First 15 minutes of Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D

[naznatips]

RolStoppable said:

naznatips said:

In case you forgot, most of the RE4 team is gone, and their Wii games are all rail shooters. It's not a matter of knowing the tech, it's a matter of being able to port the engine, which isn't just hard between TEV and OpenGL, it's not possible. Remember the PS2 wasn't using OpenGL either. Only the Xbox, Xbox 360, and PS3 have to date in home consoles, but it's easily the better system. I'm not saying they couldn't have made RE5 on Wii. They could have, but it would have taken a brand new engine and a lot of work. A lot more than it took to make these 3DS games, which look better than what we likely would have seen on Wii (certainly better than their rail shooters).

I don't know what to think about this. I would guess that building an entirely new game is more work than porting an engine. RE Mercenaries probably consists for the most part of areas that have already been used with their MT engine, like the section from RE5 that can be seen in the video in the original post. On the other hand, RE Revelations is an entirely new game. What's been stopping Capcom from upgrading the RE4 engine and basically build RE5 as quasi-new game for the Wii? The costs should have been pretty similar to what Revelations costs to make, because RE5 for Wii would have already had things like level design and difficulty balancing in place due to the same stuff being used in the HD versions.

What bothers me the most in such discussions is how it's made out to be that development for Wii would have been oh so costly while at the same time it's no problem that the HD console versions combined cost twice as much (or more) to make.

You know there's more to development costs than that right? It's not as simple as Wii is always cheaper than HD. Wii is usually cheaper than HD, but putting real effort into a Wii game will yield costs over 15 million dollars all the same (Monster Hunter 3). Time is money too. If it takes developers a year to optimize the RE4 engine on Wii just to port RE5 for an extra million sales (and again, the port itself would take another year or so), then is that necessarily worth your team's efforts when they could be making a new Dead Rising on an already built engine which will sell 2 million units across 2 platforms (and again, porting 360 to PS3 is cheaper than porting from either to Wii). And maybe it is, but suddenly it's not so cut and dry. I'm not one of those people who thinks developers shouldn't have invested in the Wii. They absolutley should have, I'm just explaining to you one of the major factors in them not doing so, and that factor is that Nintendo chose to stick with an incredibly obtuse and ungainly architecture.