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Wii U Speculation Thread The Third: Casting Dreams in The Castle of Miyamoto

Linkhero1

Member
I'm hoping for F-Zero Wii U. Now that Nintendo is releasing an HD console our friend Nagoshi can't complain. It's not up for Nagoshiation.
 

fernoca

Member
I think parody and satire are two of the more under-used devices in gaming, still at this late point in the medium's evolution.

Maybe someday gaming will get its own Mel Brooks? We can only hope so.
http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e323/HylianTom/Mel Brooks Gifs/GoodtobetheKing.jpg
"It's good to be the king!"
Conker had a good shot at it, but not many bought it...twice.

I think there was an Asterix games that parodied a few stuff, including Mario Sunshine; but the brand is quite strong (and usually exclusive) to Europe.

There was also recently Eat Lead, the first one was in 3D but quite average, the second one was 2D and ..quite average too, but slightly better because of the price.

But I agree that there should be more games like that. Though wonder if it's case of some not wanting to piss of others, since in the end..unless a big studio is the one that does it; it will usually be done by a small team. Then at some time, they might need contracts with other publishers and they might be afraid of not getting said contracts because of the parodies.

Or something.. :p
 
NMH1 and Killer 7 are some of the best examples of games as art. Actually, they're probably the best examples I can think of as games unoccupied with the notion that being pretty = art and more concerned with subtext, parody, and satire. They just don't always work as well as they should as actual games though.

Still love em to death regardless.

I don't know, I think they could be every bit as "artsy" and still be amazing pure games. Mission progression, enemy variety (fodder enemies), and side missions could definitely have been more creative and fun and streamlined and still kept the artistic touch. But I'll agree that a lot of games in this net have games issues as a result. I guess it depends on where the dev weighs the importance of the vision, on the experience/mechanics/gameplay "as art" (Ikaruga, SMB3, Meat Boy in it's way), or on experience/visuals/ambiance/story "as art" (SOTC, NMH, Limbo, Mass Effect, Uncharted). But it's definitely hard to find a perfect balance, if not impossible.
 

Shurayuki

Member
Conker had a good shot at it, but not many bought it...twice.

I bought it, it was like 120 DeutscheMark, one of the most expensive games at that time. It was also only available in english, and i was just starting to learn english in school. One of the most amazing gaming experiences i had!
(the final boss was insanely hard, actually the Private Ryan and Matrix levels were pretty hard too...at least for a child.)
 

HylianTom

Banned
Oh he's not with us anymore? Sounds like one hell of a dog! (you know, that actually jogs my memory about you as a poster!)

I think there is a lot of parody, actually 99% of Indie games seem to play off of that. In most cases it's more of an excuse to rip of the gameplay though.

Hell yes, Jump The Queen! GANGBAAAAAANG

I love that clip. Heck, I can quote the whole movie. It's my favorite movie of all time.

And yeah.. Jake passed two months ago today. He was always by my side, and would spend hours sleeping on the couch next to me while I'd be playing. He loved Wolf Link's singing, and his ears would always perk-up when he'd hear Epona. I'm going to be heartbroken for a long, long time, and I can't think about him for too long without losing it.

When I made the oath on Jake's honor last night, I was quite serious. For anyone who has inside info on a game in development, or info on the console itself, or on related accessories or the network, or maybe even Nintendo's efforts to woo third parties, please consider participating, my offer still stands. Here's the link:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=36395255&postcount=10452

If somehow this helps NintendoGAF going into the future as far as leaks and information-gathering is concerned, I'd be giddy. Nayru knows we'll take all the help we can get.
 

guek

Banned
I don't know, I think they could be every bit as "artsy" and still be amazing pure games.

I think there is a fundamental difference between the art of games and games as art. There can definitely be overlap, but it's difficult for a game to properly embody both ideas, and one is just about always compromised for the other.

