:DA was almost entirely based on our in-game camera, which the player can rotate freely. The camera does not rotate in a completely smooth fashion, which apparently led a number of reviewers to bash the game's frame rate. In the case of BG:DA, players will not normally spend a great deal of time rotating the camera, so most people won't notice this issue as a problem. In fact, this was not something that even came up as a major issue during our testing phase, so we were really caught off guard by some of the negative criticism we received. It would have been relatively easy to fix this glitch, but it honestly wasn't something that we noticed until it was too late.

"To hear some of the reviewers' opinions, you would think that the game is almost unplayable, but that's simply not the case. All in all, I think we did a great job of porting a graphics-intensive game from the PS2 to the GameCube. To put things in perspective, one reviewer who complained about our frame rate praised us for having improved geometry and texture quality over the PS2 version of the game. This is amusing because we used the exact same geometry as the PS2 version and most of our textures are about half the size of their PS2 counterparts due to storage limitations on the GameCube mini DVD.

"Most reviewers understand that a game that runs at 'a rock-solid 60 frames per second' will look very smooth, so they tend to make references to frame rates in their articles. What readers probably don't know is that there is simply no way for a reviewer to independently determine a console game's frame rate, so these reports are necessarily subjective."

Quote:While I have no way to verify VanVeld's claims concerning the frame rate of Dark Alliance, there seems to be no reason to call them into question. That the camera was involved should have been quickly observed by most reviewers, easily verifiable by two quick experiments: swinging one's weapon while rotating the camera doesn't result in a choppy attack animation, even if the view does lurch a bit, and remaining motionless after triggering a blue shockwave - unleashed after saving the game - will result in a smooth animation, unlike what appears to be a rougher version, should one move during that period. The death animations of particularly large creatures tend to seem a bit slow, too, though whether they were created that way or are the result of having to be loaded into memory, I can't say, but they might give the appearance of a frame rate problem as well.

All of this can and should be held against the GameCube port of Dark Alliance. What shouldn't occur, however, is the overstating of these problems compared to those of other games, which certainly happened in this case. Sometimes, both critics and players take evidence of slowdown in stride as an unfortunate but tolerable quirk that doesn't impugn the desirability of the product. Not all releases are treated equally, however, and being a top-flight title can sometimes serve as a double-edged sword, sometimes shielding them from undue criticism or exacerbating it - while a port from another platform is often the equivalent of wearing a crown of thorns. When asked about the commercial acceptance of Dark Alliance, VanVeld contributed the following:

"I can only speculate in terms of public perception and its effects. Given that low framerate performance was a comment made in a few reviews, it must have had a detrimental impact on our sales. It seems that the real impact would be determined by how much gamers allow their buying decisions to be determined by reviews. I think that quite a lot of gamers do read reviews, and do allow those reviews to influence their game buying decisions. In this case, that is extremely disheartening because we got zinged in reviews for something that is absolutely not true, and that most likely caused a number of gamers to not even look at a game that they would have otherwise thoroughly enjoyed.

Quote: Even though picking up both titles for the small sum of $30 brought no small amount of immediate gratification to this bargain bin shopper, in the long run, I fear that hatchet jobs involving attributions of frame rate can only hurt console gamers. Those who own Nintendo hardware exclusively should be especially wary, given that our community has passed up a great number of quality third-party releases due to such reviews, giving publishers little incentive to contribute more. As gamers begin to increasingly think of themselves as savvy when it comes to technology, the rate at which myths are spreading is actually accelerating, due to the egotism that comes with familiarity. Because of this, developers are put in the position of having to conform to these expectations of "60 frames per second," which doesn't necessarily result in smooth animation or graphics, rather than focusing their efforts on what really matters.

Quote:Perhaps they should just say that a game isn't smooth rather than give us supposed framerate numbers.