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Miyamoto on Wiimakes, Dead-End Design
GameDaily is reporting on an interview that Nintendo Dream scored with legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto. Mr. Miyamoto spoke about the future of design and Wii gaming during the interview, touching on several interesting topics. Older Gamecube titles, for example, may be remade for the Wii at some point in the future to take advantage of the console's unique control scheme. There are no announcements of which titles might see this treatment, but he seemed confident that if it does happen the pricepoint would be rather low. In some more high-level comments, Mr. Miyamoto stated that game designers have come to a dead-end as regards gaming today. Not sparing his own company, the designer thinks that future titles will have to come at gaming from a very different perspective if they are to succeed.
They should be able to use the original disc, and have the game be locally patched to handle the Wii's control scheme. I wouldn't mind paying $5 for some Metroid Prime goodness.
Designers can't seem to think of anything else.
I don't think it's that they can't think of anything else, it's that they can't implement anything else.
Take Nethack. Now, make a magnificent modern AAA 3D game out of it that sacrifices absolutely nothing. Every spell effect, every creature, every action, everything. It is probably theoretically possible, but it would be a monstrous undertaking. Nethack casually does very advanced things because the graphics, perhaps ironically, support those advanced things as well as they do anything else.
Angband is simpler in many ways, but it also does some things with terrain and detection spells that a modern 3D graphics engine could hardly dream of.
Graphics have shot well ahead of our ability to actually represent things with them. Combat's all that's left, and honestly, it tends to suck; if my sword was actually going straight through that orc, shouldn't it be in two pieces now? But it's easily fakable. Most other things aren't. So we're left with games consisting of the things that are sorta, kinda fakable in 3D.
Who knows how many wonderful features have been cut because there was no way to render them in breathtaking 3D? We end up with only the games we can represent in 3D, which is a horrific subset of the games we could do in 2D. There's still room for 2D games because we aren't as advanced in 3D as we think we are.
The Wii at least attacks one problem, that of the fundamentally binary input of buttons and a directional pad being your only interface into a complicated world. (I am aware that the directional pads are technically analog, but they aren't really very good at it.) But it doesn't do anything to attack the graphics problem.