Slashdot Mirror
What Developers Want From the Wii's Successor
donniebaseball23 writes "Wii 2 rumors are flying in advance of Nintendo's official reveal at E3 in June, but what would game developers like to see in a Wii successor? 'Without a doubt, my first request would be for an improved digital marketplace more along the lines of XBLA and PSN,' said one developer. 'We'd love more processing power, which is essential, and a better GPU as well,' said another."
A related article asks whether a high-powered new console really fits with Nintendo's strategy: "Nintendo is undoubtedly building its new system around a chipset it can buy for cheap and develop for with ease, and it'll be the system's peripheral capabilities (literally peripheral, if rumors of its fancy controller pan out) that catch people's attention — that the company will bank on using as the hook for consumers."
I hope I'm wrong, but I hear serious Nintendo fans vastly overestimating the hardware capabilities of the successor to the Wii. They're hoping for hardware that will rival next gen offerings from Sony and Microsoft despite the fact that Nintendo has shown it doesn't want to compete in that high-end console space anymore. I hope I'm wrong though. With all Nintendo's success in the last generation perhaps they can come out with a Wii successor that has beefy hardware.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
As long as the new console is HD capable. It's a serious embarrassment to have a modern gaming console still outputting SD video quality. Surely the majority of Wii owners out there now have HD screens.
And we are also tired of:
Are Linux users lemmings collectively jumping off of the cliff of reliable, well-engineered commercial software? -- Matt Welsh
We look forward to your upcoming Wii successor as well as it's innovative new online services. Sincerely, PSN Hackers
They are aware. They just don't give a damn.
No one can release an update this buggy and not do a thing for so long otherwise. I love comments of massive depth where clicking on the reply textbox will simply expand the above comment and defocus the reply text box. Yes great feature that one.
And tell me again why the "Working" symbol flashes up for 3 seconds when I ctrl-F4 the page away!
One of the things I have liked about the Wii is getting the games, and feeling like I have purchased a complete game. No "online passes", no resale penalties, not constantly feeling like I have to purchase additional DLC for the game to be complete. The simplicity of the Wii is what got me back into gaming, and the aforementioned aspects of the "Digital Market Place" being so integrated into the gaming experience, or at least how publishers exploit it, is what's driving me away.
To me, a true HD Wii with a modern GPU, decent raw processing power, and higher capacity media for games would be perfect.
A controller pan? Is there going to be Kitchen Hero game?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Nintendo got away with it on the Gamecube, and then again on the WIi. They got away with it because Xbox was still very new, and the PC technology wasn't vastly outpacing console gaming. Now we are in another era, and it's time for the consoles to move the bar. If console hardware design isn't vastly superior to PC design, the console gaming will eventually become a thing of the past as Xbox will probably lead the way of combining the features of the PC into the features of a console.
The solution would be a modular design with upgradability in the core components. Simply put, if Wii 2 isn't at least a generation ahead of the PS3 and Xbox360, it will not be able to compete. The expectations of gamers now are photorealistic PC quality 3d graphics. The majority of console owners own PCs too, it's just a different world now.
I would buy a Wii 2, but Wii 2 has to be able to do things my PC can't do. The PS3 proves that pricepoint does matter in the short term but PS3 is also successful in the long term so it's not just price. It's mainly about the games. Nintendo wont be able to get by with another fancy controller, they are going to have to change the technology.
I think one way would be to go back to cartridges. SSD now has enough space on it to surpass DVDs in all areas. Another would be to have extremely powerful GPU, and a lot of ram. Finally they need to get the internet right. Built in WiFi would be helpful.
An open, public Developer API and less health warning screens.
An improved digital marketplace might be something the developers want, but as long as your purchases are tied to a single machine and lost when that machine has a hardware failure, I am not going to buy from there. That is the reason I haven't bought anything from their current marketplace.
The *VAST* majority of game development, and an ever increasing amount of sales is now done on the iPhone. You might demand PC quality graphics for gaming, but there are millions and millions of other people who are more than happy with angry birds. Apple has won the console wars, and the landscape of game development has changed radically as a result.
