People buy Wii, they continue to buy Wii...

Wii has crap graphics, Wii continues to have crap graphics.

I see a trend here.. graphics are gimmicky; the fad wore out.

@thebloodwalker: Actually, the weakness you mentioned is only a strength.
When we have less risktakers, they are going where the money's at. It's not that big of a risk to develope for the Wii, that it is to PS360, especially when Nintendo is leading the way and showing how much can a title sell. "The followers" always go where the money is proven to be make.

Sure, not taking risks was a weakness at the start, but not anymore.

horriblebastard said: "Limitations" often lead to creativity in general and in games specifically ... Except all systems have limitations, so the Wii isn't a special case in that respect. It's just that its upper limits are lower, but are you really going to argue that the more limited a console is, the more creative the games library? If so, you're on a slippery slope that leads you back to Pong. I didn't say the PS2's games were shit, but I expect some kind of progression in terms of graphical ability from generation to generation, otherwise I'd still have an Atari 2600 connected to my TV. I used to love games like Missile Command and Asteroids, but if I buy a game today I have higher expectations than that.

 

I'll put this to you another way ...

I own an XBox 360 and the one thing I notice in Wii games that seems absent in most XBox 360 games is a willingness to step outside of the bounds of established genres and conventional gameplay design; as a result I tend to find myself having more fun playing "Shitty" Wii games than their "High" quality XBox 360 counterparts. The reason for this (in my opinion) is I have played every game on the XBox 360 before (in most cases several times) where the only difference is the earlier games have worse graphics.

Maybe its just my age, but I started playing First Person Shooters with Wolfenstein 3D and I saw a great deal of advancement up until (roughly) 1999 and after that everyone copied the formula initially produced by games like Half-Life, System Shock 2, and Counterstrike; for almost a decade all progress in these genres has been measured based on how good they look, and games like FEAR have taken this to the next level by reverting environments to be as static as they possibly can be in order to get better visuals. Basically, increased processing power has done very little to progress this genre and the "Limitations" of more powerful hardware has done nothing to encourage creativity.

First Person Shooters aren't the only genre like this, there have been very few enhancements to Japaneese RPGs since the SNES, Racing Games haven't improved much over what was available on the Dreamcast, Western RPGs haven't seen much improvement since Morrowind or Icewind Dale, Fighting Games aren't noticeably different from Playstation/Dreamcast fighting games, and most Sports games haven't improved much since the N64.

Graphics will continue to improve from Generation to generation, but the focus on graphics as the only measure of improvement has to die for the industry to progress.

It seems I was wrong to agree with everything you said Sky Render. I missed this: -

Actually they do. If graphics are merely "icing on the cake", then I assume you would give Super Mario Galaxy a high rating even if you were controlling a stick man in a black and white simply rendered world? Graphical power also allows developers to, for example, have more enemies or cars on screen at once - something that can quite obviously affect gameplay. Finally, if you had two games that were exactly the same in every respect apart from one had Wii graphics and the other had full 1080p HD graphics, why would you not choose the latter? Assuming you have a HDTV of course.

Here's how that works, bdbdbd: in an undershot market, the barriers to entry are very low: the cost of development is minor, the options are wide open, and there's little risk of failure. This means that more people can attempt to enter, and more entry-level attempts will succeed because the "good enough" point hasn't been met. However, those who previously worked in an overshot variant of the same market will find that, though the barriers to entry are low, they cannot compete as they have become formulaic in order to make a profit in an overshot market.

In an overshot market, the barriers to entry are very high: the cost of development is astronomical, most of the options have been tried, and there's a high risk of failure. That means that only the companies which are already successful or wealthy can enter, and few entry-level attempts succeed; mostly only old-timers to the industry can pull it off. This mostly involves rehashing successful ideas ad nauseum, since budgets are so high and there's so much to lose if you fail with a risky venture.

