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

Falcon/Falco/Wesker

YO UGH

kU03X.gif


Bring it.

oh how I wish it could be brought D:
 
So I posted this a few hours ago tonight:



We're nearing midnight, and surprisingly enough I'm already getting people who are taking-me up on this offer.

Part of me is wondering if I've done something stupid.

But who knows? It might be actual sources - we do have a fair number of industry insiders who lurk-about at GAF on a daily basis.

If you wish to send me some verification info, label the title of your private message "Do Not Open Until E3" or something similar. I'll do my best to send you back confirmation that I've got it, and then I simply will not open it until at least the hour of Nintendo's E3 conference. It will sit in my inbox for the next 70+ days, untouched. Simple as that.

On Nintendo's E3 Conference day, we'll evaluate the sources and information together. It'll make the day even more fun, and perhaps memorable.

I've sworn to not peek or open the emails on my departed Jake's honor, and anyone who knows me personally will tell you that I'm as serious as a heart attack when I speak of him. My voice still shakes and my eyes still moisten all too easily when I dwell on him for too long. So rest assured.. despite my habitual silliness here in the thread, I'm serious on this matter.

And, in the end, many of these emails may be folks having fun at my expense, in which case: no big deal - I'll consider it part of the risk of this kind of thing. But if the payoff is that we end-up with a great group of sources who can help us in the future? That'd be fantastic.
I would like to take part of this offer too :)
 
MRI GAF here! (also certified in CT, but I'm currently out of practice.. by choice)
I've long-admired your obliquely-positioned maximum intensity projection skull avatar.
Hah! I was testing our 3T machine for a language study a couple years ago. Now I have a rack fullbof machines that would make durangos weep for mama.

My contact card has an accurate rendering of my brain from above and from the side. It gets smiles.

Anyway, cool idea with the E3 test. For a moment, I was sorely tempted to put together a list of WAGs and send them over, just to see if I had anything right. :D
 
Do you think either of them would be happy to wait until 2015? Just when I'm almost convinced that we'll see a surprise unveiling in ~70 days for a 2013 launch, something else comes along and makes me reconsider the other extreme.

2015? No way. That'd be completely crazy.

Then again, I would have thought 2013 would have been crazy if you had asked me the same question back in 2005 so I guess we're already past that point

Wow, more advancement than usual for an AC game.

Power of the Wii U, baby.
 
I just realized that the controller's screen can be used as a keyboard for browsing the web, searching for titles on the eShop, etc.

Not necessarily a huge deal, but sending a message over Xbox Live is way too frustrating of a process to even justify sending a message half the time. This should make things much easier.
 
Ok, so what first party development teams could we realistically expect to launch a WiiU game within the 'launch window'?

Obviously EAD 4, who are expected to release Pikmin 3 around launch.

What about EAD Tokyo 1? They helped with Zelda Four Swords Anniversary and OoT3D, but they must have been working on more than that? I'm hoping they've been working on a 3D mario game for WiiU.

Then of course, there's Retro, who hopefully will have a game ready for WiiU within it's first year.

Monolith. Hopefully their WiiU game doesn't take long to come to the west.

Is it possible Monster Games could have a quick game ready within WiiU's launch window? Their last release was Pilotwings Resort, a fairly barebones game released in early 2011.

I can't really see any other teams that would've had enough time to make a WiiU game since their last release. Anything I missed? For some reason, I expected a couple more studios...
 
Ok, so what first party development teams could we realistically expect to launch a WiiU game within the 'launch window'?

Obviously EAD 4, who are expected to release Pikmin 3 around launch.

What about EAD Tokyo 1? They helped with Zelda Four Swords Anniversary and OoT3D, but they must have been working on more than that? I'm hoping they've been working on a 3D mario game for WiiU.

Then of course, there's Retro, who hopefully will have a game ready for WiiU within it's first year.

Monolith. Hopefully their WiiU game doesn't take long to come to the west.

Is it possible Monster Games could have a quick game ready within WiiU's launch window? Their last release was Pilotwings Resort, a fairly barebones game released in early 2011.

I can't really see any other teams that would've had enough time to make a WiiU game since their last release. Anything I missed? For some reason, I expected a couple more studios...

I think Retro's game is the wild card whether it'll be at launch or not. It has a very high chance of being a launch game, but it's no guarantee either. A Retro game has never launched with Nintendo hardware, but there can be a first for everything.
 
I think Retro's game is the wild card whether it'll be at launch or not. It has a very high chance of being a launch game, but it's no guarantee either. A Retro game has never launched with Nintendo hardware, but there can be a first for everything.

All I know is that the game should be far enough into development to be shown off at E3. I'm not expecting it to release this year, but if it does, that would just be (very delicious) icing on top of the cake.
 
