While I can certainly "make do" with 30 FPS, it's never a completely enjoyable experience. The input is never as crisp or responsive. And as such the experience is always ruined in some way. Also the lack of fluidity (as in real life) of 30 FPS compared to 60 FPS or higher just makes the game world that much less believeable.
This gets complicated with less precise control schemes IMO. Plenty of console games especially can be reasonably well acclimated-to at 30fps, to the point that the real impact on enjoyment is
extremely minor. by contrast, I'd never say that about something like an M&K FPS, because responsiveness at 30fps is easily below said acclimation threshold.
Sometimes hopping into a Halo game can feel rather clunky at first after playing a 60fps console shooter, but after a minute or two it doesn't feel like all that significant of an issue to enjoyment (aside from circumstances with stutter or nasty spikes). It oddly felt like even less of an issue 5 years ago when I was switching between 30fps Halo and high-FPS PC shooters, probably because my muscle memory or whatever wasn't having the direct mapping issues that occur when switching from a 60fps dual-analog shooter to a 30fps dual-analog shooter.
The point being, if we're talking about a particularly sluggish console shooter, the actual experiential damage inflicted by the choice of 30fps may very well be practically negligible to a lot of people (even
if the differences in framerate are very obvious to said people). If said people also mildly prefer the chop of 30fps for that art style, I don't find it hard to believe that (even all other things being equal) 30fps could be more enjoyable than 60fps, within that audience and that game. Even in the context of games, I know people who say they prefer the look of 30fps to that of 60fps.
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In any case, TB's argument isn't particularly great, largely because it never gets anywhere. His only direct response to the claim that 30fps is beneficial to the aesthetic is that framerate doesn't affect the aesthetic (I can understand that some people would claim that it would have a strictly beneficial impact on the aesthetic, but simply claiming that it has no impact makes me wonder what his definition of "aesthetic" is). And when he actually tries to explore that notion, his train of ideas looks like this:
1-Lower framerates seemingly
can have a pleasing aesthetic impact in film.
2-This is saved because of film motion blur.
3-Motion blur in film isn't comparable to motion blur in games because <stuff about games being less responsive>.
He NEVER gets around to completing his argument regarding aesthetic impact. Yes, 30fps games are less responsive than 60fps games... but that is at best a fairly small partial response to the initial question about the overall aesthetic. He never really concludes an argument in direct response to the claim.
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But the issue in all this discussion that really annoys me (largely in reference to the GAF firestorm)? It's that these arguments against the "cinematic framerate" people are made by people claiming that their opinion is an objective fact. How do they go about this? Well, they make a bunch of objectively factual statements, detailing how motion appears smoother at 60fps, or how 60fps games are more responsive according to a variety of various measures from resolving detail to input lags.
That's all well and good, but the question of "which framerate is better" doesn't actually lay out a particular means of assessing an answer. It's a very nonspecific question. Which framerate is better according to what? The implied rubric that the "higher is always better" people tend to use, which puts value on smoother motion and higher responsiveness, is not laid out by the question; their answer is an objective response only to a qualified question that specifically calls for the application of this rubric.
But obviously these rubrics aren't called out of thin air; they're used because people think they're a good way of assessing "better" in terms of what is
most enjoyable. After all, enjoyability is usually the basic reason we play video games. But as far as I can tell, you won't see someone justifying their choice of rubric in those terms, possibly because it questions their claim that their opinion is actually an objective fact; if the question is simply which is most enjoyable to you as a player, then
even if all of humanity agreed that 60fps was always superior to 30fps (which it doesn't), it would
still ultimately be a subjective response. In particular, in light of the typical arguments made of the "60fps is objectively better than 30fps" crowd, although the details on their rubric are all objectively-assessable, the choice of rubric and the value system that goes with is made via subjective preference. A person who prefers the look of 30fps could call forth their own rubric, and depending on how they cast the components of this rubric, it may very well be just as objectively-assessable as the other rubric; they would simply value smoothnesses of framerates in a different way (a way which prefers the lack of smoothness at 30fps over the smoothness of 60fps), and perhaps place less emphasis on the value of responsiveness.
I mostly tend to agree that, in the context of video games, 60fps is nigh-on strictly better than 30fps. I can't think of any situation where I'd take 30fps over 60fps, all other things being equal. But within the unqualified question of "which framerate is better," preferring 60fps
is my opinion. It is not an objective fact that one is better, unless I qualify the question to use a more specific definition of "better".
I generally try not to be picky about things like this if there's going to be extreme unanimity with respect to the choice of rubric in a certain circumstance (i.e. "this battery that lasted for ten hours was 'objectively better' than this otherwise functionally identical battery that only lasted for two hours"). But this
is an argument directed at an opposing viewpoint using a different rubric to assess "better"; it's trivially obvious that there
isn't unanimity with respect to the choice of rubric. Defending your value system in these cases is perfectly reasonable, and choosing to ignore the small minority on this particular sort of issue is also arguably reasonable. Claiming that the opposing opinion is merely a goofy subjective preference in the face of your "objective fact" is silly.
I give HUGE kudo's to Square-Enix for giving multiple resolution options for Final Fantasy 14 on PS4. Same goes to the developers that ported Sacred 2 to the PS3. Give your customers an option to run at 60 fps or 30 fps.
Interesting that you and TB brought this up, since according to
DF's analysis, the 720p mode still goes through the normal internal 1080p rendering process, and has nothing to do with trading IQ for performance. Their video suggests that framerates are basically identical between the game's two modes.
That said, there are console games out there that let you trade IQ and performance. The PS3 is notable for this, particularly with racing games. The Gran Turismo games are the common example, but not the only one.
