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Nuvendil on 13 July 2016
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bigtakilla said:
Nuvendil said:

Smash 4 is considerably limited in order to have it's 8 player smash and 60fps.  Anyone can see that when you look at the character models when they do their victory pose.  Smash 4 could have looked considerably bettern if the Wii U had been more powerful.

Mario Kart 8 makes numerous concessions when doing 4 player split screen and yet still can't do 60fps. 

Super Mario 3D World has frame rate snags when a lot of stuff happens and that's not even that impressive of a game technically!

Pokken Tournament's backgrounds and resolution speak for themselves I think.  Definitely very restricted.

Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD have numerous framerate snags when particular effects hit. 

Also, I don't think I should have to list out every single solitary game that has obvious undesired limitations to it due to hardware to show that Nintendo reall could use bettter hardware for their graphical style.  We've seen games with graphical styles similar to Nintendo's that show just how far you can take that look.  Just look at the new Ratchet and Clank which is just crazy detailed and yet still in that similar style.  Nintendo can use art style to create something that looks great, don't get me wrong, but the fact is Nintendo underestimated what they needed in terms of hardware muscle and just how fast they would hit the limits of the machine with their more ambitious titles.  With a PS4 level machine the games they currently have could look better with greater detail drawn at greater distances and sharper framerate and better AA. 

And Xenoblade and Zelda are NINTENOD IP's.  Their ability to realize their ambitions is not some minor quibble, it's a very important consideration when discussing hardware.  If their machine causes considerable trouble for the developers of those IPs due to hardware limitations than that's not a minor gripe, that's a major miscalculation.

Just because their are frame rate drops or textures aren't the best doesn't mean that it's the best the Wii U was able to handle. A lot of the games are simply limited by the time they have to develop it, and the size of the team that is put on the project as well as game engines and how well they work with the system. Star Fox Zero has frame rate drops and low textures, yet you would be hard pressed to get me to believe that's the best the system could handle. There is no coincedence that games look better as the gen goes on, and this is literally always the case. 

I mean, you hardly ever see any real sizable updates, and almost no game used the ability to install before playing with the exception of Xenoblade. And these are pretty much the standard in how games are handled this gen and have been handled last gen, and guess why.

And that install only erased a handful of problems and helped with pop in.  Didn't improve the crude AA, add anisotropic filtering, fix the absolutely awful problems with pop in in the city, enhance the polygon counts of various models both architectural and fauna related, improve the textures of the general landscape and city. etc.  I'm not knocking the game, I think it looks great aesthetically and is very well accomplished for the Wii U, but that's the problem, it runs up against hardware limits pretty hard.  Also, I would say Mario Kart 8 puts forth a very impressive presentation on an asset-to-asset basis, but the concessions made are abundantly clear when you look to background/surrounding details which vary from basically functional to extremely basic. 

And my point wasn't "Nintendo's games look bad," but rather that Nintendo clearly has the development chops and ambition to have far more detail in their games than they currently do, and that they have several games that are clearly running into Wii U hardware limitations that they obviously didn't anticipate giving them such troubles.