The 30fps Nontroversy: Misdirected Consumer Outrage

There are few things that rile up vocal gamers as much as the number of frames they get for every second they look at their screen. "Give me 60fps or give me death!" they proclaim before, presumably, wrapping their mouse cord around their neck and hanging themselves; a 30fps lock for them is unthinkable. 

A cursory examination of their hastily scrawled departing message reveals discontent with input lag deficiencies at 30fps and ghosting, motion blur, overdrive artefacts and choppy animation making games "unplayable". "I simply can't play a game at 30fps" they insist, to which I say "I don't believe you" (nor do the millions of consumers playing games fine at 30fps). For all their talk of a 30fps cap being developer laziness I can't help but detect a hint of laziness in the gamer who makes no effort to acclimatise to a lower framerate: they are confusing their willingness to play at 30fps for their ability to.

The stigma around 30fps locked games has coalesced into a movement spurned on my videogame critic/Youtube personality TotalBiscuit, going by the tongue-in-cheek title "The Framerate Police". And whilst I can't fault the majority of the arguments he puts forward in his video (60fps is advantageous over 30fps for multiple reasons) or the effort to organise and centralise information on fps caps (these are things that are good to know) I can't help but feel the case for 60fps is just as arbitrary as the one against 30: it’s all a matter of perspective. 

Recently I played through Doom 3 BFG Edition (PC), an enlightening experience from a framerate perspective as the compendium features the first 2 Doom games from the 90s which, despite their blistering pace and responsive controls, top out at a humble 35fps. More importantly the collection also includes a modified version of Doom 3 which, in contrast to its 30fps original release, can run as high as 120fps. And 120fps is a transformative experience; I'm almost entirely certain that the improved responsiveness in the controls did, in fact, change my whole goddamn life. Oh wait, no, nevermind. It didn't. My bad.

But in all seriousness, after dropping back to 60fps I found all the arguments against 30fps applied to 60fps as well: Less responsive controls? Check. Animation appearing choppy? Check. A lack of clarity in motion? Check. Sudden, overwhelming urge to kill myself in a hysterical rage of anti-60fps sentiment? Che-wait, no. That didn't happen either. 

If we are going to take issue with framerates locks then it should be over the implementation of framerate locks at any framerate, anything less fails to address the issues cited with 30fps: again, it’s simply a matter of perspective (and those who only have 60 Hz monitors lack that perspective). But these arguments, which deal with the objective shortcomings of 30fps aren't what I really want to address here. After all, although the arguments against 30fps might only hold weight in relative terms, they still hold weight. Instead, I want to address a bizarre anti-30fps sentiment that doesn't come from any logical reasoning, but a confused pro-consumer stance that's lost sight of why a PC port capped at 30fps is considered outrageous in the first place.

Recently Square Enix shed some light on the PC version of Final Fantasy Type-0 HD but without any reference to framerate. Inquisitive gamers and some publications chased Square Enix's Twitter account up on the matter to be told that the game would indeed feature a framerate cap. And although no specific mention of a 30fps cap was made it was assumed the game would be capped at 30fps.

The response from many corners of the internet was predictable, and disappointingly so. Here are just some excerpts from around the web: "WTF!! I swear, these devs don't care about PC ports. Yeah, I'm not getting it. Laziest thing ever", "lol) No thanks then)", “When companies FPS lock their console to PC port it says much about how little work they had to do”, “Locked @ 30fps then no sale”.

There’s an assumption amongst these consumers that a 30fps lock is somehow indicative of a lazy or poorly optimised port. In other words, to invest in a 30fps locked PC game would be tantamount to willingly supporting the proliferation of sub-par products. Put in its most extreme form: A 30fps lock is the telltale sign of a hostile publisher with an anti-consumer stance that consumers need to meet with indifference or outright contempt.

This attitude isn’t entirely bereft of logical grounding either. The recent PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight shipped with numerous issues prompting some to dub it Batman: Arkham Shite. These issues ran the gamut, from visual effects from the console versions being entirely absent, substantial hitching and stuttering on machines that matched or exceeded the recommended specifications and, topping it off, an arbitrarily placed 30fps lock that users could circumvent with a simple .ini tweak. 