All I know is that the game should be far enough into development to be shown off at E3. I'm not expecting it to release this year, but if it does, that would just be (very delicious) icing on top of the cake.

Their 3DS game will be this year or early next. The next reboot or console game is next fall. So my tarot card say.
 
maybe nintendo told that vigil guy to say it was on par just so at E3 they can blow us away :D

:p

Poor deluded soul. :P

I hope Wii U's web browser is really good.
Me too. This is actually a pretty important thing to me. I hate having zillions of devices and remotes to deal with and currently my iPad sits in the lounge as my web and email machine. If I could actually use the Subscreen for those things I could just have that in the lounge and have all the digital stuff I want to use in one device.
 
I'd laugh really hard if Wii U is $250, boasts exactly current gen capabilities, but nintendo's 1st party games blow everyone away.
 
Hm? I'm more pointing out that there's no reason to expect Pikmin 3 at launch.

Not saying "Absolutely guaranteed to be nowhere near the first three months," but there's no evidence that it will be.

Yeah, I should have clarified. I was listing any studios that I thought were candidates for 'launch window', so within the first 6 months of WiiU. With Miyamoto's comment that we shouldn't have to wait long for Pikmin 3 (because of it being in development for so long on Wii), I thought it would be a likely launch window title.

Not a guarantee, but it's probably as likely as any other first party game to be ready for launch window.
 
Kid Icarus was the first announced 3DS game. The very first.

It was clearly the best launch game.

Wow, I was about to post the exact same thing.

I think Pikmin is going to end up like Kid Icarus. We'll see a lot of it at E3 this year, won't get a date, but assume launch window. Then it will end up releasing a year after the Wii U launch...
 
Wow, I was about to post the exact same thing.

I think Pikmin is going to end up like Kid Icarus. We'll see a lot of it at E3 this year, won't get a date, but assume launch window. Then it will end up releasing a year after the Wii U launch...

I think that'll be retro's game.
 
Hell yeah it is.

I hope Sakurai makes an amazing Smash game and then works on a sequel or a new IP or another old IP revival.

KI's revival honestly came out better than Metroid's did.

Woah, that's some high praise right there.

I don't know if I agree, but I'm enjoying the hell out of KI right now. Sakurai is a true beast. I always thought Smash Bros was so packed with content because of all the franchises he was allowed to borrow stuff from. Kid Icarus has proven me wrong. That game is jam packed with content.

Sakurai's team and Retro bringing old franchises into the current generation is something I could get used to.
 
Hell yeah it is.

I hope Sakurai makes an amazing Smash game and then works on a sequel or a new IP or another old IP revival.

KI's revival honestly came out better than Metroid's did.

Sakurai has jumped into my automatic day 1 buy list, regardless of what the game is. He just always packs his games with tons of stuff. So
Good.

I dunno about that MP comment though, that was one of my favorite games ever. I need to let KI:U soak in more lol
 
I hope KI does gangbusters. I know he's already well respected by Iwata and the like (didn't they work together on kirby? They might as well be frat buddies), but more is always welcome.

I think I need to get KI - trying to hold off, but man, everybody says that it is a classic.

I bought it and I don't even have a 3DS yet *blushes*
 
Hell yeah it is.

I hope Sakurai makes an amazing Smash game and then works on a sequel or a new IP or another old IP revival.

KI's revival honestly came out better than Metroid's did.

The good thing about the Wii U will be his ability to make adjustments to Smash if he needs to. I have a feeling that will make playing the game a lot better for a lot of people.
 
Gahiggidy said:
So in other words, you are saying the v5 kit is closer to 4x stronger than xbox 360?

How do you come to that conclusion? >______>

Ideaman, if your source has so much info, does he know the specs of the WiiU at this point then?

Well, 2.1 is closer to 4 than 2 is, lol

could be interpreted as: V5 closer to 4x (stronger than) 360, compared to V4 > then yes
could be interpreted as: V5 closer to 4x 360, than close to 360 > then no


A news concerning the dev kits, as promised

Third-party studios will receive the "v5" dev kits very soon (before the next month). It's even possible that some just got them

- They are apparently the dev kits which where in possession of Nintendo lately (whereas third-parties had the V4).
- There is a noticeable increase of performances with them, a noticeable but not huge however. We don't know if this amelioration is due to a change of components, tweaking of the previously present ones (frequencies, etc.), or a global & light optimization of the hardware, the dev kit itself, the software development kit that may be linked to it, etc.

Some details about the context and assumptions:

- Except maybe big japanese studios (like Capcom), i doubt that other third-parties received these dev kits (much) earlier. It's likely that my sources are one of the firsts to be granted of the latest revisions. This means that all the declarations, the news, from foreign developers, that you've read until now, were in a V4 dev kit framework, before the release of these newest ones.

