RolStoppable said:
No, the bold doesn't agree with what you said, because your claim was that a higher resolution by default drives up costs. It only does if the developer chooses to use the higher resolution to add more detailed art which is what I have been saying all along. Of course pretty much every developer is going to use the higher resolution to create more detailed graphics, because graphics are a big selling point of games. So while there appears to be a clear correlation between higher resolution and higher development costs, it's perfectly possible to increase the resolution of virtually any game at no additional costs. The result will be a game that has blurry textures and looks ugly in some places. The Wii version of DiRT 2 is a good example of this. What I am suggesting here is that a Wii game that was built with PSP specs in mind will be cheaper than a Wii game that was built with Wii specs in mind. The former game will be cheaper, but it will of course also look worse. Likewise, you can make a game for one of the HD consoles that costs much less than the average, if you only create Wii-like graphics for it. The output can still be in 1080p, but it won't cost more than a Wii title. And the same applies to any other comparable situation. There is no need for a link, because this is common sense. That being said, if you make a PSP game, you can port it for little cost to the Wii, because all you have to basically do is to adjust the resolution and the control scheme. The game won't look as pretty as a Super Mario Galaxy, but that's not what third parties aim for anyway. |
Most of that I agree with - the part is take issue is at the end. I don't believe you can just take a PSP game, put it on Wii and upscale the resolution and volia you have a fine working Wii game. I guess my take is that the art assets used on a handheld game simply wouldn't hold up in 480i, and you'd ultimately have raise the by over 3x to get the Wii version running properly. We've seen PSP ports like MoH:H2 take a good 6 months to churn out, with the developers stating that artwork / graphical stuff is being redone.
"This is really the 'Special Edition'," says Backbone producer James Stanley, who tells us that compared to the PSP game, the Wii version will have more polygons, higher-resolution textures, more voice acting, better pacing, splitscreen play for co-op, and an improved user interface designed to make navigation and weapon selection easier, along with tech-friendly features like 480p and Dolby Pro Logic II support
There's very little online that explains any of this, or why PSP / DS dev cost is significiently cheaper, so we're really just debating your guesswork of what happens in a PSP / Wii port against my guesswork in one. I still believe your last sentence suggests that it is cheaper to make a Wii game by making a PSP game and then porting it to the Wii, rather then just making a Wii game - which common sense dictates can't possibly be true.
My take on things is while resolution can just be happily scaled from handheld to 1080p, the actual art assets the game has arn't so easy. The higher the resolution, the more you're spending on producing these art assets, the more the budget. You can't take a game built with PSP's art assets and just stick it on Wii, you'll have to do alot of work to make it acceptable (acceptable not being such that is looks like SMG, but such that it actually passes quality control), and that's where the budget discrpencys come in and why average handheld developement is so much cheaper.
Again any sort of link or citation would be nice, no matter how much common sense you think it is. From what I'm gathering your logic seems to suggest to me it'd be possible to get these $15m games like Dante's Inferno, Army of Two, Split Second etc up and running in an acceptable, realeasable state on the Wii for just $1m-2m. I know Wii games are typically cheaper to make, but we both know that's unrealistic.
