Lone_Prodigy said:
Ignorant me thinks that all you need for a Wii port is essentially like dialing down the graphics options in the PC version. Shadows? Off. AA? Less/off. Number of corpses? Low. Textures? Low.
This is why I'm not a dev.
That's kind of the problem. In ports like this they're extremely limited in what they can do, and are ultimately stuck scaling assets until things run in a stable way. They are dialing down the graphical options, quite literally, until it works.
The problem is the base coding of the engine is not built for the Wii's hardware, so it's not as simple as dialing it down until it works, because you may need to dial it down stupidy far due to engine and hardware incompatabilities.
It's why the best looking Wii games, or games for any platform, will always be those built exclusively from the ground up. Engines built in a way to milk every juice from hardware, and optimised in that the engines understand the hardware.
Modern Warfare, hell the CoD4 engine in general, was in no way built for the Wii's hardware archecture, thus scaling down assets ends up with a needless ugly game simply because less work could be done on the engine.
I'm positive that if the template for Modern Warfare was taken and rebuilt with a whole new engine for the Wii you'd end up with a very nice looking game. Sadly, that is the nature of ports.
As a whole though it is also what makes the Wii such a cunt to port to. Even with three similar platforms (PS3/X360/PC) you often end up with slight graphical difference, rendering issues, etc. With the Wii you not only have totally different hardware that a vast majority of engines are in no way built for, but the raw power is so much lower you have to scale the shit out of art assets as well.
It's a terrible port platform. I know people really want ports, but for the cheaper system it would ironically be likely more expensive and time consuming to develop a really faithful, successful, and top quality port of a game primarily built for stronger systems.