Industries swing between these extremes regularly in a simple three-step cycle:

Innovation -> Refinement -> Overshooting

Once you've overshot, you go back to innovating. If you fail to do so, the market crashes. This only applies to unstable markets, however. Stable markets (ie. ones with no reasonable alternatives, like the food preservation market) can stay at the brink of refinement and overshooting and not lose customers because there's no reasonable alternative that does an authentically better job.

You missed the underlying message again, HB. What we call "good graphics" now we'll be calling "outdated crap" in a decade. If a game is fun because of the graphics, that is a bad sign. That means that the game will not hold up to the test of time. A great example of that would be Final Fantasy VIII: it was visually impressive for its time, and everybody flocked to it, but the gameplay was critically flawed. Though it was very highly rated when it came out, nowadays it's often criticized harshly for its long load times, clunky battle engine, pointless irritating minigames, lackluster storytelling, and total lack of proper gameplay balancing.

Are you not going to answer the questions I asked Sky Render?

A game is never fun ONLY because of graphics, but that is not the same as saying graphics play no part whatsoever in a person's enjoyment of a game.

@horriblebastard: Actually it's you who seem to be the fanboy, not me.
So, you agree then that the 1st party games in question are great? In order for a game to be great don't need to be innovative, although, even made with the same formula, SMG and TP are still very different from their predecessors, which can't be said about many PS360 games.
And what made you a Nintendo fan in the first place?

And Wii will be maxed out before PS360, which is the whole idea. Let's say Wii gets maxed out next year, that's when the games start to evolve, when we compare PS360, which gets maxed out a lot later. Maybe they even die out before that happens.

This wasn't about making innovative games, it was about making games with quality. As the SMG/TP example shows, you don't need to innovate in order to make games better. Of course, i do welcome innovation too.
Zack&Wiki hardly was innovative, if i've understood it correctly, it was just a return to a dead genre. Boom Blox may have been innovative (i haven't played the game), but very badly marketed (even by EA:s PR) and don't forget that Wii games are showing strong legs. It may end up having pretty good sales. And besides, how many innovative non-marketed new IP has been a blockbuster on PS360?

No, i don't agree. You said they play the Wii because of the controls.

So don't you read what people write or is your reading comprehension so bad? People are telling you that since the devs can't compete in flashier graphics, they need to compete with games quality. And other thing that people here tell is, that since the publishers wants to make money, they need to jump to the "gameplay ship" and Wii.

I don't see any other question you asked. If you want to know what I think about "more enemies on screen", "bigger environments", "more detailed character models", and so on, I think "overcompensating". The most brilliant games in existence do not use thousands of on-screen visuals; some of them need no more than two paddles and a ball.

Adding more and bigger to a game does not improve it; it just makes it more complicated. While I'm certain that many an elitist out there feels that complexity equals quality, this is not the case; intuitiveness equals quality. I would much rather play a game that I can just pick up and enjoy without having to remember a half-million special rules and tricks than to play a game that has thousands-on-thousands battles and zero intuitive gameplay. Screw the likes of Generations of Chaos and Galactic Civilizations. If it's going to be that overly complex, I'd rather pop in Wii Sports, quite frankly. At least I know I'll have fun with that without having to muddle through 60 tutorials just to find out how to complete a single round of the game.

horriblebastard said: Are you not going to answer the questions I asked Sky Render? If a game is fun because of the graphics, that is a bad sign. A game is never fun ONLY because of graphics, but that is not the same as saying graphics play no part whatsoever in a person's enjoyment of a game.

 

In general terms, if there are no costs associated with improved graphics and there is no gameplay trade-offs associated with improving the graphics most games would be better with better graphics. We don't live in an ideal world, there are costs associated with developing better looking games (which hurts developers and publishers), consumers are forced to pay more for these games and the hardware they run on, the gameplay tends to be more generic and less risky, and often they make game environments more static to pre-calculate "Better" lighting to improve visuals.