Wii U Speculation Thread The Third: Casting Dreams in The Castle of Miyamoto

A lot of information gets leaked tomorrow. It's usually NDA breaking/leaking day tomorrow. It's kind of an unwritten rule, but you'll get a lot of information on things, not just video game related tomorrow.

I wish if my post wouldn't make this obvious, but this was masterfully played and needed to be applauded for as much. :lol
 
Even though personally I quite like dual analogue controls they really are inferior to a mouse or pointer or touch screen.

Not sure what your use of "inferior" means. But there are several factors that are attributed to each control method. Comfort and accuracy are two main derterminants.
 
It in its infancy in that it hasn't reached any kind of point where people can really decide where it should go.
You have so many companies pulling it in so many directions right now.

I think that might be the main issue.

With TV and Movies, it was fairly simple. There was a pretty clear idea of what people wanted.
But because of the way that you interact with gaming, everyone has their own thoughts on what makes it great.

Not sure I agree with this. Film was more or less filmed theatre until the forties. It took a fair while for directors to take advantage of the freedom of cinematography, mis-en-scene, all that shit. It doesn't just happen, it takes great artistic minds, and I think the corporatist nature of the game industry probably retards those great minds.

Anyway I need to go to sleep, it's half two here.
 
Everyone says this, "It's only in its infancy, just give it time blah blah" but is it? Are these things inevitable? Seems to me that gaming is the only art form that has consciously tried to get emulate another the older it's got. Film went in the completely opposite direction. I honestly don't share your optimistic view of the industry's future.
I wonder about this too. We all like to think gaming will mature and become a widely respected form, but could its primary function perennially be to provide violent power fantasy to young males and simple time-wasters to heavy gadget users?
I think Nintendo's efforts to expand the industry are very important to moving the form forward. If the total pool of gamers grows larger, it becomes less of a risk to try new things. New genres could flourish with expansion into new demographics. Niche product becomes viable. There's more hope that an audience with unusual aesthetic tastes exists in high enough numbers for a boundary pushing work to succeed.
There are all sorts of benefits to games as industry and medium if companies with power make it their goal to bring as many new players into the fold as possible, rather than using more powerful hardware to appeal to the dedicated gamer base that does not significantly grow as the years go by.
Personally. I don't think i can be asked to play a 10-20 hour game upright centering my Wii pointer control.
I never had trouble with this in games that made constant use of the pointer. Only in games where it was used occasionally (like Zelda) so it was natural to let my hand flop and forget about screen alignment.
It's because it came with the Trojan horse that was the Wii Remote. I appreciate motion controls mind you, but the stigma is on pointer controls as well from people generalizing everything Wii Remote as "motion controls" and writing it off due to their experiences with poor usages of said controls.

The part that sucks though is that pointer controls are a quantum leap on par with the joystick & d-pad and the potential will never be tapped as long as developers aren't building with them in mind. =/
Yeah, it's a real shame.
Despite expecting it not to be a fantastic game, I'm really looking forward to Pandora's Tower just because it seems to be a game that actually tries to take advantage of the benefits of pointer control.

EDIT: bonma_man are you Australian? I'm struggling to type this stuff here. Apologies to anyone if it's a bit garbled! I'm heading to bed.
 
Not sure what your use of "inferior" means. But there are several factors that are attributed to each control method. Comfort and accuracy are two main derterminants.

Honestly I've never played an FPS or TPS on the Wii but the pointer seems like an obvious advantage over dual analogue controls which are inherently imprecise. I like Halo's slow style but I don't think you can deny it would've been quite a different game with more precise controls ie a pointer, or a mouse.
 
Everyone says this, "It's only in its infancy, just give it time blah blah" but is it? Are these things inevitable? Seems to me that gaming is the only art form that has consciously tried to get emulate another the older it's got. Film went in the completely opposite direction. I honestly don't share your optimistic view of the industry's future.

But sorry to ruin your speculation thread, I've been lurking since it began.

I made a thread back in the day touching this same point, gaming evolution is just an illusion when you see that the focus of this "evolution" comes from emulating films story telling. The only way that gaming really evolve in something is focus on gameplay, so other aspects as story, art, becomes dependent of gameplay, no other way around. Making games dependent of other mediums as films, books, just help to negate the relevance of the medium itslef.
 
