What real 'next gen' is there actually in the Wii U...?!

[thetonestarr]

Captain_Tom said:

Oh, there absolutely is a big difference there. But right now, anybody doing something multiplat is a moron if they don't at least look into porting it to WiiU too. Right now, it's going to be easy as pie to port the games, and they'll absolutely find enough sales to at least make it worthwhile (already-developed games that are easy to port really only need to make 50,000-100,000 sales to turn a profit on the port).

This is going to end up getting them all used to working on it while also giving WiiU a respectable early lineup. Respectable early lineup = more early adopters. More early adopters = larger potential market. And larger potential market = developers are more interested in taking advantage of it.

And since games can be 100% traditional on the WiiU without sacrificing ANY potential buyers whatsoever (except those that refuse to play things that don't use the screen), I really don't see devs not being interested. It just doesn't make sense. The only reason we didn't see more games on the Wii wasn't because it was weaker. There was almost absolutely zero concern there (save from companies like Epic, who are very few and far between). The main issue was that devs didn't want to have to do motion controls, or wanted to be able to do more than the Wiimote + nunchuck could offer WITHOUT motion controls, and the Classic Controller sales were far too low to do that. There just wasn't a big enough market on the Wii for traditional games.

But WiiU's userbase will be 100% traditional-game capable. And since graphically, it won't be lacking either (even in comparison to neXtbox/PS4, it's really going to be more like the difference between current 360 vs current top-of-the-line PC at most), the devs that were once iffy on graphical capability won't be anymore.

And actually, the WiiU will be also setting the first standard for next generation, especially since Sony and MS didn't announce anything this year - meaning they probably aren't releasing until 2014 (honestly, if they were releasing next year, they would have announced something at E3 to try stealing any attention from WiiU that they possibly could. Hold back the competition as much as possible, etc, etc). Two years as the best thing on the market will make WiiU's initial installbase pretty respectable, even if it starts off particularly slow. Assuming it starts off really slow, they'll have an installbase of 20m by PS4/neXtbox release, and if it's a runaway success, could be around 50m. Either way, it'll have been wildly successful financially for Nintendo. Remember, GCN turned a consistent profit, keeping Nintendo always in the black, at only 22m final installbase.

Do you have any idea how big of a difference that is?  Metro:2033 on Ultra in 1080p at 60 FPS looks easily a generation+ ahead of even Gears3!  I would say the difference is close to the one between MGS3 on PS2 and MGS4 on PS3.  

Look I used to hate PC gaming and stuck to my PS3.  I still love my PS3, but coming from just building a gaming PC, I can say the difference is huge.  Mine is not even top of the line!  

I hate PC elitests, but nothing annoys me more than someone that clearly doesn't know what they are talking about!  

Case and point:  Top of the line PC in 2012 = PS5.

Thanks, I have a Radeon HD6870 and I'm very familiar with what it can do. No, it's not the absolute top of the line, but it's not far off, and it IS quite a bit more "powerful" than what's in the 360. But the visuals as of yet released that are capable on it are NOT anywhere near "a generation+" the way you describe it. This is a widely known and documented fact, and one that has also been mentioned a variety of times in similar fashion in other threads recently.

 

Yes, they're decently better, but not so much so that developers will be all that motivated to worry about it, and not so much so that gamers will be that concerned, either. The biggest difference from here on out isn't how many polygons or teraflops or how detailed the textures are, but how many models are possible and how many textures it can push. Those each are affected the most by the things that the WiiU has upgraded the most.