| KungKras said: Why does it have to be a direct port? Porting is like rebuilding the game from scratch in some ways anyways. Any advanced physics could easily be downscaled to the prevoius gen without people noticing. There is nothing in CoD that the previous gen of hardware couldn't handle except maybe the draw distance. Building an engine that has all the features and then using that as a base for the Wii versions of future CoDs wouldn't be unreasonable. My Goldeneye example is more valid than your splatoon example in this case. Goldeneye plays identically to CoD, has split screen multiplayer. So the hardware is capable of it, end of discussion. If there was a splatoon-like game with the same physics and paint effects on 3DS allready, then I would make the same case about that, but there isn't, so it's different. You may have to rewrite some parts of the game engine when making the first ports. But they probably had to do that anyway. |
Porting /can/ be rebuilding a game from the ground up. But that's really only if the system is difficult to port to. Typically multi-platform games have one lead platform and it is ported to the rest. In the time of the PS3/X360/Wii, typically the X360 was the lead platform, and games were then ported to the PS3 and the Wii. Can you guess which of the two platforms between the PS3 and the Wii was much, much, much easier to port to? I'll give you a hint: It was made by Nintendo. The Wii's lack of power didn't just mean scaling down 3D models, or animation, or AI, or physics, or shaders. It often meant stripping them down to their core, and completely re-doing them. Whereas with the PS3, most of the time, it was just a matter of figuring out how to make it work as it did with a different hardware configuration, with little to no "degredation" of the game itself.
And please spare me with talk about how easily anything can be done. If you're speaking from experience, then you should know that how easy something is to do is dependant on many different factors, and you can't just paint it with a broad brush. Sure, it's possible, and theoretically, advanced physics can be scaled down without people noticing, but in practice that might actually require rewriting the entire physics engine because the hardware isn't powerful enough to run that advanced physics engine when its reduced to its most basic functions. Rewriting an entire physics engine from the ground up isn't an easy task, I assure you. If you think building a wii engine that is capable of doing everything the PS3 and Xbox 360 engines can do, and still maintain a level of visual quality with the game that the target audience would find acceptable, I implore you to do so. Developing such an advanced, yet lightweight engine should easily be a very lucrative business opportunity for you, as studios would be lined up to license it from you. I mean you could easily make that same engine work on PS4/X1/WiiU, right?
Your Goldeneye example is pretty funny. It was an improved remake of a game made in 1997. While that game was advanced for its time, making an remake 13 years later on hardware that was many magnitudes more powerful than its predecessor is far easier of a task than porting a game that pushes the limits of much more advanced hardware. As for your splatoon explanation, the people who made the game were the ones that said it wasn't possible I'm pretty positive they know more than you or I ever will about what it takes to port that game to the 3DS. . What makes you think you know more than them? To be able to make a statement on how easy it would be to port that game, you would have to have intimate knowledge of the Wii U hardware, the 3DS hardware, how the game is made, how the game interacts with the WIi U, and how the game would have to interact with the 3DS. In order to say how feasible that is, I would say you would at very least have to be a lead developer on a WIi U game, as well as a 3DS game, and likely have experience as a lead developer in porting a game from one to another in order to begin to question how feasible it is, and even then I would defer to the developers themselves. I just don't see how you can question this. I know I certainly don't.
As for AAA third party Wii games that didn't do very well:
- Madworld
- Okami
- No more heroes (both of them)
- Trauma Center
- Zack and Wiki
- SSX Blur
- Boom Blox Bash Party
- Scarface: The World is yours
- Medal of Honor (all of them)
- The Conduit
- Fire Emblem
- Tatusnoko Vs. Capcom
- Muramasa: The Demon Blade
- Sin and Punishment
- The Guitar Hero series
Need I go on? All of these games were solid efforts on the Wii, but I guarantee most, if not all of these games never met their sales objectives. Most of them broke even, or barely made a profit at best. Some of them lost studios millions. Third parties struggled to put out million+ selling games on the wii. There is no denying that.