I agree though that it isn't impossible.
 

z0m3le

Banned
I know but I'm talking in terms of multiplats. All I need is Fallout on my Wii U and I'll be fine.

Invest in a decent PC, Wii U + PC, if it's anything like this generation Almost every notable game also came out on PC (except for Sony exclusives and Red Dead Redemption)

I am hoping Nintendo isn't shunned again for just being different, I really see the Upad as console gaming's laptop evolution.

(as in what happened with PCs, and their movement to laptops, sure desktops still exist, but laptops became more popular, I don't look at this as the handhelds because they don't offer the same experiences, they are more like netbooks or tablets of the gaming industry) -Yes I think Upad and MS's tablet controllers will change the game that much in the long run.
 

peter

Banned
Ideaman told this already.
I still see site's that are still posting news like this:
"Game studio suggests Wii U’s hardware is on par with existing consoles"


This was someone his reaction, and i believe this is a good example to explain Vigil comment:

Why are you so dumb. Marvin Donald gave an interview about Darksiders II in which he PASSED ALONG WHAT HE HEARD from his development team about the resolution for the game on the Wii U.

He clearly said that the game would not have an enhanced resolution on the Wii U. So if 360 and PS3 have a 720p Darksiders game, the Wii U will have the same.

He is not saying the hardware is just as powerful as 6 year old technology. It would be dumb for Vigil to put extra time into a 1080p version for one console, even if the Wii U was capable of it.


Some other wiiu info:


Ubisoft Says It’s Ready To Take Full Advantage Of Wii U Digital Strategy

Ubisoft’s digital manager Chris Early has told Eurogamer that the company is more than prepared to take full advantage of the Wii U by offering unparalleled digital content on the platform. Ubisoft previously took advantage of the PlayStation Vita’s digital offerings by providing digital copies of the company’s launch software. Here’s what Early had to say about their plans for Wii U:

“We’ll absolutely take advantage of whatever the policies will let us do with the platform from the standpoint of providing digital content.”

“Nintendo has not announced a lot of their digital programs at this point of time. Our key is, as you see from us from a content perspective in supporting the platform, is we’re going to be there like we were with the Vita, and support the policy side of it as well. With the Vita all of our games are available digitally, and they’re even optimised from that standpoint because that was a policy in place we were able to design to.”

“So from the same standpoint, I expect when the Wii U comes out and there are digital policies that are there, we will be in support of them as well.”



http://mynintendonews.com/2012/03/27/ub ... -strategy/

Green Hills Software’s MULTI Integrated Development Environment Selected by Nintendo for Wii U Development

We’ll take any Wii U news we can get! :)

Global Agreement Will Yield Richer Games, with Faster Time-to-Market

SAN JOSE, CA — March 27, 2012 — DESIGN West/ESC 2012, Booth #1227 —Green Hills Software, the largest independent vendor of embedded software solutions, has entered into a global license agreement that will enable Nintendo Co., Ltd. to provide Green Hills Software’s MULTI® integrated development environment (IDE) to developers that are creating video game software for the upcoming Wii U platform, which is scheduled to be launched later this year.

“We selected the Green Hills Software solution because it generates highly optimized code, and Green Hills provides excellent global support,” commented Mr. Genyo Takeda, senior managing director of Integrated Research & Design at Nintendo Co., Ltd.



http://nintendoeverything.com/index.php ... velopment/


I'm from belgium and i'm new here. I will try to gather some info over the inet and post it to here if someone posted already before me.
 

HylianTom

Banned
Invest in a decent PC, Wii U + PC, if it's anything like this generation Almost every notable game also came out on PC (except for Sony exclusives and Red Dead Redemption)

Indeed! When you think about it, it's a pretty old-school platform combo, back from the days where there was a clearer dividing line between consoles and PCs.

z0m3le said:
I am hoping Nintendo isn't shunned again for just being different, I really see the Upad as console gaming's laptop evolution.
Hmm.. uPad or not, there will be shunning.
 

