FreeMufasa
Junior Member
I re-bought that game last month. So good. Had they continued in that direction (and maybe made it multiplatform), I think this series had the potential to be huge.
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Wii U Speculation Thread of Brains Beware: Wii U Re-Unveiling At E3 2012
- Thread starter bgassassin
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I re-bought that game last month. So good. Had they continued in that direction (and maybe made it multiplatform), I think this series had the potential to be huge.
JoshuaJSlone
Member
Regarding the multiplatform situation of Wii U alongside an MS or Sony system with a definite tech advantage: As a worst case scenario I'm imagining how much better off Wii would've been with 192 MB of RAM and a GPU similar to something ATI released in 2003.
I always thought Nintendo did the worst possible with the Wii. Even if it was a no-go for them to stray from the GameCube design, they still could've spent more R&D money to develop a dual core CPU variation and slapping on unified shaders to the original Gekko design.
2x Gekko cores @ 729 MHz
48 MB 1T-SRAM + 64 MB GDDR3
1x Flipper core @ 243 MHz with 8 unified shader units (360 has 48) as well as the original TEVs
This would actually have the potential to be a generational leap. id Tech 4, Source, UE3.0 and everything else would run on this. Raising the clock speed is not enough, Nintendo.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Slapping unified shaders on Flipper is OOTQ. They could go dual GPU though, at the associated cost.
Smiles and Cries
Member
You put a dash in Wii U? NAME CHANGE STAT!
I want an international (meaning NOA) Xenoblade
I want some kickass RPGs on Wii U
I think Square Enix may be a sleeper player on Wii U
Nowadays they are apparently selling the 3DS at a loss.
They did with the 3DS.
walking fiend
Member
More accurately, tbh
The_Endgamer
Member
Does anyone find it kinda funny and disappointing that despite every Nintendo home console being able to link to the internet since 1988 (NES>Wii), Nintendo still have yet to have a completely streamlined service?
I know i do...
I know i do...
Fourth Storm
Member
I believe WiiU has the potential for semi-strong Western 3rd party support right out of the gate. Besides Sega, Capcom, and other Japanese publishers offering up their Western styled/developed games, most major Western publishers, such as EA, Ubisoft, and Activision seem to be 100% on board. Valve and Epic look ready to join the party as well. The only publisher which has continued to hold out is Take Two. Everyone knows Nintendo are courting them, and I wouldn't be surprised to get some ports out of them eventually. Unfortunately, Chinatown Wars tanked...but with Ken Levine's comments maybe we can hope for a GotY edition of Bioshock Infinite or something...
Chinatown Wars didn't necessarily tank because of Nintendo or DS. The game was different from what made GTA famous on the consoles. The GTA games on the PSP were did better, but only for a while, especially when it seemed that all they were doing was just repackaging PS2 games to sell again. The fact that Chinatown wars on the PSP didn't succeed as well as the others shows it was the game's deviation from what people expect from GTA, not that the problem lied with Nintendo or the DS.
Dreamwriter
Member
lunchwithyuzo
Banned
Level-5. Ghoul Watch believe!
I really believe (and I could be wrong but I still BELIEVE it dammit) that Nintendo is going to do a Nintendo World event some time before March of this year to introduce the Wii U a little bit. I understand they're planning the FULL re-unveil at E3 but there's too much information to all be communicated in one event like that.
Historically Nintendo has introduced it's new hardware at Space World/Nintendo World shows and I FULLY expect that to continue with the Wii U to an extent. I think it would have the further advantage of taking at least some of the thunder out of the Vita's debut and reignite the hype around the console. At such an event i would expect a limited number of games to be shown from Nintendo itself as well as the console's online strategy to be unveiled. I think E3 will be about playable games, pricing information, and some games we won't know about.
As I've noted before, Nintendo did a Nintendo World last January for the 3DS, I would expect a similar 1st quarter event for Wii U.
lunchwithyuzo
Banned
I think we'll get some minor info around GDC. Maybe news on Wii U's Virtual Console, since Nintendo has a bit if a history of doing VC announcements at GDC.
That's because 3DS launched early this year. Wii U won't be out untill next fall.
