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Torillian on 18 June 2012
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Conegamer said:
Torillian said:
Conegamer said:

Very true, but that's upscaled rather than being built around the HD Hardware, hence it still looks very ropey in places. 

Both Monolith and Mistwalker said the game would only be possible on the Wii because of the finite budget, and many things would have been missing from Xenoblade had Nintendo not been there to give them the opportunity to finish it. 

I'm not denying that FFXIII would probably have been the same game, but if Monolith wished to make Xenoblade exactly as it is on the HD consoles, they'd need a much larger budget, so it would only be feasible on the Wii.

I'll try and find sources.

But there is nothing specifically more expensive about developing on HD consoles.  Development usually gets expensive if you go for higher fidelity art but there isn't anything that magically means drawing the same models in Wii is cheaper than they'd be to make on 360 or PS3, it's just that developers usually shoot significantly higher because they can, but there's nothing that requires it.

The PS3 is pretty darn hard to work with, I always thought...

However, whilst i's true that it wouldn't be significantly more expensive, if it were on a HD console and merely had the upscaled graphics of the Dolphin, it'd have been mocked because of 'not having up-to-standard' graphics. If they don't shoot higher 'because they can' and merely stick with OK, then people would be turned off it because there's better looking games. So, it'd be a tricky one. 

Perhaps it could be ported across with only a minimal cost increase, but would it havemade the game 'better'? I don't think so. Nothing would be gained, bar HD graphics, from it being on the other consoles. It wouldn't be anymore enjoyable because the faces look more realistic, for example. 

The only things it could possibly gain, in my eyes, would be the extra RAM producing more enemies on-screen, and also to stop pop-up of plants in some occasions. Aside from that, it'd merely 'look pretty', and I don't think anyone wouldn't play it because of low-res textures.

If it were true that looking better with less jaggies didn't make the game "better" than Dolphin wouldn't exist.  I know that visuals aren't that important to everyone but they obviously are to some and if you could get better graphics without losing anything else I really don't see a downside.  You can say that the standards of HD gamers would work against them, but then I could say that not being a Mario game would work against it on Nintendo.  While that's probably true on both sides for some of the userbase obviously Xenoblade didn't sell gangbusters anyway, and I don't recall many people passing on any JRPG because of visuals specifically.  Hell Xenoblade in Dolphin would almost certainly look better than the Atelier games from a 3D modeling standpoint and those games do just fine.  I don't think there's any real reason to think that upscaled Xenoblade couldn't sell just as well on the HD consoles except for the fact that there probably wouldn't have been a Operation Rainfall type push since it'd probably get localized without problem.

Here's a question for you I guess, the Wii U is obviously atleast as powerful as the PS3 and 360 and probably noticeably more so.  Do you think that Xenoblade 2 (or whatever they end up making) will be a 20 hour long corridor-fest?  Hell, The Last Story was on Wii and that was actually one of the more corridor like JRPGs I've played in a while and short to boot.  



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