I wonder about this too. We all like to think gaming will mature and become a widely respected form, but could its primary function perennially be to provide violent power fantasy to young males and simple time-wasters to heavy gadget users?
I think Nintendo's efforts to expand the industry are very important to moving the form forward. If the total pool of gamers grows larger, it becomes less of a risk to try new things. New genres could flourish with expansion into new demographics. Niche product becomes viable. There's more hope that an audience with unusual aesthetic tastes exists in high enough numbers for a boundary pushing work to succeed.
There are all sorts of benefits to games as industry and medium if companies with power make it their goal to bring as many new players into the fold as possible, rather than using more powerful hardware to appeal to the dedicated gamer base that does not significantly grow as the years go by.


EDIT: bonma_man are you Australian? I'm struggling to type this too here. Apologies to anyone if it's a bit garbled! I'm heading to bed.

haha yes, got home from a pub crawl about an hour ago, even with day light savings ending I don't feel great.

But yes I basically agree with you, can't be arsed elaborating right now though. Would just love gaming to be as diverse as the book or music fields. The overwhelming focus on technology in itself just distracts from the we should really be focusing on.
 
I think that might be the main issue.



Not sure I agree with this. Film was more or less filmed theatre until the forties. It took a fair while for directors to take advantage of the freedom of cinematography, mis-en-scene, all that shit. It doesn't just happen, it takes great artistic minds, and I think the corporatist nature of the game industry probably retards those great minds.

Anyway I need to go to sleep, it's half two here.

Well, yes, the money behind the industry is a huge problem with what is happening right now.
However, we also have an exact opposite direction where we have these tiny games by tiny teams that are hitting big as well.
So it's a very mixed message that people see, and why there is such a divide, even amongst the gaming elite.
 
Ok, let me delve some in the recent 'what developers want from next-gen' talk that's been popular lately, but from an entirely Western perspective.

1. Middleware providers want PC-like consoles in terms of features and power. Which is natural, as the product of those developers is 'new tech' which, let's not fool ourselves, is made possible not so much by sw breakthroughs as by hw advancements. In this regard, those parties don't really care about the consumer market - their income does not come (primarily) from that. They are a major force behind the 'AAA..A' push we're seeing today (the other proponents being mega-publishers who want their grounds clear from 'weeds'). Unsurprisingly quite a few independent game studios bit the 'HD experience' bate at the start of this cycle - who'd want to be left behind if everybody left and right was rushing to Klondyke? I find the case of Denis Dyack/SK particularly telling: at the start of the gen he was an evangelist of 'hollywood-style AAA+ productions made possible by huge teams using advanced middleware running on HD powerhouses' (paraphrasing his various statements from that period). Fast-forward a couple of years when he was already suing Epic for underdelivering on middleware promises and contractual obligations. And we know how Too Human went - SK are grasping for their breath ATM. For this group of middleware developers, nintedo's philosophy is detrimental - they'll always pay lip service to it, but that's not what they really want the market to be heading, and they never will.

2. Regular game companies who care about their consumer base, and for whom 'advancements' in the revenue stream from the end consumer are where the gist is. Those guys ideally want huge install bases and subscription-based revenue. For them the hardware prowess is secondary - they could be happy on an ipad if it was not for Apple dictating the rules. Such players would be perfectly fine with nintendo, with the implied remark nintendo does not screw up with the online. Which takes us to..

3. Blizzard and Valve. Those guys are the self-made success stories of the Western game industry - one of them with the 'next-gen' subscription-based revenue, the other - with the own DD service, both with huge install bases, both playing by their own rules, building their own kingdoms. Of course, not without their own cloudy weathers. Their interest in nintendo's offerings is entirely dictated by what the weather forecast in their own kingdom says. In this regard, IF they decided to do business with nintendo, they'd be more aligned with (2) than with (1) above - a viable online system is way more important to them, than the spit'n'shine the hw offers.

Very good post. My hypothesis for over a year now has been that hardware designers would be sensible and pay attention to group 2, but now I'm not entirely sure.

Something I kept forgetting to mention is awhile back wsippel or someone said something about the flash memory and caching, and I think the patent indicated something like that.

I also keep forgetting to add that the patent still won't obviously contain everything possible, so the I/O and other components may still be doing more than what we seem to know.

Partitioning off a dedicated 2GB or so of flash memory for games to use as a cache would be an interesting idea, but would affordable flash memory be able to reach the bandwidth necessary for this to be worthwhile? Given a disc read speed of, say, 18MB/s (4x Blu-ray), is there much point using a flash cache unless it's substantially faster than that?
 
