A game should be designed around the hardware is going to run on, that's exactly what i'm saying, except that you bind hardware power with home/handheld dinstinction.
Of course. But you don't always know the exact limitations of your platform or your engine at design time. I mean, sure, you know what it says on paper, but until you're pushing pixels and loading actual assets into memory and running everything through your engine, you're throwing coins in a fountain hoping you're not going to run into any major issues.
Again what do power have to do portability?
I must be misunderstanding this question. Clearly the form factor size of a device has everything to do with power -- it affects the amount of space you have for your innards, heat dispersion issues, battery size. Not to mention important, but non-power related issues (lack of 4 triggers on vita, easy example).
Simply designing for 2 triggers instead of 4 is a 'concession' to current portability requirements on the Vita. Or designing a third person action game (say, GTA) around 1 analog stick during PSP's era is a concession to portability.
What can now be done on home consoles will be possible on future handhelds and what is possible on current handhelds was not possible in past home consoles, so how is even possible to think to bind hardware power with portability? Are you telling me that in 2008 VC was an home console game and that since in the future(or even in the present imo) it will be possible on a handhled it will become a handheld game?
In theory, sure. People can play whatever on whatever, especially with suspend resume. You're absolutely correct - remote play, for example, proves that. But clearly different form factors often have different use cases and it is incumbent on a designer to keep this in mind. If the designer knows, for example, that the average play time on a console is (making this up) 1.3 hours but only 15 minutes on the sibling handheld, they'd be remiss not to take this into consideration when designing the experience.
Not to mention all the other differences (memory, controls, etc). VC2 did not have small mission areas simply because developers decided portable gamers needed 'bite size missions'. VC2 devs would almost certainly have loved to have the same sized levels, but they had to make them 'bite size' due to hardware limitations (most likely, memory). It goes hand in hand.
But yes, you're right -- they could likely put VC on the Vita and keep level size. But by the time a handheld can do that, the consoles can do levels 50x bigger.
The simple, most basic truth -- they are different devices with different form factors.
Consider the concept of the 'song' and 'album' and the multi-decade transition from Vinyl to MP3. With a record, people would put it on and then generally listened to the songs in order, for an extended period of time... popularizing the concept of the album (and in turn creating the 'concept album'). Nowadays, due to spotify and mp3 players and pcs, many people jump from song to song, artist to artist. This has in turned changed how artists view the album, and how they make music. There is no need to focus on an album as an 'hour journey of music' when you know the vast majority of the audience no longer listens to music like that (you can still do it, obviously, but the exception proves the rule).
You can not separate form from function, nor media from medium.
Any kind of distinction between games should be based on intrinsic characteristics of the structure of the games.
Why? It's clear that some games are designed for the mobile audience - short bursts of play.
Likewise, it's clear that some games are crippled by the device they are built for (be it power limitations, or control scheme). Think of all the PSP games that clearly would have benefited with a second analog -- isn't it fair to say that was a concession made to be on handheld at all? Why not call it what it is? A handheld game.
Not to mention, I know I prefer different genres on different devices. And while my tastes may or may not reflect everyone's, I'm sure Sony researches this and knows a lot of data on its audiences.
Is it really hard to imagine that, in general, people might like pretty, cinematic action games on a console, and slower number crunchy games (say, srpgs) on the more intimate handheld form factor? Or whatever the specifics of the research are.
And wouldn't good developers then design games to the strengths of each system and the desires of said audience? Which would then, by definition, create a schism between handheld and console games?
And yes the blame goes always to developers when they make a new game(ports are another thing), because they should make the best with all they have(hardware, people, money), if you want to make a Vita game(but this applies to any kind of hardware, home, handheld, mobile and everything else) you should first know what Vita can do,
How can you say the bolded in one breath, then argue that we should not differentiate between games on handheld vs. console in the other?
I mean, the vita is 'designed' for the hand and portability -- touch screen, backpad, gyro, 2 triggers. If you design to those features, you're making a 'handheld' game.
if you plan to do Witcher 3-like game on Vita you can't blame Vita because you can't do it or calling the game "home" for this reason, if you make that Witcher 3-like game with PS1 graphics it will probably run on Vita but no one would probably buy it, so it's all about making the right choices, like not making that witcher 3-like game on Vita at all but an original rpg designed specifically for Vita.
If borderlands 2 Vita had PS1 graphics(just an example) it would probably have been a native res 60fps 1:1 port, but no one would have bought borderlands 2 with PS1 graphics so developers preferred to sacrifice other aspects for better graphics, it's all about choices, not about a supposed handheld/home nature of a game.
That's really got nothing to do with it, though. You couldn't design a PS4 game for the PS1/2/3 either. That's a given, and not really relevant to the conversation.
You are putting 100% of the blame on the dev if something goes wrong during development, and the fact is you can have extremely 'sane' and reasonable expectations (no 'Witcher 3 on vita') but discover late in development that the hardware simply can't handle it for obscure reasons and it's not always the fault of the developers.
Again, just because everything seems reasonable for a device on paper does not mean you won't run into major roadblocks due to the device or engine. You can't always blame the dev for this.
If a game is not going to run on Vita then it should be cancelled or developed on a more powerful console unless acceptable downgrades can make it run perfectly on Vita.
That's wildly unrealistic and would cause developers to lose their jobs and companies to shutter their windows. It's not how the development process should, could, or ever would work.
Any hardware has its limits, but they have nothing to do with the handheld/home games dinstinction.
Again:
People use devices with different form factors differently.
A good designer should take these different use cases into consideration.
Therefore, a good designer will make design distinctions between a game created from the ground up for handheld vs. a game created from the ground up for console/tv.
This won't affect every game, or every genre to the same degree.
It really is that simple.
