Nintendo: next gen is about “improving gaming experience” “wonderful graphics won’t help”

[thetonestarr]

Sal.Paradise said:

richardhutnik said:

Andrespetmonkey said:
Because improving how a largely VISUAL medium looks won't improve the experience.

I mean I see his point, gameplay and "innovation" (that word is tossed around way too lightly in this industry) comes first, but when a game looks amazing it improves the experience immensely. It's a big part of the experience and it's what turned a lot of core gamers away from the Wii.

The amount of return you get from updating graphics is getting less and less.  I would ask now, based on what you see with graphics today, are the games unplayable?    I bet one can go back in 10 years and look at 3D stuff today, and find a number of games that would still be playable.  I contrast that with 3D stuff on the original Playstation and a number of them fall VERY short of desirable now.

This is exactly what I would have said 10 years ago though. People forget about the march of progress so easily. I remember seeing old usenet posts about diminishing returns in the early Dreamcast era - how much further could we possibly improve graphics from upcoming 128 bit beasts! How can we expect developers to create games on PS2/GC/Xbox hardware, it's too powerful and complex!

It's the same spiel every generation, difference is now Nintendo have a weaker machine to sell, so they'll be saying it too, not just forum posters. 

I 100% guarantee you would have said absolutely nothing of the sort 10 years ago. Ten years ago, the advance of graphics power had exploded through the previous ten years. Some games made ten years ago (or nearly ten years ago, on hardware that is now at least eleven years old) still have graphics that are relevant today. Not a single game whatsoever from the 4th or 5th generations had anything significant to compare against the 6th generation, though.

5th gen was inarguably the biggest graphical leap, with 6th not that much smaller a leap. The increase in graphical output from 6th to 7th wasn't anywhere NEAR as big, and the advanced SINCE the 7th gen began have been fairly mediocre. You've seen what they're producing on the 7th gen hardware now - they're producing in-game engine models and scenery that look almost lifelike.

Of course improvements CAN be made, but the bigger thing from here out is going to be increasing the amount you can show WITH those graphics (which requires mostly a larger amount of RAM and more streamlined processing, both of which are MAJOR upgrades the WiiU has over current-gen), and improving the gameplay experience itself (which is what Nintendo is addressing here).