| super_etecoon said: Well I think we've probably hit the halfway point in the lifespan of the WiiU. As always, it's safe to assume that Nintendo is hard at work deciding the path they will take for the next half decade. So what would you like to see feature-wise in Nintendo's next system. This isn't about securing third parties or moneyhatting exclusives, or even about their ability to market. Purely I'd like to see this discussion based in terms of innovations and refinements within the product itself. I'll start off this discussion by giving a few of my opinions:
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right there with you on the first 2 points. Although the second one ain't an issue for myself since I live in a small 70m² appartment, I can understand why some would like that. I would further add a better battery life and higher resolution screen to the gamepad, as both can be an annoyance in some games.
About the backwards compatibility... If it's true that AMD is changing to x86 architecture, then this will will become very difficult (read: nigh impossible) to achieve, at least for Wii U titles (Wii and Gamecube wouldn't be a problem) since the emulation of a different architecture is a super effective computing ressource destroyer. However, eShop titles which don't fully use the Wii U Hardware capabilities could be transferred to the new console, especially if there's also a PC Port of that specific game.
Now, since backwards compatibilty is probably not doable without a Wii U legacy chipset, my suggestion would be to ditch the optical drive altogether and go back to cartridges. After all, the main reason why one has to install most games on PS4/Xbox ONE is because the Blu-Rays have become too small to fit an entire AA or AAA Game on them with all their graphical features on these consoles. Cartridges are not limited by this as their internal space is scalable. Also, this would drastically limit loading times and could be used as an effective copy protection. This would also alleviate the need for big hard drives like their competitors need nowadays. The drawback of course would be a potentially higher price as cartridges are more expensive to produce, but since Nintendo games are already cheaper it would at worst just equalize the prices again.
As for hardware capabilites and going the x86 route, I would say by then a Zen based CPU (zen is a CPU slated for 2016, meant to replace all previous archtectures and going back to full cores unlike the modues AMD is using since Bulldozer in high power processors), Quad- or hexacore @ 3.2 Ghz+ (count 20-30W TDP just for that), Radeon 3xx or 4xx Graphics chip with at least 24 Compute Units (CU, resulting in 1536 Streaming processors, need to be more than the 18 CU (1156 Streaming Processors) of the PS4 but considering technical limitations it just can't go much further than this). If the first leaks of the 390(X) are to be true, than such a chip could go down to 50-70W TDP. Adding to this would be 8-16 GiB RAM, and using HBM2 or 3 (first generation HBM is limited to 4GiB) here would be very efficient (10-20W depending on clock rates and including the Mainboard and other minor electricity consumers). So for 80-120W TDP this would become a very playable console for a 2017-2018 release
And since there is no backwards compatibilty, the Wiimotes can be either diched or upgraded to become much more accurate.