BlackNMild2k1
Member
I don't really want to get too deep into this as we've had a thread here about it already and we've talked it to death at this point. But look up "3rd Party wall of Shame".
The demographics for the system are directly related to the software released for it, and outside of Nintendo, the majority of software was casual crap. 3rd parties didn't provide the Wii with the software to keep the "demographic" they pursue on the PS360, so now there is no reason for that demographic to be on the Wii. Like was already said, "It's a vicious cycle"
Nintendo consoles have been pegged as consoles for Kids and "Casuals" regardless of the fact that nearly everyone (or someone they know) owns/owned a damn Wii at some point. It's the software that helped keep that stereotype alive and no better example than the Capcom test.
Port RE4 as a test, get good sales, follow up with RE UC as another test with a promise of more like RE4, get good sales, follow up with a sequel to RE UC instead of RE5, get not so good sales... we failed the test. No RE5 for Wii!!
So as much as it seems that we may like to "victimize" ourselves, I think we were right on point about the 3rd party situation as a whole. they may have initially bet on the wrong horse, but they've had plenty of chances to correct it, but decided to double down on their misplaced bets instead. The demographic is the one they shaped it to be, so when they finally do decide to release some of those games on the Wii, they can't be surprised when it doesn't perform nearly as well as the PS360 versions after 5 years of the "demographic" being ignored on the Wii.
I know there are technical reason for not supporting the Wii as HD budgets exploded and having to rework things on a completely different engine with a whole different coding and barely better graphics than what they've been working on for the prior 5 years wasn't what they wanted to do, but hopefully they don't make the same mistake again since one of their main reasons this gen will not be a valid excuse for next.
Wii U is competing vs PS3 for support out of the gates. PS3 has demonstrated it can do decent software sales that are hard to ignore by any publisher. The PS4 is not even in discussion
bgassassin
Member
I'm going with Ubisoft especially after the comment from them not too long ago about the Wii still makng up 45% of their business.
Taking Killer Freaks from PS360 and apparently making it a Wii U exclusive for launch is a start in that direct to me.
EA Sports games should be another. I think Madden can be a system mover on its own. If I were Nintendo I would use that game to push the adoption of a second controller since its cost is their concern. Give people a reason to buy it and they will.
Capcom should have a strong presence.
Activision for no other reason than CoD.
Sega because they seem to have a close relationship with Nintendo.
I think these are the obvious ones.
Now to go out on a limb with a wild card pick, I'm going to say Valve. They seem to have a similar gaming philosophy to Nintendo and I can see them properly taking advantage of Nintendo's "flexible" online system.
Same way they got Xenon from Cell. Take the core, modify it, and make a new chip. Remember MS originally wanted Xenon to be a 3.5Ghz OoOe chip. POWER7 should make that easy to achieve.
I assume lherre's info is coming from the target spec sheet of the retail kit for him to say 3 cores with 2 threads each. I personally think they started with a modified Xenon as that's the closest thing readily available to reach that target. I remember a dev saying there were things they could do in the first kit that they couldn't do in the second. While that's far from a clear indication of what changed, maybe they got some prototypes of the new CPU?
I definitely find it funny sometimes. The company that almost invented the present day internet doesn't have a "proper" online component for their consoles
Pretty much gonna second bgassassin's list and add Square-Enix from the big guys to the list if only because I've deluded myself into hoping that SE pulls a smart maneuver and makes a The World Ends With You (U) Too that hits around launch, capitalizing on the folks looking for some RPG love, gets momentum from the Neku in KH3D appearance and being an awesome as fuck game and becomes a new cornerstone RPG franchise on the Nintendo side of things.
Final Fantasy is so 1987 after all.
[/hipster gamer]Oh god they better. The story of Sega this generation is of them making a big project HD game that tanks or otherwise underperforms, and then hitting up Nintendo's Mario and Sonic Olympic Sega Welfare Program for essentially a no strings attached grant.
Sega has Nintendo to thank for even being alive at this point.
Oh absolutely, that is certainly the challenge for them, but its a much more favorable one than in the west. PS3 has been an ok console for japanese devs, but certainly not the success that the PS2 was. WiiU becoming lead platform for many of them is very possible I think, given the current situation.
