Legendary_W said:
"Alright this has been pissing me off about people. I myself have gone through 4 years of college in the pursuit of becoming a game developer (looking at Crystal Dynamics), and the first thing they tell you in college: on today's modern systems anything is possible. Anything, so long as you program it right. Nowadays people think more power will allow us to do more, but that is completely wrong. In fact, it's backwards thinking. All more power has allowed game developers to do, is become lazy programmers. As consumer, power should mean shit to you. You don't have to deal with system limitations, developers do. When these professional developers make their games, if they wrote more efficient code, there would be absolutely no need to make 3 different versions of the same game. Instead, they write these high end combiners and render unneeded stuff for the more "powerful" systems simply because they can get away with it. Then they make the Wii/Wii U versions not as good looking simply because they are too lazy to fix up their mistake of inefficient code. Don't ever let the power of a system deter you from buying it, because no matter how powerful a system is, you as a consumer do not deal with the limitations. If a Wii U and PS4 were the same price, then yeah, bad deal for you. But it's not, it's at a reduce cost and the specs aren't too different. Buy a system for the games YOU want, not because a game developer said the system is weak because that assimply isn't true."
As far as my knowledge goes I think most, if not everything, he is saying is true. I saved it because I found it quite interesting and decided to share it with a friend that knows more on the subject than I do. |
Compared to the PS4, the Wii U is not that great It's a much stronger system than people give it credit for, but so are the other two next gen systems. In time if the PS4 dominates, there is going to be a huge golf between the systems' graphics.
Luckily for Nintendo in this day and age graphics scale really well. Having worse resolution, worse models, worse animations, worse textures, worse framerate, etc. are much better than missing entire aspects of the game. That's assuming the Wii U gets a port of course. One thing that is really going to be a problem with the Wii U is dynamic lighting. With 7th gen games lots of lighting was done in production. This saved a lot of system resources but took a lot of time to make. Every item needed to be remade depending on its lighting situation for example. With PS4 and XBONE, many devs are switching to a real time solution. This means they only have to make one neutral colored item and the game engine does the rest. It looks better but more importantly is much cheaper.
Sadly the Wii U just doesn't have the power to do this and have great graphics. A port of a PS4 game will either need to be rebuilt costing millions of dollars, or else it will have to be scaled back beyond acceptable values. 1080p on PS4 verse 480p on Wii U with a worse framerate. Maybe I'm taking that analogy a bit far, but you get the point. I'm a dev so even though I post crazy things, I'm still less crazy than a random gamer.
On the thread subject, graphically there isn't much that in an ideal situation the wii u couldn't do. However games are more than graphics. AI, gameplay based distruction, and online elements are just not going to compare to the competition.