Now, I’d hesitate to call Iron Galaxy, the 12-person studio behind porting Arkham Knight “lazy”, instead placing the blame squarely at publisher Warner Bros.’ feet for giving the studio an unreasonable timeframe to get the port completed – but whether you attribute it to laziness or poor judgement the end result is the same from the consumer’s perspective; a sub-par product that fails to take advantage of the strengths of the PC platform. And worse, one in a very, very long line of them.

For western developers, many of whom cut their teeth on PC game development before joining (and later supplanting) their Japanese counterparts on console, tying game logic to framerate wasn’t a done practice, making any fps locks arbitrarily placed and trivial to overcome had the developers put in a little effort. Sometimes the effort needed being exceptionally small, such as the aforementioned Arkham Knight .ini tweak (followed up with some basic testing).

In this development culture, the development culture to which PC gamers are accustomed, a 30fps lock is an indication that the developer or publisher didn't care enough to put in the minimal effort required to improve the PC version over the console release. And if they couldn’t be bothered to do that the chances were the game was broken elsewhere and post-launch support would be non-existent as well (along with a host of other issues and disappointments). It was a sign that the publisher had little respect for its PC consumers or the PC as a platform.

So a 30fps lock is symptomatic of poor port when considered in the above context; a short-hand that consumers can use to out cavalier publishers. But Final Fantasy Type-0 HD isn’t part of this development culture. The original version of Final Fantasy Type-0 (on which the HD remaster is based) is a Japanese game that was developed exclusively with the PSP in mind, and one where framerate was tied to game logic in such a way that removing the 30fps restriction would be a non-trivial development challenge.  

In fact key members of the team that handled the HD conversion, the Osaka-based Hexadrive, have made just this point, suggesting that the optimisation effort in getting the game running in 60fps for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One releases would have been trifling in comparison to the effort required to overhaul restrictions built into the base systems behind the game.

Translation: 60fps or 30fps?
The limitations on the base systems' structure was a bigger challenge than the performance/optimisation issue [in getting the game running at 60fps].
Overhauling everything to 60fps would have required a lot of time.

It should be noted that this statement was made to an audience of technically-minded game developers at Kansai CEDEC (Computer Entertainment Development Conference) 2015 in a presentation by Hexadrive’s Chief Technical Programmer Junichi Iwasaki. CEDEC is a developers’ conference, not a press or publically open event so it’s not the case that Iwasaki was being a 30fps apologist or exaggerating the capabilities of this generations’ home consoles for the sake of keeping face or selling a product. He has no reason (and no means) to fool a crowd of people who know their way around Reverse Reprojection Caching and Scalable Ambient Obscurance. Iwasaki is telling the truth here: Final Fantasy Type-0 HD has non-trivial limitations locking it at 30fps and overcoming them would be outside of the scope of a remaster. 

The long and short of it is that it’s not reasonable to expect Final Fantasy Type-0 HD to run at 60fps for genuine reasons rooted in the culture and development of the original game. It was short-sighted of Square Enix to develop the game in this way, and perhaps indicative of the myopic, Japan-centric view the publisher was dragging into the late 2000’s. TotalBiscuit is right in saying that developers probably shouldn’t tie game logic to framerate in the first place, but unless you have a time machine that’s little consolation for PC ports of games that have their roots in the past. 

But this is important to point out all the same because it’s this development culture context behind the 30fps cap that's important in deciding whether the publisher's stance is hostile to PC consumers (which would make a case for outrage driven by pro-consumer sentiment), not the presence of the lock itself. Consumers aren't being tricked or coaxed into buying a sub-par product. It’s not the case that a 60fps version of Type-0 HD is sitting around on a hard disc at Square Enix HQ somewhere, arbitrarily held back by a dastardly Square Enix CEO (the dastard!). 

Whereas I can understand that consumers who may have already experienced the game at 30fps on console may see no reason to purchase the PC version without a higher framerate justifying double-dipping, I can’t help feel but that those against 30fps locks on principle have lost sight of why a 30fps lock is contentious in the first place. Their stance isn’t justifiable from a pro-consumer standpoint, smacking of misguided entitlement. Their protest of not buying the game, ultimately, little more than willfully opting for the 0fps version of the game.