DCKing

Member
He is not saying the hardware is just as powerful as 6 year old technology. It would be dumb for Vigil to put extra time into a 1080p version for one console, even if the Wii U was capable of it.
If the Wii U is capable of running Darksiders II in 1080p, it would be one of the most trivial changes they can make to the game. They could still consider it not worth investing, but getting the thing to run on the Upad is a way bigger change than simply giving the game a higher resolution. That either means the Wii U is not capable of doing it, or it is at least not capable of doing it trivially from 360 code (which it would be if it had substantially more power). It's also much harder than you think to match the 6-year old tech of the 360 in a new console. The Wii U box should be capable of a rather decent bump, but improving vastly over 6 year old tech is not as trivial as it may sound.

Why do people still think the Wii U needs any substantial power to run UE4? Even the Vita will be capable of running UE4, smh.
If it's not dead by then amirite
 

Easy_D

never left the stone age
Yeppers! The loop continues! We'll be talking about developer excuses once again in no time!

I also wouldn't mind Nintendo buying the rights to Faxanadu from Konami (who now holds Hudson's IPs) so that they could build their stable of action-adventure games.. but that'll never happen. Few people seem to remember the game.

I thought Faxanadu was owned by Falcom? It's part of the Dragon Slayer series isn't it?
Edit: I see, Hudson published it. Right-o. So Konami still holds the rights eh. But with Falcom's involvement I don't see how Nintendo could buy it.
 

Shurayuki

Member
If the Wii U is capable of running Darksiders II in 1080p, it would be one of the most trivial changes they can make to the game. They could still consider it not worth investing, but getting the thing to run on the Upad is a way bigger change than simply giving the game a higher resolution. That either means the Wii U is not capable of doing it, or it is at least not capable of doing it trivially from 360 code (which it would be if it had substantially more power). It's also much harder than you think to match the 6-year old tech of the 360 in a new console. The Wii U box should be capable of a rather decent bump, but improving vastly over 6 year old tech is not as trivial as it may sound.

Why do people still think the Wii U needs any substantial power to run UE4? Even the Vita will be capable of running UE4, smh.
If it's not dead by then amirite

I think people lump Samaritan and UE4 together, and didn't Rein hint at UE4 not being that great at scaling (down)?

Somehow, i don't care e e e e e anymore.
Not that i don't want to know. We need stuff to get hyped over and i need stuff to do, i need like more japanese quotes x.x (not really)
 

MDX

Member
Ideaman told this already.
I still see site's that are still posting news like this:
"Game studio suggests Wii U’s hardware is on par with existing consoles"


This was someone his reaction, and i believe this is a good example to explain Vigil comment:

Why are you so dumb. Marvin Donald gave an interview about Darksiders II in which he PASSED ALONG WHAT HE HEARD from his development team about the resolution for the game on the Wii U.

He clearly said that the game would not have an enhanced resolution on the Wii U. So if 360 and PS3 have a 720p Darksiders game, the Wii U will have the same.

He is not saying the hardware is just as powerful as 6 year old technology. It would be dumb for Vigil to put extra time into a 1080p version for one console, even if the Wii U was capable of it.


I disagree with your last statement. Its very important for developers to show fans that they are committed to bring out the best out of the hardware. Those devs that early on decide to go for "lazy" ports, will be dismissed in the future. Remember, first impressions are very important.
 

VAPitts

Member
Ideaman told this already.
I still see site's that are still posting news like this:
"Game studio suggests Wii U’s hardware is on par with existing consoles"


This was someone his reaction, and i believe this is a good example to explain Vigil comment:

Why are you so dumb. Marvin Donald gave an interview about Darksiders II in which he PASSED ALONG WHAT HE HEARD from his development team about the resolution for the game on the Wii U.

He clearly said that the game would not have an enhanced resolution on the Wii U. So if 360 and PS3 have a 720p Darksiders game, the Wii U will have the same.

