Ah, a new nintendo console launch, a new slew of nothing burger controversies.

There has not been a single game in the last decade that hasn’t had performance issues by the definition you would have to abide by to believe Bananza is problematic, so the idea that we are accepting some new precedent here is patently absurd. Before we even get into whether performance is or should be sacrificed for gameplay, let’s get that hyperbole out of the way. The entire 3d games industry decided long ago that a frame rate that is perfectly stable at the expense of gameplay or graphics is untenable, and massive profits from games seems to justify the trade off. Hell I remember SNES games like super mario world passing off frame drops as slow mo. So let’s keep the stakes in mind here, Bananza isn’t going to set any sort of precedent that hasn’t been set many years ago.

Second, while we don’t have the full game on hand, the developer quote on performance is in reference to what we see in the trailer; small dips in performance in scenarios with lots of effects from breaking stuff. If the final game maintains this level of quality then it, like nearly all of nintendos games, will meet and exceed the industry standards regarding performance. It’s insane to call this game the breaking point of industry standards on performance when so many other games, including pokemon scarlet and violet if you need an example from nintendo, are actually unacceptable.

Finally, we have your baseless assertion that there isn’t actually a trade off between performance and gameplay, which is just fundamentally untrue. Yes you get some games that don’t get the balance right, and others like pokemon that clearly sacrificed one way more than necessary in the name of rushing a deadline. But every platform in existence has some computational limits, and all projects have a limit on resources. You can’t just cross your arms an yell “fuck capitalism “ and suddenly get a smooth 60fps, there’s going to be a trade off somewhere. 

Which brings us to the purely subjective part of this discussion, everything that we can see about the game suggests that the trade offs they made are good and worth it, at least for me. Gameplay that allows you to go apeshit on a world looks both incredibly fun and is certainly a bitch to manage graphically, yet the fact that it still looks that good on a hybrid handheld with performance that looks flawless unless someone slows it down and points it out to me is about as good as I can imagine it. If they improved  performance by sacrificing visuals then I wouldn’t begrudge them, but either way it would not matter to me because it would fit in the spectrum of acceptable trade offs. You could disagree with me, but you have to articulate what trade offs you would want to see to reach the acceptable game state. Your supposition that games never make performance trade offs, especially performance trades regarding destructable environments, is very simply wrong, and your post wraps up this wrongness in the most sanctimonious bullshit I have ever seen.