Way back in the day, every game had its logic tied to its framerate – As anyone who’s ever tried to run an eighties PC game on a nineties PC only to see it run at 20x speed and completely unplayable can tell you.
But in the modern day this is less common. Generally the game keeps chugging along at the same pace, no matter how fast or slow the frames are being presented (unless, of course, everything is bogged down so hard that even the game logic is struggling)
And yet, you’ll still find a few. Any fan of Dark Souls who played on PC back when Prepare to Die edition first came to PC will remember how unlocking the framerate could cause collision bugs and send you into the void. And I recently watched a video of a gent who massively overclocked a Nintendo Switch OLED and got Tears of the Kingdom to run at 60FPS… Except everything was, indeed, running in fast-forward, rather than just being smoother.
This makes me wonder – Is there some unseen advantage to keeping game logic and framerate tied together? Perhaps something that only really shows on weaker hardware? Or is it just devs going “well the hardware we’re targeting won’t really go over this speed, and we don’t really give a fuck about anything else” and not bothering to implement it?
The game “logic” you’re talking about is tied to the frame rate by default. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that a game’s frame rate is a function of available compute power and the complexity of the logic that must be solved every update (every frame).
Accounting for this usually isn’t difficult, but developers are only human and it’s easy to make mistakes when your game is being developed for very few hardware variants. The original dark souls was ps3/xbox360 only. Since the game performed the same on all it’s target systems, the oversight wasn’t obvious until PTDE released for PC much later, which was apparently ported by a skeleton crew with very little time and budget.
This doesn’t happen as much these days because developers are much more aware of PC (and its limitless hardware variations) during development. Also, there are more console variations to account for, e.g. the Xbox series S vs X. Devs just can’t get away with being lazy with frame rate variations anymore as it will become a problem very early in quality assurance, and may even cause compliance violations which can bar your game from launching on consoles.