He is not saying the hardware is just as powerful as 6 year old technology. It would be dumb for Vigil to put extra time into a 1080p version for one console, even if the Wii U was capable of it.





I'm from belgium and i'm new here. I will try to gather some info over the inet and post it to here if someone posted already before me.

u know it's people like u that remind me i haven't lost my mind (not all of it anyway lol) but seriously, people love to take stuff out of context just out of sheer discontent. they want so bad for somebody to say that the Wii U isn't more powerful then current gen that they're willing to 100% completely misconstrue things that are said. i find it very appauling personally because this isn't done to the other companies (at least not in a negative way). but lo and behold, the collection of jackasses won't go away after breaking it down like this. heck, they've had this explained to them 100 times b4 your post, SINCE the article has been out. i guess they want to justify their constant whining about Nintendo. but again thank you for the break down.
 

guek

Banned
That either means the Wii U is not capable of doing it, or it is at least not capable of doing it trivially from 360 code (which it would be if it had substantially more power).

I'm starting to wonder whether or not this is actually true. After wsippel's report on the CPU, it sounds like while the wii u can run 360 games with relative ease (as several devs have mentioned), optimizing 360 code for wii u might be another matter altogether.
 

VAPitts

Member
I disagree with your last statement. Its very important for developers to show fans that they are committed to bring out the best out of the hardware. Those devs that early on decide to go for "lazy" ports, will be dismissed in the future. Remember, first impressions are very important.

i def don't disagree with what you are saying, but do u think THQ can really afford an advanced port right now?

apparently across the board is all they can do now atm. as far as "lazy" ports, u know they're gonna have one sacrificial lamb. especially when Nintendo is involved (Gamecube says hi) but if they are so committed to Nintendo this time around or at least what they're making it seem to be, then wait till Nintendo's games are all shiny in 1080p. as the country folks say: "That'll learn em" lol
 
I think parody and satire are two of the more under-used devices in gaming, still at this late point in the medium's evolution.

This is why I was really looking forward to Timesplitters 4 taking jabs at all the Dudebro shooters and still being a solid game on its own. Now if only Crytek UK could bring the project back with an awesome streamlined console Cry Engine level editor and a script written by someone like say Gabe and Tycho.
 

Easy_D

never left the stone age
I'm starting to wonder whether or not this is actually true. After wsippel's report on the CPU, it sounds like while the wii u can run 360 games with relative ease (as several devs have mentioned), optimizing 360 code for wii u might be another matter altogether.

Maybe it's an easy to use, harder to master type of scenario. Porting is relatively easy but making it run as well as it could takes a bit more time. I personally believe there will be a noticable difference between ports and games built from the ground up, discarding shovelware or games that aren't AAAAAAAAA. Nowhere a generational leap of course, that would be absurd to even consider at this point.
 

guek

Banned
While I agree we should expect more from vigil, I doubt the Wii U port team is much larger than 10 people, most likely less. Their entire job description might be to make sure the port runs well and do something marginally interesting with the controller. After all, this isn't a matter of drag and dropping from one console to another. No matter the ease of porting, I'm sure there are some bugs to iron out. And if the team really is that small and they've been asked to make controller features, the majority of their job might be just to fix bugs with the controller UI and making sure the game doesn't crash rather than trying to optimize for 1080p.

It kind sounds like wishful thinking but then apparently the PC port of the first DS was pretty lazy too. Competent but unambitious.

Either way, I'm not getting my panties in a bunch. I more take it as a confirmation that Wii U isn't sporting some sort of awesome power cosmic underneath the hood, which is something we all should have known from the beginning.
 

HylianTom

Banned
While I agree we should expect more from vigil, I doubt the Wii U port team is much larger than 10 people, most likely less. Their entire job description might be to make sure the port runs well and do something marginally interesting with the controller. After all, this isn't a matter of drag and dropping from one console to another. No matter the ease of porting, I'm sure there are some bugs to iron out. And if the team really is that small and they've been asked to make controller features, the majority of their job might be just to fix bugs with the controller UI and making sure the game doesn't crash rather than trying to optimize for 1080p.

