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Does the Wii Provide A "Watered-Down" Game Experience?
CNet is running a story inspired by comments from Ubisoft's Ben Mattes about how the Wii affects game development. When asked why there was no Wii version of Prince of Persia, Mattes said, "The reality is that from a technical standpoint, the Wii cannot do what we wanted the game to do. The AI of Elika was highly advanced and required a lot of processing power; the world size and dynamic loading, the draw distance, the number of polygons in the characters... If we had done a Wii version, it would have been toned down, probably linear; it wouldn't have been an open-world game, and so it would have been a very different experience." The article goes on to look at a number of Wii games that are stripped-down versions of their Xbox 360 or PS3 counterparts. Of course, part of the Wii's drawing power is that it's much simpler than the other systems, and has brought casual gaming to millions more people than it would have otherwise. The question remains, as Kotaku points out, whether the Wii's audience will persist after the other systems match its casual-gaming capabilities.
Well the worst thing about his complaints is, the new Prince of Persia wasn't a good a very good game. Elika's AI may have been complicated, but it wasn't reflected in the end-product by her doing anything very cool. The "open-world" concept of the game was pretty weak-- getting from point A to point B was linear, but you were just given the option of whether you wanted to go from point A to point B, or from point A to point C.
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time was a better game, and it was linear. The girl sidekick from that game was just as good as Elika. It didn't require particularly high-end hardware.
The Jak and Daxter games on the PS2 used dynamic loading, and the PS2 hardware was clearly inferior to the Wii in every respect.
And check out the reviews of GTA Chinatown Wars for DS, Rockstar clearly put the effort in to think about what the DS could do best, and build the game around that.
Then again, the Prince of Persia team have a history of crappy ports. Their last Wii title was a horrible port with a frame rate that dropped through the floor during the final battle, even though it was derived from the PS2 game.
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The Wii attach rate is abysmal and for real gamers games it's even worse. Yeah, 20 million people bought a Wii, but about 15 million of them just played Wii sports then forgot about it.
The Wii market might be much larger in sheer numbers, but the expected sales for a game like PoP is probably smaller.
Sigs are awesome huh?
I don't understand why people are so rabidly defending the Wii as "fun" and "innovative".
I grew up playing Mario and Zelda games (and happened to be burned by Nintendo's lack of consumer compassion and their hate for backwards-compatability). But that's mostly what they put out: in-house proprietary sequels.
There's nothing innovative about Mario anymore; that you can run in three dimensions instead of two doesn't change the game. It just puts a new look on the game. And that look would be better with more powerful hardware.
Maybe I think of something different when I look for "innovation", like original stories that aren't on their eight iteration of saving the Triforce (Hello, Okami), or fun gameplay that sucks me in without locking me into the same characters that passed nostalgia and hit nausea for me (when I really want to platform, I turn to LittleBigPlanet now).
Sure, maybe not everyone wants to play GTA or InFamous or Street Fighter, but Nintendo is alienating gamers in order to cater to a broader audience...this doesn't really help gamers at all, nor does it help the video game industry. If "the future" of gaming is less Heavy Rain and more Mario Party or iPhone App Store then I'm going to stop supporting Nintendo and start supporting developers and publishers who push the envelope in terms of what I expect and what I can do. The Wii doesn't really offer me that experience.
no, it's not lack of design creativity.. it's that the PS3 or xbox allow much more detailed, larger worlds, that the wii simply can't handle. I'm going to pick up the latest Tomb Raider on the PS3 to compre it to the Wii version, which was very disappointing. And I played the GC tomb raiders on the wii and had a great time.. i think the wii just couldn't handle the larger, more complex world the newest tomb raider is played in.
Your frame of reference is obviously that of a "normal video game player." You are not the Wii's target market, and thus you feel understandably disenfranchised. I just cannot manage to see how appealing to the "mainstream market" ie normal, everyday people, reflects a failure in development. I also think that you drastically underestimate the number of shitty games for the PS2. There were close to 2500 games made for that console, and if you think the average quality was that great, then you have never been in a gamestop bargain bin.
In writing this comment, I am aware of the fact that there are not as many top-quality wii games as I would have hoped or expected at this stage of development. However, I think that the games designed specifically for the wii are fantastic, and I blame the deficit partially on poor ports and the cost barriers involved when companies decide to develop a title. After all, if you were a developer, would it appear to be more cost effective to program for joysticks and buttons than a novel motion-capture interface? Of course, because the title can be sold to PS3 and Xbox and PC users alike, and your staff likely has more experience in programing for these interfaces.
So... a reason for NOT liking the Wii would be "my kids like the Wii"? Is it just me, or is that type of reasoning completely insane?
Errrr, no. I never actually even said I didn't like the Wii. I said it is not an activity I would pursue on my own. I actually like play-doh and coloring with my kids. I just wouldn't spend $250 plus a zillion dollars for peripherals on a toddler's toy.
My statement was a response to the original poster, whose point was something along the lines of "The Wii is so great it is simple enough for toddlers." My point was "Things that are simple enough for toddlers generally don't appeal to me on their own. That the Wii is simple is no more a plus than for play-doh or coloring books."
The metacritic scores reflect more on the inadequacy of gaming publications reviewing games not meant for the veteran gamer audience. There is a word-of-mouth network between Wii owners, the sales tend to be fairly concentrated on the system which suggests that people don't just buy stuff randomly but the pattern follows more what the average joe wants from a game, not what a gaming publication wants. Two of the top selling WiiWare games are My Aquarium and Texas Hold'em Tournament, both got panned by reviews but both do their job and the job they do is in high demand. There are claims that the Wii games market is based much more on satisfying pre-existing demands of the customer than the other markets (which use hype to generate a demand for the games on offer). Noone ever says "hey, I'd love to play a game where you're a big bulky space marine crouching behind chest-high walls" but they bought GoW because once the game was shown to them they liked it. The Wii's current biggest sellers are mostly things that people wanted before they were made even though they may not have expected them to be available on a videogame system. Maybe it's harder to show games to Wii owners so they can decide whether they like it.
On the other hand we have little information about how plain sequels to last gen games would sell on the Wii, the last gen genres tend to be represented by wacky games (like Mad World, No More Heroes, Deadly Creatures, ...) which would be niche last gen too. I think The Conduit may be one of the few attempts at doing a conventional genre straight on the Wii instead of adding some twist that's not what people want. We'll have to see how it turns out.
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