| Kytiara said: Interesting read. The only thing I'm going to disagree with is where you imply that an easier to develop for system may have had less room to grow. People seem to equate more advanced and more powerful hardware with difficult to use, and at the same time the reverse is then implied, anything easy to work with is obviously less powerful (or at an extreme "last gen"). No developer (at least none that I've ever met) enjoys working with a complicated and hard to use API. This is something I think microsoft excels at, because of their ties in software development for the PC, and Nintendo has done well, by sticking with the same development environment as the gamecube. It's nice to hear that the PS3 has tons of power under the hood, but if the developers have to painstakingly drag it out of the system, then its almost worse than not having it at all. In my opinion, Sony should have been able to provide that raw power while making it less of a chore to use. They didn't, and that doesn't make me feel very positive about the company. |
Just as a side note, you don't necessarily need greater processing power in order to produce graphically advanced games.
As we have seen from every system which has been supported after the next generation begins (NES, SNES, Playstation) and from handheld systems which are "obsolete" when they're released (Gameboy, GBA, Nintendo DS) you can often produce the apearance of a graphical effects at a lower performance cost then actually producing the graphical effect; essentially, you find a trick.
Generally speaking, the conditions needed to produce these kinds of tricks are a solid understanding of the graphical effect you are trying to emulate, a solid understanding of the system you're trying to emulate the effect on, and the motivation to emulate the effect on this system. The Wii benefits from this because most of the effects you would try to emulate on the Wii would be well known effects that are being produced on the PS3/XBox 360, the Wii is easy to understand and developers should be able to obtain reliable performance from it, and the Wii having lower graphical capabilities will lead developers to try to stand out graphically.
