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oniyide on 31 March 2012
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superchunk said:
oniyide said:
@superchunk interesting, i stand corrected, but then my next question would be what are they using the havoc engines FOR in those Wii games and even in some of the HD games?? It seems that some of the games are physics heavy and others are not. But hell, im not a designer, but im sure there is alot that goes into it.

We'll just have to agree to disagree, I still think that alot of those 3rd party games would not run on Wii without making significant changes to the design. The GTA4, or RDR, JC2, etc. would NOT be the same games if they had the Wii as the lead platform. IMHO im glad 3rd parties did what they did, take advantage of the much more powerful systems, so we could get features and gameplay not possible on the lower powered systems or just have everything equally but no game being as good as it could have been, just to appease some Wii owners.


You have to think about what is the most common thing limiting game development and what part gets pushed the fastest and gets thus costs the most.... the GPU.

It has very little to do with the raw computing power which would be for AI and such. This is why all you really need to do is turn down the graphics. Remove HD alone and you have a lot of reduced power needs. Then remove various lighting techs and such and  possibly a few less unique characters on games like AC and bam... you have a game that while technically inferior would still be enjoyable on Wii. That's my arguement, but I had it in reverse. They'd start with the base case, i.e. Wii, and then add in extras for the PS360. However, it never materialized because they simply ignored the Wii and prevented it from ever reaching that 60%+ marketshare.

Had Nintendo been able to gain those big AAA 3d parties, they could have pushed that idea forward, but 3rd parties simply didn't want to sign on to the extra costs of a new or greatly altered engines.

This will be evident with at least the first year of Wii U. Wii U will get upgraded ports from PS360's 3rd party games at first. You'll see some games with far better visuals, faster FPS, etc and then games like AC3 might even have far more characters, better draw distances, and so on.

Wii games would have only been less in the same fashion as CoD. Worse visuals and lacking multiplayer, however overall same game. 3rd parties simply didn't see the potential ROI in doing that.


@bolded. I dont blame 3rd parties...much. Why should they swallow the extra cost of having to cater to the Wii, becasue it was so different from the other two platforms that they had been working with already??  Like you said it would have cost more.  Even if they built these games for Wii first and used all that extra power from HDs to get the same GTA4 for PS360 that we know and love, what would have been the point?? People still would buy the better version anyway, just like they have been doing pratically the entire gen. You could name a handful of games that sold better on WIi despite the larger audience. Sure its a bit, lazy but it makes buisness sense. Im sure people who are interested in those games owned another console to play those games, numbers back up my point, even back then the 360 versions beat the Wii ones.

As for Wii U im not going to speculate on power of Wii U until I see it at E3, but even if it is much more powerful, 3rd parties will NOT take advantage because they are lazy and that would be extra work. Why would they bust their ass, for a version they know would sell the least anyway?? Especially in the first year, they won't.