It kind sounds like wishful thinking but then apparently the PC port of the first DS was pretty lazy too. Competent but unambitious.

Either way, I'm not getting my panties in a bunch. I more take it as a confirmation that Wii U isn't sporting some sort of awesome power cosmic underneath the hood, which is something we all should have known from the beginning.

No bunched panties here, either.

To begin with, I'm just happy (and pleasantly surprised) that it's coming to the Wii U at all. Seeing "coming to Xbox 360, PS3, PC, and Wii U" still sounds so.. weird! (But I like it!) Like so many other companies do, Vigil could've easily crapped-out some old chestnut of an excuse like "we want to make a unique game for the U" or "we didn't know about the Wii U until we were too far into development.

I'm guessing that third parties are going to be paying very close attention to sales figures for this game (and Assassin's Creed 3) when weighing their Wii U options for the following years. Almost like a "test game" - save for the fact that it isn't utter shit.
 

DCKing

Member
I'm starting to wonder whether or not this is actually true. After wsippel's report on the CPU, it sounds like while the wii u can run 360 games with relative ease (as several devs have mentioned), optimizing 360 code for wii u might be another matter altogether.
If the Wii U chip is more 'general purpose', i.e. it sacrifices silicon space and maybe clock speed for being an architecture that requires less optimization to get any performance out of it, I can imagine that it will have a hard time matching performance in some special optimized applications. Given that this architecture is likely to be used in the other consoles and will be less of a headache to work with it's probably a good choice.

Running a game in 1080p is not something that should be CPU bound at all however. That's only the GPU doing stuff, basically. The Wii U not being able to run Darksiders II in 1080p tells us that the devkit GPU is not all that great. At the very least when it comes to ported games, but I think this implies more than that.
 

Thraktor

Member
Hey guys, I'm back!

***tumbleweed blows by***

Alright, I doubt any of you remember me, but I used to post a bit in the old Wii U speculation threads. I've been on a self-imposed exile from GAF for the past couple of months as I'm in my final year of college, but I've decided to make a brief return to cover a few things that I think need to be cleared up here in this thread.

There was a bit of discussion a few pages back on the console's CPU, and I thought it'd be worth spelling out what we know about the CPU, and what it means as far as the console's performance is concerned.

Wii U's CPU

The Wii U, by all accounts we've had thus far, has a tri-core IBM PowerPC CPU, with 2-way SMT (symmetric multi-threading), OoOE (out-of-order execution) and 3MB of L2 eDRAM cache. (The L1 cache, by the way, will be 32kB instruction cache + 32kB data cache, which is standard for all of IBM's PPC CPUs.) The CPU is expected to run somewhere north of 3Ghz (and I'd put 3.5Ghz as the absolute upper bound on that).

Given all this, the CPU would be expected to perform about the same in terms of raw computational power (flops) as the XBox360's CPU. The Wii U's CPU does have a couple of advantages, though, in terms of how efficiently that power is used.

A lot of modern CPU design isn't focussed so much on getting as many cores to run at as high clock-rates as possible (even in energy-guzzling server chips), but rather on getting the CPU to run as efficiently as possible, in particular minimizing the amount of wasted cycles. In old microprocessors, if the processor doesn't have the data it needs to perform an instruction, it has to wait until the data arrives from memory. Every clock cycle the data takes to arrive from memory is one in which the processor is doing nothing; it's a wasted cycle. If you're reading from memory a lot, these wasted cycles can add up to a considerable portion of the processor's time, and the actual performance you get will be a lot lower than the processor is in theory capable of.

