No, not at all. A smart developer can do some very impressive things with scaling (or in the case of Xbox, separate execuiteables) and porting consideration, but if a game exceeds the capabilities of the hardware, it is what it is.
...All I'm saying is, I hear Shadow of Mordor talked about all the time as proof of some example of porting challenges, but if I were asked whether it was the hardware's fault or the developer of
Naughty Bear and
Wet that this port was busted, I'd feel 99% safe pointing at the developer.
Shadow of Mordor 360/PS3 had all kinds of problems besides just a crippled Nemesis system. Nemesis system was the intentional compromise, but stuff is just missing or broken or built wrong. (And I'm not saying that Behaviour/A2M was a terrible developer back then, as there's stuff of theirs that I liked, but having played their PSP Dante's Inferno which looks nice but has fundamentally unplaytested glitches like no play effect of the "punish or absolve" system. And the less said about their PS2 version of Mercenaries 2, the better. They weren't the studio you'd go to for polished, technically capable ports.)
When I think of the Nemesis system, I think of its complexity and its richness of production elements, but I don't know that I think "next-gen power", or that it's such a rich and present database that it couldn't be replicated on console hardware that could track character choices/interactions across three complete Mass Effect games. I'm not seeing too many reviews from that period which say the cutbacks in PS3/360 felt reasonable to them, or that the product has any reason to exist if such compromises were required to make it play on past-gen.
We did it because no one else would. Paying a total of £80 from our own pockets for Shadow of Mordor on PS3 and Xbox 36…
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Ports down from Xbox One to Xbox 360 were quite rangey. Performance was of course often the biggest differentiator in the short time that publishers supported both platforms (in the time before developers pushed the boundaries beyond the outdated hardware's capabilities, or else the financial incentive to bother to try had dried up,) but there were also cutbacks and other sacrifices. Instead of always mentioning the pathetic Shadow of Mordor port, I'd rather we looked at more indicative and accomplished ports like...
Forza Horizon 2 (by Sumo Digital.) It ran fine and mostly looked nice, but the world could sometimes be a little empty. Sumo quietly changed a lot about the car handling and the festival circuit campaign in their version (it's more arcadey, and it avoids open offroad racing events where it can even though the offroad stretches are there on the map,) presumably to get the most out of 360 instead of attempting an unflattering 1:1 port from Xbox One. You could say it was the best that could be done with old hardware, except that FH1 on 360 arguably looked better.
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And
Titanfall (by Bluepoint.) The Xbox One game that pretty much sold us on next-gen being here and amazing ended up porting down real well in the hands of good talent. It may not be 100% perfect, but it's nearly impossible to complain about.
The inside story of how Bluepoint Games managed to squeeze Titanfall onto Xbox 360 without compromising the heart of the game.
www.eurogamer.net