Today sucked. It sucked for a lot of reasons. It started bad, didn’t get any better, and left me feeling like a defeated piece of shit by the time I had the free time to start writing this (aka, take breaks at work). Rather than write about that (I need time to process), I’m going to talk instead about starting to replay The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at sixty frames per second on a 4k TV. You see, I got a Switch 2 and a brand new TV, so of course the first thing I did when I got both those things set up (in a burst of nearly-manic energy on Sunday evening at 11pm) was plop in my BotW cartridge and load up the SECOND save file that the expanded Switch 2 version of the game gets you so I could start a new Master Mode playthrough. I was prepared to buy the expansions since I figured the at least 600 hours (632, precisely, according to the stats part of the new Zelda Notes acitivty in the Nintendo Online app) I have in justified spending another ten dollars, easily, but I apparently get it for free thanks to having a Nintendo Online + subscription (for those sweet, sweet N64 games, of course). I did have to wait a surprisingly long time for the game to update, but I was able to use that time to delete a number of games that were in the download queue that I had little to no intention of playing anytime soon, so it wasn’t entirely wasted time. Still, it felt weird that the download took so long (though I guess it was making some pretty major display changes) and the weirdness didn’t stop there.

It turns out, if you spend six hundred hours doing something and then start doing it at a different framerate and with a VERY different display quality, things are going to feel weird! I turned off all the weird motion crap, but it feels super weird to watch the game running while I’m playing it. It all looks too smooth and weirdly jagged. I’m pretty confident at this point that this is just my warped perception of things, thanks to playing a game with a doubled framerate as the first thing I did with my brand new, higher-quality TV. I probably should have started with a known quantity, like some Baldur’s Gate 3, anime, or even just playing BotW on my OLED Switch, so I’d have a chance to adjust to the new TV and how weird it looks now that everything is ten inches bigger. Then, once I’d adjusted, I could swap to something running in 4k and gradually adjust to all of those changes. Instead of doing that very sensible thing, I changed everything all at once and, thanks to setup delays, troubleshooting, and downloading the game update, I started playing BotW at a quarter past one in the morning and promptly lost my shit at how weird everything felt. The controller I’m using is different, the visuals are so much sharper because of a better TV AND graphical updates, and everything is moving so much more smoothly because of a better TV and a framerate increase to BotW. The only thing that is the same is the game’s mechanics and the course of the game.

All of which has thrown me off. All my reactions are delayed, all my old best practices have flown out of my head, and it is a struggle to feel like a proficient player despite my six hundred hours. I’m struggling more than when I did this same thing on stream as part of my “Naked & Afraid” playthrough prior to the release of Tears of the Kingdom and that had me hunched in a closet so I could run everything through my computer rather than comfortably sprawled on my couch. I’m pretty sure my timing is just off from not having played BotW in a long time and having played only keyboard and mouse games for well over six months at this point, but it sure feels like everything is happening much faster than it used to. I mean, it’s possible that the increase in framerate has increased the pace of the game just enough to throw off my muscle-memory, but that feels unlikely. I can’t imagine something like that making it out of testing without being fixed. It’s so incredibly experience-breaking, especially when it seems to mostly be the combat running weirdly, not any of the other stuff. I don’t feel like I’m running faster, but I have very little that is tied to incredibly specific timing that happens outside of combat, so maybe I’m just not noticing it. I don’t know. It’s hard to be sure, given how drastically the visual experience of things has changed since the last time I played BotW.

I’m sure I’ll adjust eventually. I’m very interested to experience all of the new voice notes and finally collect all of the korok seeds since I’ve never had the drive to actually work my way through using an online guide to find them all or put in the effort to use the Korok Mask’s proximity sensor to grid-search the entire map. Actually do that completionist run I’ve contemplated but never wanted to invest the time and energy to make happen. I mean, I might as well. It’s not like there’s much replayability in Tears of the Kingdom, even if I am curious about how it will look on the Switch 2 given how much nicer it looks on my OLED Switch than BotW does. Plus, I’m starting to hit a slowing-down point on Final Fantasy 14 as I have caught up with my friends and want to play through the rest of the game with them, which will probably free up a lot of game time since they tend to play a bit more widely than I do and, you know, not voraciously devour the plot as quickly as they can. Not that there isn’t also plenty to still be doing in that game (I have such a long list yet), but I will try to spread myself a bit more evenly. Especially with how my habits are probably going to change as a result of why today sucks. Anyway, I’m out of stuff to say about the updates to the two Switch Legend of Zelda games since I haven’t played through much of them yet, so I’m just going to go play a little more 4K 60fps BotW and see if it’s just my perceptions or if there really is something off about the game. I AM a software tester, after all. Gotta nail it down or else it’s never going to stop bothering me.