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griffinA on 15 August 2009
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Procrastinato said:
HappySqurriel said:

But the design work that is rewarding is handled by a tiny group of people ... and in a game like Forza or Grand Turismo the majority of artists get the joy of modeling or texturing dozens of different wheel designs or spoilers in order to add customization options that few people will ever care about.


Let me get back to the OP topic, and comment on ths at the same time, albeit a little indirectly.

Ponder Madden '10 for a moment.  The design team spent most of the past year working on the new online franchise features, most likely, because it made sense on both the PS3 and 360, given their excellent network support.  In previous years, the HD Maddens have put a lot of effort into improving their animation systems, and their tackling mechanisms, to feel more realistic, and give the "you are really there" feeling a serious boost from previous iterations of non-HD Madden Football.

The Wii Madden does not support these features.  They can't (its not a choice) do realistic animations -- the Wii doesn't have the math-crunching horsepower to animate two football teams realistically with a reasonable framerate. They can't do the new tackling, because again, the Wii doesn't have the horsepower to do the physics simulation necessary.  They can't make the game seem as much like the flashy TV experience you get on a Sunday afternoon -- not even on a SD screen, with the relatively weak Wii GPU (relative to the HDs, I mean).

These are the design teams' attempts at making the game better, when it comes to sports.  They've successfully done it for years, too.  They can't really change the game (but they can add new gameplay features, like online franchise, if the console supports it decently) -- mostly what they can do is make it cooler, make it slicker, make it shiny.

Given the choice of retooling their work of the past 9 years to work on the Wii, much as it did from 2001 to 2005 (remember, they've been there already), and improving the experience overall, bringing what the fans want (the feeling and raw excitement of an american football game, which is largely a spectacle, not just a game)... which do you think any one of the individual developers would choose, given the chance to do so?

I bet they could recycle the most recent edition of XBox (not 360) Madden to work on the Wii.  The only real work required would be to update the roster.  Maybe they could squeeze a couple more minor features in... maybe the characters could have ~35 bones in their animated skeletons, instead of ~30.  Not the near 100 that the HD versions probably have, but it would still be more.  Cheap.. fast.. right up the Wii alley.  Well... not upping the animation bone count, but the roster update should be cheap.

Exciting?  Cool?  Maybe they could keep them from talking to the HD teams, and finding out how much closer to the football experience their games get.  Maybe they aren't football fans... they're just "creative robots" who don't care about football, but instead love to make football fans (who they don't understand, since they don't care about football) happy with new features they've cooked up on their own.

I'm not guessing here.  I know.

I'll take this one

 

First, I'd challenge the fact that customers are looking for a "realistic football experience." The best selling sports game of all time is Wii Sports. Not exactly a proper sports sim is it?

 

Secondly, you're only looking at Madden and games in general from a prism of improving graphics technology. I firmly believe that there are other ways to improve on Madden that don't have to do with making ultra-realistic individual blades of grass. What you essentially stated in your example though is that developers tend to not take risks by being innovative. I think we can both agree on that. When it comes to Madden in particular the developers have always just kept having simple, sustained innovations every year. The average gamer is sick of it though and has been very critical of EA because of it. So, dare I say that it's a good thing that the wii forces developers to come up with new ways to make their games stand out?



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