Iwata Interviews Wii Developers

Knuckles writes "On the Wii website, President of Nintendo Satoru Iwata conducts an extensive interview with the developers of the Wii. The interview comes in two volumes with three parts each. Iwata actually asks many tough questions, such as: 'In general, no engineer hates higher performance. As an engineer, didn't you experience any inner conflict when it was decided that we would not necessarily take Wii in the direction of sheer horsepower alone?' The interview is the start of a series according to the Wii website." More from the article: "Yes, it wouldn't look very natural beside a TV if it was too toy-like. And likewise, it wouldn't really be an amusing form of entertainment if it looked like some kind of AV equipment. With this in mind, we came up with 'A Design for Everyone', a concept created in order to allow as many people to use Wii as possible. Making Wii into a device that everyone likes is more important to us than a having fiercely individualistic design."

Comments

Low-heat design requirement!

[neutralstone]

From TFA:

Takamoto: The internal fan is another case in which having a clear goal from the beginning allowed us to achieve what we wanted. Because we had the clear goal of not letting the fan spin at night, the LSI team had to minimize the heat released from the ICs (integrated circuits), and the design team had to take into consideration the heat that would be trapped inside.

Iwata: We really couldn't give up on that goal once we decided to make Wii a sleepless machine that stays on 24 hours a day. If the fan is spinning in the middle of the night, I could just imagine mothers everywhere pulling the plug right out of the wall because they thought it had been left on again. (laughs)

This is going to be an important (but perhaps seldom noticed) feature. Home theaters are beginning to sound too much like server rooms.

Re:Low-heat design requirement!

[Mac Degger]

Except, of course, that the Wii doesn't do DVD playback.

Which I don't mind; I have multiple dvd players anyway, and it makes teh Wii cheaper since they don't have to licence the dvd encryption stuff.

Re:They made the inevitable car analogy!

[rolfwind]

The problem is not the improvement plateau (all gaming consoles of the same generation are roughly on the same order of the magnitude with each other).

For instance, few people today make much of the graphical differences between Super Nintendo and the Genesis even though at the time it was a big deal for them.

The problem is that after a certain point with PCs/consoles, you have to pay 100% extra for an improvement of 10%-20% in performance.

In consoles, I think many people will see it as better to just go for the slighter lower system (~$250) today and in a few years, buy another next-generation system for similiar money that would blow away any of the older systems, even the high end one. In this way, they keep getting comparable improvements at $250 a pop instead of $400-$500 a pop, for a system that is almost as good, and with the $150-250, they can buy a few good games and accessories to boot.

lower development costs & other bottlenecks

[cgenman]

Let's not forget... to get a system that can do High Definition normal mapped individual scales on every creature in the game, you may have to pay 100% more... but I can assure you to create that art asset cost a lot more than 100%+

Which means that Nintendo can launch twice as many games on the same overall budget... to find out which ones stick. Brain Training was one of Nintendo's cheapest games to make, but it has sold tens of millions of copies as well as millions of DS's.

Graphics were a bottleneck in gaming for a long time. You couldn't even get more than three sprites in a walk cycle on some of the old systems. On the PS2, you could do a full 3D walk cycle with inverse kinematics foot positioning adjusted for different skeletal systems. Graphics are about as good as they need to be at the moment, and other needs have arisen.

For one, the controller is getting bad. Sure, we've got sholder buttons (courtesy of Nintendo), a diamond face button pad (Nintendo), analog control sticks (Nintendo), and analog buttons (Sony), but the thing is so unweildy and in need of streamlining. We're interfacing with the most hyperrealistic worlds ever created using functionally the same controllers we've had since the late 70's, though with more buttons. Even then, we're talking about LOW TECH in the late 70's.

Another area ripe for development is Physics. Sure, you can skid cars now, and occasionally you can knock bottles over, but can you punch holes into walls? Does your character tip back further based on the weight of the item they're carrying? Can you aim your gun at the floor and skip a bullet off of it in Metal Gear Solid? Do we even have hair that gets close to sitting on people's shoulders, rather than hovering six inches above it?

And finally, we need more advancement in art techniques. Sure, our art pipelines have been serviced well by the support industry of middleware providers, but it still feels like we're limited artistically and by production method from really unleashing the power of the end systems. Can we work on creating art assets in-game? Texture these things under changing lighting conditions? Near other relevant textures from the game? Can we extrude a 2d concept sketch automatically into the starting basis for the 3D models in the scene?

There is a lot of work to be done. But for now, the graphics of a system aren't really the bottleneck to the next generation of power.