Winning over Capcom and SE is particularly important I think. Not just for domestic reasons, but both have some very popular franchises(SE also holds the Eidos stuff as well) that do well in the west which would help Nintendo reconnect with the "western gamer" so to speak. Nintendo already has both of them in a big way on the 3DS, getting that to carry over to the WiiU would be huge. Just having DQX appear on the console is a big deal I think. It's a reliable franchise, so it could be something that convinces other devs to throw support in for the console knowing that there will be a solid base of people who dont just buy Nintendo games.
Obviously Sega is a given at this point imo.
Lupin the Third
Member
Wait... can you clarify what is meant by this? I love to give Nintendo credit where it's due, but I'm not sure how they "almost invented" the modern internet. Can you please be more specific?
That would be ace. Online multiplayer and local multiplayer with 3DS connected.
bgassassin
Member
I had to find an article with enough info as most only talked a little about its use in Japan (it was supposedly used briefly in the US as well).
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/feature/27666
I haven't followed WiiU news at all since E3, so apologies if this has been addressed.
My understanding is that WiiU is backward compatible with Wii games out of the box. Has Nintendo talked about whether there will be an auto resolution upgrade? Could they theoretically do something similar to the Dolphin emulator if they wished to? I really want to play Skyward Sword, but don't really want to buy a Wii at this point just for that game, especially if I can get a better looking version of it sometime next year. Thanks for any information!
My understanding is that WiiU is backward compatible with Wii games out of the box. Has Nintendo talked about whether there will be an auto resolution upgrade? Could they theoretically do something similar to the Dolphin emulator if they wished to? I really want to play Skyward Sword, but don't really want to buy a Wii at this point just for that game, especially if I can get a better looking version of it sometime next year. Thanks for any information!
From what we know now, no. Nintendo is likely hoping for hardware emulation, which would make changing... well, anything impossible. They'd have to go with software emulation to modify the game.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
DCKing said:
No, unified shaders is a fundamental trait of the design - you can't just add it to a GPU as a post-factum feature. Unified shaders means that there's a threading control model in there, with the associated scheduling logic, load balancing logic, thread queues, etc. It's perhaps the most definitive feature you build a design around, and not something that can be an afterthought.
As per the 3DS - its (vertex) shaders are not a 'on/off' feature - they are always used, and exposed by the API under an extension (just as the fixed pixel shading features are exposed as an API extension). It's just that OpenGL ES1 (which is what 3DS native API is more or less) can abstract the fact the pipeline is shader-based/has shader sections and pretend it's all a fixed pipeline for those occasions devs would not use the shader hw directly for some reason. But that's how OpenGL ES1 works on every modern GPU out there - outside of any API extensions (i.e. optional parts to the core API) it abstracts whatever shader architecture lies underneath and present to the client a fixed-function pipeline circa pre-OpenGL2.
bgassassin
Member
As it stands now, Nintendo has said that Wii U will not do that for Wii games.
Haha. Well Bayonetta was a million seller. I don't know how some of their other games did.
Forsaken82
Member
They say that because March 31st ends their current Fiscal year. It doesn't mean they are going to break the norm and release it during the summer.
Aizu_Itsuko
Member
I'm talking as a whole, not specifics.
EA has been quite lost this gen, constantly changing their minds, and have pretty much switched roles with Activision.
Sony has bled due to hardware loses, not software.
In other cases, it varies.
It's amazing that a company that's got EA Sports titles, Battlefield, and everything else doesn't manage to make a profit.
Aizu_Itsuko
Member
I don't think so.
They have made decisions based on profits first and foremost when it comes to home consoles.
The NES, SNES and N64 weren't any smaller than the competition and it was only when they started losing market share and became more conservative that they started making smaller, more profit focused systems.
Wii U, just like the 3DS, is trying to recover part of the hardcore audience they had lost in recent years, mainly due to the lack of big third party support. They have probably realized that the new gamers they reached with the Wii are quite unpredictable and not very loyal and want to build a more balanced, more open system for all kind of gamers (even if they still don't want to pursue a more powerful/less profitable system like Sony/MS do).
They are reacting to the Wii's current situation and the potential threat that is Apple.
Aizu_Itsuko
Member
Oh, things would have been much different; not perfect but better.