One important part of the landscape, is get used to selling 4 million copies at 99 cents each, not 50K copies at $50 each.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
They didn't get away with anything on the GameCube. It was a highly competent system that blew the PS2 out of the water and nearly matched the X-Box with processing power. It was a fantastic system that came out at a weird time and just never gained traction. Had Reggie been at the helm when the GameCube launched, we might have seen a different outcome.
Why should console game hardware be vastly superior to PC design? Your TV only does 1080p at best, with the majority of HDTV's out there being 720p. Granted, newer consoles need to allow for higher resolution textures, but when we have videocards pushing 3 monitors at a time these days, we certainly don't need anything that powerful. Not only that, I don't want to have to pay for anything that expensive.
The Wii 2 has to be able to do things your PC can't? The Wii already does that. I don't see your PC using anything like the Wiimote for input. That's the difference. Also, I'm thinking you're going to have a hard time playing a FPS in your lay-z-boy with a PC.
And a modular design would be absurd for a console. You'd end up fragmenting the console user base with too many configurations. Then you'd end up with the inefficiency of PC games, where software vendors have to take a massive array of different configurations into account. The beauty of console games are that you can highly optimize them for a specific hardware set, thereby letting you get away with less powerful hardware. If you look at Nintendo's past, it's riddled with add-ons, ram upgrades, etc. that never caught on. That's because console games want to take the console out of the box and never have to touch it. Once you make the investment, that's it for the lifetime of the console.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
You do know that the current Wii already has built in WiFi right?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
You are failing to understand the economics of the situation. 4 developers working for 4 months to make an iPhone title, vs 50-150 developers working for 3 to 5 years for a console title. For a studio to start developing a new console title requires a bank balance of at least 3 to 5 million before you can even begin (and even that is no where near enough for the marketing budget). Where is that money going to come from?
If you are an investor with say, £6million in the bank. Are you going to invest that in developing a single console title (which might break even), or are you going to invest that in 100 iPhone titles all of which are more likely to turn bigger pound-for-pound profit?
Over the last 2 years or so there have been numerous established, high quality studios, that have had to close their doors simply because, they have been unable to raise the capital needed to develop ther next title. I'm aware of quite a few more that will be facing that prospect very soon. The whole industry is turning it's attention to the iPhone simply because it's risk adverse, easy to raise the capital, has a very good chance of making a profit, and is the only way for some studios to keep their doors open.
My personal fear is that the gaming community will tire of yet another forza, yet another GTA, yet another portal, and may start to see console games as over-priced and unoriginal. Dont forget that as the capabilities of consoles increases linearly, the development cost/complexity rises exponetially. If the sales figures for the next generation of consoles is just 80% of the current generation, and the development costs rise by 20%, I can't see how the console market will be able to sustain itself.
No "online passes", no resale penalties, not constantly feeling like I have to purchase additional DLC for the game to be complete.
And no talking to other players unless you have met them offline and exchanged friend codes.
Thank god you are not in charge of designing consoles!!
Neither I, nor anyone at work, nor any of my friends, nor even any of my relatives want "photorealism" in a game console. We want games! As in fun, not realistic, not simulations, but escapes from reality.
Why do you think the Wii was so successful? There's definitely no "photorealism" in the Wii games, there's no hard-core simulations on the Wii, there's no tera-pixel-pumping 3D awesomeness. No, there's just reality-escaping fun.
Consoles are not PCs. Consoles should not be upgradeable. They are appliances with a known hardware configuration that does not change over the life of the console, which makes it easy to program for.
You want a PC to game on? Then connect your PC to your TV.
What I would love to see are sports games that aren't league simulations, that don't include real-world physics, that don't include photo-realistic players, that include super-powers.
Or racing games that aren't driving simulations, that don't include perfect real-world physics, that don't include real-world damage and handling, that let you race without taking your finger off the gas.
Or flying games that aren't flight simulators, that don't include perfect, real-world physics, that don't require a pilot's license to enjoy, where you just blow shit up.
Or a space flight game without real-world physics, like the TIE series.
Consoles are not super-computers, and that's the way it should be!!