Very good post. My hypothesis for over a year now has been that hardware designers would be sensible and pay attention to group 2, but now I'm not entirely sure.



Partitioning off a dedicated 2GB or so of flash memory for games to use as a cache would be an interesting idea, but would affordable flash memory be able to reach the bandwidth necessary for this to be worthwhile? Given a disc read speed of, say, 18MB/s (4x Blu-ray), is there much point using a flash cache unless it's substantially faster than that?

There are high speed SSDs out there, obviously. They could split it between basic flash memory and then a high speed SSD. Though, I dunno if that's a good idea, since SSDs do have a problem of becoming corrupt after so many uses.
 
I made a thread back in the day touching this same point, gaming evolution is just an illusion when you see that the focus of this "evolution" comes from emulating films story telling. The only way that gaming really evolve in something is focus on gameplay, so other aspects as story, art, becomes dependent of gameplay, no other way around. Making games dependent of other mediums as films, books, just help to negate the relevance of the medium itslef.

I completely agree with this. The games that have - in my opinion - used the medium as a tool for storytelling, or at least tried to say something, have done it by integrating it into the gameplay rather than fucking cutscenes. But unfortunately they are few and far between and almost completely ignored.

Killer7
Majora's Mask
Animal Crossing
Journey
ICO
Another World
etc

I want a console that facilitates this kind of experimentation.

(ps I'd recommended reading Randy Smith's EDGE columns if you haven't already)
 
Just wanted to come here and let you know you win the price for the most stupid comment on NeoGAF for this week. Congratulations!

Ohh really? well, taking time and quoting a "stupid comment" doesn't make you the smartest person but you already knew that right? try harder next time
 
I completely agree with this. The games that have - in my opinion - used the medium as a tool for storytelling, or at least tried to say something, have done it by integrating it into the gameplay rather than fucking cutscenes. But unfortunately they are few and far between and almost completely ignored.

Killer7
Majora's Mask
Animal Crossing
Journey
ICO
Another World
etc

I want a console that facilitates this kind of experimentation.

(ps I'd recommended reading Randy Smith's EDGE columns if you haven't already)

When I made my thread I put Pikmin as the goal point, it's amazing how many people feel sad when a Pikmin die, and it all comes from your own actions, that's exactly the kind of emotion I want to feel in a game, Pikmin is a very moving game, and it's able to reach this point without any flashy cutscene.
 
I made a thread back in the day touching this same point, gaming evolution is just an illusion when you see that the focus of this "evolution" comes from emulating films story telling. The only way that gaming really evolve in something is focus on gameplay, so other aspects as story, art, becomes dependent of gameplay, no other way around. Making games dependent of other mediums as films, books, just help to negate the relevance of the medium itslef.

The only problem with that is it's not the easiest thing to do. Making a story that comes from the gameplay (do don't show) requires a lot of time and thought. Time and thought that some devs are going to give.
 
haha yes, got home from a pub crawl about an hour ago, even with day light savings ending I don't feel great.

But yes I basically agree with you, can't be arsed elaborating right now though. Would just love gaming to be as diverse as the book or music fields. The overwhelming focus on technology in itself just distracts from the we should really be focusing on.

I'm hoping that we soon get to a point in technology where developers can say, "Finally. This is good enough to last us for a long, long time. Let us now turn focus away from bells and whistles, and turn our focus more towards narrative, style, etc."

But sadly, breaking the new console cycle is going to be a tough one. And we have to get the financial angle worked-out; telling a story without breaking the bank will continue to nag us.

When I made my thread I put Pikmin as the goal point, it's amazing how many people feel sad when a Pikmin die, and it all comes from your own actions, that's exactly the kind of emotion I want to feel in a game, Pikmin is a very moving game, and it's able to reach this point without any flashy cutscene.
I was so disturbed by Pikmin death that I did a no-death, plenty o'resets run in Pikmin 2. You're right.

I look forward to Pikmin 3, but damn if I don't dread seeing the little guys die..
 
When I made my thread I put Pikmin as the goal point, it's amazing how many people feel sad when a Pikmin die, and it all comes from your own actions, that's exactly the kind of emotion I want to feel in a game, Pikmin is a very moving game, and it's able to reach this point without any flashy cutscene.

