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Groucho on 09 January 2009
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Soriku said:
Groucho said:
Soriku said:
You just kinda proved my point...more advanced output would mean more expense.

I'm not talking about just the graphics. I'm also talking about the shaders, the detail, the whatever.

 

That's just it though.  You don't need that stuff in JRPGs to look decent.  Heck a lot of excellent JRPGs from the last gen had pre-rendered backgrounds, despite having 3D characters.  Did that make them stink?

Because games like Lost Odyssey and Valkyria Chronicles have good looking gfx, doesn't put them on par with shooters, for development costs, for any of the same reasons, and it certainly doesn't imply that making them for the Wii would be "cheaper".

RPG dev costs are mostly in the scripting of the game, and the source art.  The engineering expenses, which is what makes games like shooters so expensive, just aren't as "present".  If the company sinks huge costs into superstar voice acting, motion capture for awesome cutscenes, etc, that costs big $$... but that stuff looks darn near the same in 480p as it does in 720p (its pre-rendered on CPU farms, many minutes per frame in some cases), and the sound... well its the same cost no matter what the destination hardware plays it back at.

 

Yeah, you don't need it, but a good deal of HD RPGs use those. Games like Valkyria Chronicles don't need that type of stuff, but FF or LO or something like that would need greater graphical output stuff.

They're not on par with shooters yeah...but I don't believe they're on par with Wii costs so easily.

I think what you're getting at is that the "ambition bar" for HD platforms is higher than it is for the Wii.

I totally agree, but that really has nothing to do with the platforms, per se.  The difference in cost is not anywhere near as great for the JRPG subgenre as it is for a shooter.  That's my point.  

You can be ambitious with extraneous stuff (like awesome cutscenes and voice), but that costs the same.  Its only the engineering and art expenses that factor in, relative to the platform, here, and I'm saying that the art is actually cheaper since JRPGs don't usually require the artists to make normal maps, bump maps, etc.  The engineering, however, can be as expensive, or cheap, as the publisher wants it to be -- pretty silly for a JRPG, but it does happen -- and I suppose that's where the "3rd parties are dumb" comments must come from?

I'm just saying that, typically, the dev cost differences between Wii and HD JRPGs are not typically as great as they are between Wii and HD shooters, sports titles, etc.  That's all I'm saying.  

The Wii is still very attractive as a JRPG platform to the 3rd parties -- again, because the engineering requirements are much less (a huge part of the dev expense, that is).  Sure the games cost about the same as the HD versions, but you get a LOT more bids for making them (from cheap, low-tech studios).

The publishers can cherry-pick the good candidates and roll with them, for JRPGs.  They can up the quality bar merely by the selection process.  And most JRPG pitches... well they come from little Japanese studios who are eyeing the Japanese demographic, and frankly don't have much of a clue as to what would draw a western gamer into their game.