They could have probably lost BC though.
I don't know the manufacturing costs of the 3DS so after the price drop this could be true. But I suspect they are losing very little money and mostly because they didn't meet their sales expectations. They bled money at launch with the GC too, but it was a laughable amount.
Nintendo is not going to bleed $150-200 per system sold like Sony or MS do, that's for sure.
Regarding of what they are going to do with the Wii U, all I know is that they like simplicity but I don't have a crystal ball and different factors could lead them to do unexpected things. We can only base our speculations and predictions on what's to be expected from Nintendo.
My guess is mismanagement.
Ok, so what you are saying is that Nintendo is using that Xenon as a model for designing their Power7 CPU?
Well, AS A WHOLE, yes publishers did make a lot of money this generation. But that's mostly Nintendo's profit. It would be like saying this classroom full of D-students has a B-average just because one genius is in it.
There were years where the only reason the industry as a whole put any numbers on the board was because Nintendo counteracted all the losses from the other publishers. Heck even Activision lost money last year, and they had CODBLOPS, Starcraft II, AND WoW tithes.
Nuclear Muffin
Banned
I think you're thinking of Atari. Nintendo may have experimented with an online network with the NES, but it was Atari's GameLine network that eventually became AOL.
ThatObviousUser
ὠαἴÏÏιÏÏÎ¿Ï Ïαá¿Ï εἶ
In terms of full-committed projects (non-spinoffs, non-casual fare), I'd say Sega was the best third-party on Wii. Sonic Colors, House of the Dead: Overkill, 428, Nights sequel, ports of Sonic Unleashed and All-Stars racing, two other exclusive Sonic games, etc. Sega's certainly been better than EA, Square, and Capcom.
Nuclear Muffin
Banned
I'd have to agree (along with Atlus). They put solid effort into most of the stuff they made and most of it was quite good indeed.
All part of their long-term strategy to strangle the rest of the industry to death by raising average development costs to the point where only they can survive and afford said ridiculous dev costs.
Well you dont have to believe what Nintendo stated about the Wii size:
http://www.nintendo.co.uk/NOE/en_GB/news/iwata/iwata_asks_-_wii_32854_18058.html
The Wii was a success at this size it was. Small, sleek & simple.
The WiiU is bigger:
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/40405/wii-u-vs-nintendo-wii
I think Nintendo has done what it can to keep the size down, but... what they have decided to pack in there makes it a problem. We also know that the WiiU can only be placed in one position, and it has more vents. And they have done that to capture the market that they lost with the Wii.
bgassassin
Member
As speculation that's the direction I'm leaning towards based on everything we know so far. Nintendo wants development to be easy. 360 beat PS3 in that regard. At the same time Nintendo apparently prefers OoOe for their CPUs. There are supposedly the same amount of cores with the same amount of threads as Xenon. And Xenon already has a large amount of die space designated for L2 cache. Emulating a Xenon design with modified POWER7 cores would seem to be a cost effective way to get the power they want while making it easier on devs.
In the context I'm talking about Gameline wouldn't fit, though I admit I learned something new. It seems to have been for downloading games only at the time. Nintendo's was used for stock trading, weather updates, banking, and some other things we do on the internet.
Sigh, being a hair bigger than the Wii just about dooms its potential hardware-wise
That assumes that what we saw at E3 was a finalized hardware design, which I doubt it was. Personally I think it could look a lot different come E32012 given that the console itself was barely shown last E3 and they are supposedly planning this "re-unveiling". Particularly considering it looks a bit to similar to the Wii, it might be a good idea to change it up. Honestly though gauging power from size is a waste of time, the system will be shipping without a HDD, and Nintendo has always been very good at designing compact hardware.
Sigh, being a hair bigger than the Wii just about dooms its potential hardware-wise
It's 50% bigger, and that's before considering that it doesn't have GCN ports...
-Pyromaniac-
Member
Guys it's just a box.
/reggie
/reggie
Overhead... EA is running toe to toe with Microsoft for most managers on a project.
ReyVGM
Member
Sigh, being a hair bigger than the Wii just about dooms its potential hardware-wise
The Gamecube was smaller than the PS2 and Xbox and it was still more/as powerful as them.
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