Much like how in Little King's Story I'll restart a fight when a villager dies. Doesn't matter if you get more people that wash up on the shore. That person had a fucking family.
;_;
 
There are high speed SSDs out there, obviously. They could split it between basic flash memory and then a high speed SSD. Though, I dunno if that's a good idea, since SSDs do have a problem of becoming corrupt after so many uses.

Shouldn't be a problem, because there are HDD that use the exact same principle. A regular HDD with a small portion "SSD" (a couple of gigs) built in. As a cheaper alternative for full blown SSD's.
 
There are high speed SSDs out there, obviously. They could split it between basic flash memory and then a high speed SSD. Though, I dunno if that's a good idea, since SSDs do have a problem of becoming corrupt after so many uses.

There are SSDs out there that reach 550MB/s, but they start at several hundred dollars apiece, so a bit out of the range of Nintendo. There are also SD cards that hit about 90MB/s, which is closer to what I'm thinking of, but I don't know whether the flash in them would be affordable from Nintendo's perspective.
 
Honestly I've never played an FPS or TPS on the Wii but the pointer seems like an obvious advantage over dual analogue controls which are inherently imprecise. I like Halo's slow style but I don't think you can deny it would've been quite a different game with more precise controls ie a pointer, or a mouse.

i agree about pointer controls. the main problem is that they are not that accessible, because they still need to be heavily customized so that they are optimal (because each setup is different and people seem to have a lot of different preferences) Things like bounding box, turning speed, sensitivity

This could of course be improved in the future, but developers did not make enough games to fully figure it out yet
 
They are a business.
Used games means less money that they get.

See, when you buy a used game, nothing goes to the publisher. It all goes to the business that sells it.

However, it's rather foolish to try and stop it. Used books and music and movies haven't killed those industries. In fact, it helps them. But gaming is weird...

http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/retail/retail_used.jsp

Finding Used Nintendo Products

Looking for an original NES system? Having trouble finding an old N64 game? The following list provides names and websites of some known retailers that sell used Nintendo products, and may be able to help you locate that hard-to-find older product you've been looking for.

Links that go to Amazon.com, EBGames.com, and GameStop.com follow afterward.

Although the page is focused on older hardware and software, I doubt that, say, Sony or Microsoft even have a page like this on their sites. (Not that I've looked.)
 
http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/retail/retail_used.jsp



Links that go to Amazon.com, EBGames.com, and GameStop.com follow afterward.

Although the page is focused on older hardware and software, I doubt that, say, Sony or Microsoft even have a page like this on their sites. (Not that I've looked.)

I've always found that laughable, that Nintendo doesn't seem so threatened by the used market, confident that their stuff will sell regardless.
 
I'm hoping that we soon get to a point in technology where developers can say, "Finally. This is good enough to last us for a long, long time. Let us now turn focus away from bells and whistles, and turn our focus more towards narrative, style, etc."

But sadly, breaking the new console cycle is going to be a tough one. And we have to get the financial angle worked-out; telling a story without breaking the bank will continue to nag us.


I was so disturbed by Pikmin death that I did a no-death, plenty o'resets run in Pikmin 2. You're right.

I look forward to Pikmin 3, but damn if I don't dread seeing the little guys die..

I think that technology and the high barrier of entry is part of the problem too. Like everyone knows how to write and make music, and these days everyone knows how to take a picture or a movies, but who the fuck knows how to make a game? It's too abstract.

PIKMIN's another one, yeah. Nintendo games seem to be completely ignored when they do anything arty-wise.
 
That's all for software that they can't make money on anymore (in its original state, anyway).

And I said as much.

I think it's safe to say that Nintendo has never done any anti-used game venture.

No "online passes."
No exclusive first-use-only content codes.
Focus on physical media as opposed to digital.
Digital content tied to hardware, not account (can be resold with hardware).

The closest thing they've done is include Club Nintendo codes, which are for gravy physical goodies, not game-centric content. Their philosophy isn't "anti-used,"it's "pro-new." Simple as that.

Some of these may change with Wii U, but Nintendo is easily the most used-friendly company on the market by a landslide.
 
I didn't even notice it until someone pointed it out to me in here when I proposed that the Wii U disc slot glow "Nintendo red." Not sure when that happened.
Same here :) I didnt notice it before recently too.


