Totally agreed. I was gonna suggest that intentionally imposing hardware limitations on devs as well but then got distracted
I suspect the biggest reason was forcing the devs to take extra time to refine their camera work so it didn't need to be user adjusted/get adjusted all the time.
I can totally see this being one of the main reasons even as they tend to mention limitations leading to creativity a lot in Iwata Asks features and devs in general calling that out when talking about older games.
I also tend to feel that way about gaming in general. Limitations help when it comes to staying focused, hence why games that get lost with the freedom notion are often a trainwreck; creativity, when coming at the expense of a lot of extra work gets lost because of the extra emphasis on something having to be profitable (hence, not taking risks) and the fact everything takes so long to do (I recall Zelda's fishing game happened because fishing was the hobbie of the main programmer, and he'd work on it on his free time or "undercover" if he was too overcharged with work there's no guarantee that could be in). Really takes the soul out of any game.
A lot of people tend to feel that the more power the better (and in the paper, yes, the easier it is to get something running the better; but that's also a fallacy, if running a 128 bit game on a X360 is easy then you don't do a 128 bit game anymore). That's not necessarily true, for there's not really a switch in there that says "max details on", stuff like if you crawl the grass bends, tree's branches moving with the wind or generating more than 5 faces on a FPS game are not automatic, every detail takes time to implement and the more detailed a game is the more work it takes. That's why after 6 years Crysis still looks so good, the gpu tech improved, but if other dev chases after the same thing they practically have to start anew when it comes to details; unless they use pre-loaded engine's for everything, which is certainly Epic's plan. And maybe I'm old fashioned but that dependency on external tech is not something I find good for the industry, in the end it might be a monopoly just like any other; a monopoly within a market who had it's monopolies), no less.
Also, from my experience having a briefing whose end is never in sight is certainly not good too, it drains the workers too much and stresses them out (if they're doing lots of extra hours too), for a worker to be motivated it has to be able to see what's missing and when is he done with something; the quality of the end job goes down the drain otherwise.
Our industry is burning out talent like never before, before it was because of the trial and error involved in making new kinds of games (I remember some developers for Mario 64 and Saturn games quitted the industry altogether because these new projects were really uncharted territory and there weren't good tools to assist it's production), that felt like a means to a transitory end but now we have the tools but suddenly it's all about how graphically polished it needs to get. Seems kind of wrong.
z0m3le was talking about development costs a few posts up, a current gen game costing 15 million is a really cheap game; they often cost 30 million if not more.
An FF last gen costed 30 million, with full 5 year production and FMV's, when this gen started the rule was multiply by four, so a FF costing more than 100 million was no surprise; I doubt the figure dropped to less than 3 times the dev costs seeing the work needed on assets. I believe 20 something million for a exclusive game is the norm, almost 30 for a multiplat one (costs an extra 3/4 million if done alongside); but I haven't looked at where those numbers were stated for 1/2 years so I'm talking out of my memory alone.
I also remember stranglehold costing 30 million, sure the costs dropped a little, but still.
Of course, with all that said you can't go against progression altogether, which is why any platform should be appropriately powerful for what it is.
Sorry for the rant.
I'm dragging this from the depths: (1 page away, but still)
except that everyone is really scared of userbase fragmentation. Wii Motion Plus, Classic Controller, Playstation Move/Sub-controller are a good example for this.
Nintendo doesn't really seem afraid of it. Wii Motion Plus, Wii Fit, Classic Controllers and GC controllers (these two not being compatible)
Rather, they make money out of it.
imagine they now had to market RAM expansions to people in order to play a game at all or play a game like it was meant to.
Well technically we're seeing games now that aren't being played by the console like they were meant to, possibly due to the RAM ammount (on Crysis 2 it was certainly a big part of the equation), how much would a 512 MB GDDR3 @ 700 MHz expansion module cost right now?
Probably $10 or $20, they could even have included that cost at launch in their profit margin (it was cheaper but Nintendo actually did give out the wii condoms this gen to launch systems that lacked them; taking from their profit margin)
Of course the motivation for doing this to a manufacturer is low; but think about this, it's all a matter of marketing and leverage against competition. If consoles a year from now are launching with 4 GB as a response to the wii-u then it would be a wise counter-measure to have an expansion slot for RAM.
Of course, I also know it won't happen.
this creates more work for devs cause they have to make their already super-complex games work without the RAM expansion and with the RAM expansion and produce a worthwile upgrade if you have the thing. this also adds another variable to debugging and testing the expansion with every model of your console. plus you have to account for that when you design your system in the first place.
Very true, can't possibly be an afterthought (like an USB pen!).
it's a neat idea from a consumer perspective which means we could buy a 30-50 dollar RAM expansion and in theory get a few more years out of our console in relation to the evolution of PC versions. but from a business perspective, it's a nightmare. peripherals/add-ons are always trouble.
Not necessarily a nightmare, but, and this is the main reason I replied specifically to this post as no one pointed it out... The memory expansion had to be proprietary, and that's the biggest kicker, it's not just dropping an ddr3 compliant connector in there as then anyone could buy, install and by all means buy any brand with any kind of ratings to it.
And *that* would be a nightmare indeed. A big reason why shit goes wrong in PC's is about RAM, if you buy a computer and the RAM sucks because if it's not from a respectable brand it might crash all the time, lose data or struggle all together; they'd need to be in control of the RAM expansion department. Console's are all about controlling the closed hardware, and the philosophy for closed platforms really colides with expansion, expansion connectors need extra space, and are an extra part to fail (like you pointed above).
And of course they also don't want people opening up consoles like they open computers so they would want an expansion slot like N64 or X360 slot for HDD, something external, like a cartridge.
The Gameboy Advance even went through a variation of this: while the graphical power of the system was a souped-up SNES, the system only had two face buttons and shoulder buttons.
I thought about mentioning that one, but I always felt two extra buttons in that case wouldn't hurt, I realize they try to adopt consumer demanded features late, but I didn't really see merit to it (other than cost saving measures) before DS omited the joystick and 3DS omited the second joystick, those decisions certainly helped to shape the platforms (DS as the last 2D haven and 3DS being self sufficient with a simpler than home console control scheme, which I feel can be important on a more "pick and play" platform).
I guess the thing about GBA, is that controllers were far more advanced than the SNES one back then (they already had one joystick, and their upcoming home console already had two of them) so giving it four face buttons wouldn't really bring it to parity; on the 3DS though a second joystick as a standard would bring it to parity, which is the real issue.
PS Vita is pretty much in the same league of any home console controller Joysticks don't click down and it doesn't have L2/R2, but it's very close; and I look at that like flying to close to the sun, for their objective can't be a certain differentiation.
