Understand. I've gone back and played OoT and other N64 games and wondered how i ever managed to play the game. Choppy frame rates, low res textures, blurry models, even the N64 controller feels forign now. I could barely manage to play the game for 30 minutes before my eyes got sore, yet in 1998 i could sit in front of my N64 all day.
Precisely, people won't recall the horrible vsync, low resolution textures or the sub-HD going on. Top range current gen games like Uncharted or Halo 4 simply won't be put to shame by PS4/X720 let alone Wii U.
And thing is, in N64 days double the power really made the difference whether something was doable or not, such is not the case today. It's mostly a matter of how far you're willing to scale it.
That said i think there is a concern with the stratergy and business model Nintendo have employed for the Wii U. One primary concern Nintendo have voiced is regarding rising development costs and incresed risk. For those who want to develop ambitious games, is Nintendo's Wii U even the platform of choice? Nintendo seem to be selling it as the system for the developer and publisher who don't want to invest 10s or even 100s of millions into a single title, yet alone spend years in development making it.
That's not all that different than Sony's decision to go with a simpler architecture this time around, or how Sony and Microsoft are both borrowing from PC's at this point. With the development cost increase everyone is trying to make it more affordable by making the platform itself give less resistance in being conquered (and also making ports across systems cheaper)
As for Nintendo possibly being a platform of choice for ambitious titles, I believe there's a flipside to that.
Content takes time and money to create, there's a reason why high budget HD RPG's are reduced to a town these days and DS/3DS installments feel more invested, ambitious despite being self-contained; I don't think Xenoblade, as a new IP could be doable on a HD platform this gen without getting butchered, not because they couldn't handle it, but because the team would either get lost or pressed to deliver the game at some point.
Wii being so low tech though allowed them to make loads of armor and content without being concerned with it looking great, unique, lush and detailed in HD. Lots of equipments are basically palette swaps, but they get the point across; videogames used to be that stopgap between books and films in the sense that lot's of things could be left to your imagination... I mean, look at FF7, they dropped that Cloud crossdressing thing in, probably as a joke and it stayed in, nowadays they wouldn't do it but if they did they'd lose months making sure it looked like cloud in a drag but still feminine and shenanigans like that. The end result is the same, you remember he had to crossdress, the original version representation worked just as fine.
Sometimes you can be more ambitious and deliver more by not aiming for the sky/being constrained. Whereas while being less constrained one might simply get lost, or priorize finishing something up with extra polish while disregarding the rest.
But this is my very peculiar opinion. Anyway, you're right and that was my original point as well, third party's in particular, as technological driven as they are tend to see pushing something that isn't a top of the line machine as pointless. I don't necessarily agree, but it's a very well defined pattern; Nintendo's hope in coming first was holding it's own and get to be the lowest common denominator for multiplat, but that acceptance isn't seeming likely.
I can accept this. But look at what happened with the Wii, it was clearly more powerful and capable then the Gamecube. More powerful CPU, GPU, more memory, progressive scan for PAL, 6x or more storage space per optical disc, etc. Personally though i found very for Wii games even seemed to even match the top teir of Gamecube games. Zelda TP, Rouge Squadron 2 and 3, Resident Evil 4, etc.
Well, Resident Evil 4 was the byproduct on the SD generation, it was very sub-SD even, but it didn't matter because nobody had a HDTV. Hence it looked really bad on the Wii years later running at the same resolution.
Zelda TP was pretty much more ambitious than SS ever was, because they were fighting to put something "next gen" on the Gamecube, such is not the case with SS, and it shows.
Mario Galaxy is quite possibly the most impressive piece of tech ever made on the architecture though, 60 frames with EMBM on almost all surfaces along with freebies like fur shading, and that's on the Wii. Wii also has more games using the system acordingly than GC, because this time around they were exclusive. But yes, you're right.
Pretty sure games on PS4 will be able to install data as required. Similar to what Blizzard have done with WoW but on a better scale. You won't have to install the entire game, rather the game will install only what it needs to get you up and running.
That takes planning, not every developer will be clever about it. But if they want to tackle the full memory footprint available they'll have to use the HDD and be smart, because streaming is a bottleneck; let's say they have to stream 6 GB of assets from there, well it's gonna take a while.
With 1 GB of RAM streaming is less of a bottleneck, so you have to do less to sidestep it; the omission of a HDD seems very deliberate that way and it's something Nintendo would do.