There are two main technologies that modern processors use to minimize the proportion of cycles that are wasted. The first is the cache. This is a small pool of memory on the CPU that automatically pre-loads data as it's needed, and can then be accessed by the CPU at a much lower latency than main memory. The Wii U's CPU has a cache three times larger than the XBox360's CPU's, which means more data in low-latency range and hence fewer wasted cycles. It should also be expected that the cache in the Wii U is probably more advanced in it's implementation: ie. better at figuring out what data will be needed and when.

The second relevant technology is out-of-order execution. In a processor which is capable of out-of-order execution, instead of simply waiting when a piece of data isn't available for an instruction, the processor will go ahead and execute the next instruction along (if it can), or indeed the next instruction after that, or the next instruction after that, etc. This can, in some cases, substantially reduce the amount of wasted cycles, and it's a capability which the Wii U's CPU does have, and the XBox360's (and PS3's for that matter) doesn't have.

So what does this mean for games? Well, for some in-game CPU tasks, such as physics, the benefit will be pretty small. Physics is generally pretty linear code, so won't gain much from out-of-order execution or the bigger cache. By contrast, non-linear code like AI will benefit hugely from out-of-order execution and a large cache, so we'll see very significant improvements in AI performance on the Wii U's CPU compared to the XBox360's.

So, physics-heavy shooters like Red Faction wouldn't see much improvement CPU-wise on the Wii U, whereas AI-heavy games like RTSs should run significantly better. Most games will be somewhere in the middle, with a decent, if not amazing boost in performance over the XBox360's CPU. Keep in mind, though, that even if the CPU isn't any more efficient at running physics code, the fact that it's more efficient at other things means that developers have more power left to dedicate to physics, so all else being equal, we should still see better physics in Wii U games than XBox360 games in many cases.

It is worth noting, though, that even if the Wii U's CPU may be a bit disappointing to some, the HD consoles this generation (especially the PS3) went overboard with regard to their CPUs to the point where a lot of graphics work is offloaded to the CPU on many titles. A console with a modest boost in CPU power and a larger jump in GPU capabilities would make for a much more balanced machine.
 

Thraktor

Member
UE4 support will show us whether or not nintendo is actually committed to reclaiming 3rd party content. I'm happy either way but will be decidedly more pleased with one outcome over the other.

UE4 support will tell us a lot more about Epic than it will about Nintendo. With UE3 and the Wii there was a good technical reason that it couldn't support the console: the Wii simply didn't haven the necessary feature-set (i.e. programmable shaders) that the engine was built around. The raw power of the console was of far less importance, Unreal Engine would be scalable enough to run on something as powerful as the Wii if it had a modern shader architecture.

This time round, no matter how big the power gap between Nintendo and the competition (a lot smaller than last time, anyway), there won't be any features the next XBox and PS4's GPUs will have that the Wii U's won't. They'll surely be faster, have more SPUs, etc. and will probably have more efficient tessellators, and so forth, but there won't be anything that the Wii U can't do, but slower. Any engine designed for those consoles will be able to run on Wii U, so long as the resolution/texture detail/effects, etc. are reduced appropriately. If UE4 isn't available on Wii U, it won't be because it's not technically capable of it, it'll be because Epic have made the decision that they don't want UE4 on Wii U.

The difficulty for Epic would be when someone like Crytek comes along with an engine that not only produces crazy-good graphics on the next XBox and Playstation, but can also scale down to Wii U as well, giving developers a lot more leeway to release their games on three platforms instead of UE4's two.

My personal guess is that Epic are playing the "we won't say what UE4 will run on" game to try to push Nintendo, MS and Sony into making their machines as powerful as possible. Being able to say to Nintendo "well, if you increased X spec by Y amount, we might be able to get UE4 working on it" is a good position for them to be in at the moment. Similarly, telling MS and Sony "If you make the console X times more powerful than Wii U then we'll be able to make UE4 XBox720/PS4 exclusive" can really prey on their desire to shut Nintendo out from the "mature" market again. Once the consoles are out, though, there's little reason for them to hold out, and they'll eventually announce Wii U support for the engine, although later than for the other two.
 