2006, I believe.
I was mostly wondering why, but when is also nice to know :) But was it really that early? I also noticed that Nintendo went away from the red tearstrip on their game and switched to grey/black. One example:

iblSDgioZx2HPs.jpg


(Smash Bros is a later print, i bought it maybe a year ago. The first prints has a red tearstrip).

All 3DS games that i own also have the grey/black tearstrip.
 
Same here :) I didnt notice it before recently too.



I was mostly wondering why, but when is also nice to know :) But was it really that early? I also noticed that Nintendo went away from the red tearstrip on their game and switched to grey/black. One example:

iblSDgioZx2HPs.jpg


(Smash Bros is a later print, i bought it maybe a year ago. The first prints had a red tearstrip).

All 3DS games that i own also have the grey/black tearstrip.

Ah, sorry, thought you said when.
It was to make it more sleek and "modern".
 
And I said as much.

I think it's safe to say that Nintendo has never done any anti-used game venture.

No "online passes."
No exclusive first-use-only content codes.
Focus on physical media as opposed to digital.
Digital content tied to hardware, not account (can be resold with hardware).

The closest thing they've done is include Club Nintendo codes, which are for gravy physical goodies, not game-centric content. Their philosophy isn't "anti-used,"it's "pro-new." Simple as that.

Some of these may change with Wii U, but Nintendo is easily the most used-friendly company on the market by a landslide.

To be fair, they also haven't really had the infrastructure to handle things like that. Still, I doubt they'll go the anti-used route next gen. They tend to focus on making a profit off the console, so I guess that should serve as a buffer against any loss in software sales. Given how good the legs are on Nintendo games, though, I have to wonder how big of a problem used game sales even are.

Also, isn't the whole Greatest Hits/Player's Choice thing supposed to help combat used sales, too? Or is that a completely different issue?
 
I had a dream about the Wii U next unveiling the other day. Nintendo had sit up a small theater in the showfloor, similar to what S.E. often does, where they were showing a long presentation trailer that didn't show much of anything, followed by three new big title games, and a bunch of smaller titles. From there you'd move inside their booth and play the games. I assumed this set up was for crowd control inside their booth, but since the dream ended at the end of the trailers I don't really know.

I rarely have video game related dreams and only one other time was it this vivid. I could probably write a fairly convincing summary, if not rumor, for some of the games, but with Stupid Lie Day coming and the restrictions on that, I'm kind of hesitant to go into more details.
 
To be fair, they also haven't really had the infrastructure to handle things like that. Still, I doubt they'll go the anti-used route next gen. They tend to focus on making a profit off the console, so I guess that should serve as a buffer against any loss in software sales. Given how good the legs are on Nintendo games, though, I have to wonder how big of a problem used game sales even are.

Also, isn't the whole Greatest Hits/Player's Choice thing supposed to help combat used sales, too? Or is that a completely different issue?

That is part of it.
Reselling popular games for cheap. They really need to expand the series, though. And bring them out quicker.
 
It's because it came with the Trojan horse that was the Wii Remote. I appreciate motion controls mind you, but the stigma is on pointer controls as well from people generalizing everything Wii Remote as "motion controls" and writing it off due to their experiences with poor usages of said controls.

The part that sucks though is that pointer controls are a quantum leap on par with the joystick & d-pad and the potential will never be tapped as long as developers aren't building with them in mind. =/

Same thing I was thinking. It annoys me that pointer controls get lumped under "waggle".

Partitioning off a dedicated 2GB or so of flash memory for games to use as a cache would be an interesting idea, but would affordable flash memory be able to reach the bandwidth necessary for this to be worthwhile? Given a disc read speed of, say, 18MB/s (4x Blu-ray), is there much point using a flash cache unless it's substantially faster than that?

But think about it for a moment. What's better? An 8x BR drive giving you 36MB/s, or cheap flash that can get you 100-150GB/s?
 
About the RAM, I see talk about Nintendo going for GDDR3 for main RAM, but what about GDDR5? Or is that too expensive?


edit: I guess the eDRAM will help offload a lot of the bandwidth if it's GDDR3 on a narrow bus.


sorry to bold but my question never got answered :/
 
About the RAM, I see talk about Nintendo going for GDDR3 for main RAM, but what about GDDR5? Or is that too expensive?


edit: I guess the eDRAM will help offload a lot of the bandwidth if it's GDDR3 on a narrow bus.


sorry to bold but my question never got answered :/

Looks like you answered it yourself. :)
 
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