- A previous post of lherre indicated that Nintendo guys were testing an engine and saw slightly improved results on the V5 compare to V4.
Context: it was posted 1 month ago, when lherre decided to come out of his lair in answer to my very first message to confirm that Wii U was clearly closer to "2x than 5x xbox360". And he basically added that the expected more advanced dev kit in Nintendo headquarters at the time that i've talked about will not change dramatically the Wii U power status. So he surely knew of these engine benchmarks before my intervention, maybe some days, maybe some weeks.
Assumption: considering the 1month+ interval between these internal tests and the V5 delivery to third-parties (minus the dev kits assembly and shipping), there's a chance that the V5 dev kits in the hands of foreign studios have received even more hardware refinements and optimizations than the models used for these Nintendo tests some time before.

- They could have a different code name, but my sources called them V5, as in "the ones following the V4 that they currently develop on". Therefore, it appears they are a rather major revision.


[Now, a detail that could be important, but i'm not sure at all of it, as what my sources told me isn't clear and rely on subjectivity (maybe they haven't understood well what Nintendo said). Take that with caution, and it would be cool if a developer working on the Wii U could precise this.

- It seems these kits may be "near final"

It's possible that Nintendo still have more advanced dev kits, but apparently not to a point to constitute a real new future revision (perhaps just small increments in numbers like 5.1/5.2). There may be new dev kit shippings to come but it could point that there is a progressive stabilization in hardware changes. It could also be a word-confusion from my sources between "last" and "latest", or maybe Nintendo thought that when i gathered these infos (a few weeks) but in fact there will be new revisions in the work because they decided to modify the components again, etc. So big grain of salt for this part]

I hope we'll hear more about these dev kits, what kind of modifications occurred on them, and their performances.


Ideaman, you've given some vague info/hints on overall system power and more specifically, the RAM amount. Thanks for that. But you have not yet -as far as i can remember- given us some more info on the part that keeps us up at night: the GPU. Is that because you don't know anything about it, or because you can't say. Is it possible to use some Russian interrogation techniques on your sources?
 
This "is x-time stronger/weaker than y" term has to leave this thread.

Also, disappointed first that guek hasn't a 3DS, but proud now because he bought KI nevertheless!
 
Me too. This is actually a pretty important thing to me. I hate having zillions of devices and remotes to deal with and currently my iPad sits in the lounge as my web and email machine. If I could actually use the Subscreen for those things I could just have that in the lounge and have all the digital stuff I want to use in one device.
Me three! On 3DS, switching to the browser and then going right back to your game is great. With more RAM and a more powerful CPU it should be even better on Wii U. I imagine it will support Flash too, considering the Wii browser does. I'm expecting good things.
 
Wish I could quit this thread until E3 as we are going in circles.

"Developer said WiiU is on par"
"That's disappointing"
"That's bullshit, because of x,y,z"
"Oh, that's ok then"

"Developer said WiiU is on par"
"That's disappointing"
"That's bullshit, because of x,y,z"
"Oh, that's ok then"

"Developer said WiiU is on par"
"That's disappointing"
"That's bullshit, because of x,y,z"
"Oh, that's ok then"


But I can't.
You never know, I may just miss some "real" news.
Maybe......
 
Idy just wrote something; it's not groundbreaking but important nonetheless.

E3 isn't that far away anymore, March is coming to an end and then we get crazy April fools day rumors.
 
Yeah be careful what you read this coming weekend. And be carefull of every april episode of magazines aswell.

Shouldnt we make an "April fools gaming news" Topic?
 
So what of those rumors that Wii U was bumped up to be able to run UE4 (even if just barely?).

some guy on some nintendo fansite bet his account on it.

so...

fhvLf.jpg


In all seriousness, the guy who posted it here seemed pretty confident in the guy. I think he's (supposedly) been right about stuff before
 
some guy on some nintendo fansite bet his account on it.

so...

fhvLf.jpg


In all seriousness, the guy who posted it here seemed pretty confident in the guy. I think he's (supposedly) been right about stuff before

Hmm, interesting. E3 can't come soon enough. I hope we never get an announcement of hardware more than a year before launch ever again.
 
Hmm, interesting. E3 can't come soon enough. I hope we never get an announcement of hardware more than a year before launch ever again.

Same here, I give Microsoft credit for that (even if they screwed up with the RROD and othe launch issues) I think they had the best reveal to launch timeline. They revealed the 360 a couple weeks before E3 and then showed all the games at E3 followed by a launch like 5 months later, that is perfect timing for me.
 
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