HylianTom

Banned
UE4 support will tell us a lot more about Epic than it will about Nintendo. With UE3 and the Wii there was a good technical reason that it couldn't support the console: the Wii simply didn't haven the necessary feature-set (i.e. programmable shaders) that the engine was built around. The raw power of the console was of far less importance, Unreal Engine would be scalable enough to run on something as powerful as the Wii if it had a modern shader architecture.

This time round, no matter how big the power gap between Nintendo and the competition (a lot smaller than last time, anyway), there won't be any features the next XBox and PS4's GPUs will have that the Wii U's won't. They'll surely be faster, have more SPUs, etc. and will probably have more efficient tessellators, and so forth, but there won't be anything that the Wii U can't do, but slower. Any engine designed for those consoles will be able to run on Wii U, so long as the resolution/texture detail/effects, etc. are reduced appropriately. If UE4 isn't available on Wii U, it won't be because it's not technically capable of it, it'll be because Epic have made the decision that they don't want UE4 on Wii U.

The difficulty for Epic would be when someone like Crytek comes along with an engine that not only produces crazy-good graphics on the next XBox and Playstation, but can also scale down to Wii U as well, giving developers a lot more leeway to release their games on three platforms instead of UE4's two.

My personal guess is that Epic are playing the "we won't say what UE4 will run on" game to try to push Nintendo, MS and Sony into making their machines as powerful as possible. Being able to say to Nintendo "well, if you increased X spec by Y amount, we might be able to get UE4 working on it" is a good position for them to be in at the moment. Similarly, telling MS and Sony "If you make the console X times more powerful than Wii U then we'll be able to make UE4 XBox720/PS4 exclusive" can really prey on their desire to shut Nintendo out from the "mature" market again. Once the consoles are out, though, there's little reason for them to hold out, and they'll eventually announce Wii U support for the engine, although later than for the other two.

Welcome back, Thrak! (*slides shot of whiskey down the bar*)

Your comment on whether or not Epic will pretty much allow UE4 on the U is not very surprising at all. Honestly? I sometimes wonder if the competiton would go so far as to moneyhat Epic into boxxing-out Nintendo from UE4. Microsoft and Sony may act nonchalant as far as how severe a competitor they see Nintendo, but after what happened this past generation, something tells me that they're going to be a bit more cut-throat this time around.
 

Bagu

Member
Welcome back, Thrak! (*slides shot of whiskey down the bar*)

Your comment on whether or not Epic will pretty much allow UE4 on the U is not very surprising at all. Honestly? I sometimes wonder if the competiton would go so far as to moneyhat Epic into boxxing-out Nintendo from UE4. Microsoft and Sony may act nonchalant as far as how severe a competitor they see Nintendo, but after what happened this past generation, something tells me that they're going to be a bit more cut-throat this time around.

NO way that would happen. No amount of money those two could throw would match the money Epic would make in licensing fees if the Wii U ran UE4
 

MDX

Member
Hey guys, I'm back!


It is worth noting, though, that even if the Wii U's CPU may be a bit disappointing to some, the HD consoles this generation (especially the PS3) went overboard with regard to their CPUs to the point where a lot of graphics work is offloaded to the CPU on many titles. A console with a modest boost in CPU power and a larger jump in GPU capabilities would make for a much more balanced machine.

Thanks for the analysis.
I would like to add this observation:
We really dont know yet what kind CPU will be in the final retail version of the WiiU.
Dev kits could have used modified 360 CPUs for all we know.

Also, I found it interesting that IBM was more forthcoming about their CPU than AMD was about their GPU during E3. Did that mean the CPU was ready before the GPU? Did it mean the CPU will have more of a significant role to play than normal? Or did it mean that Nintendo was more concerned about spilling info about the GPU than the CPU?
 
NO way that would happen. No amount of money those two could throw would match the money Epic would make in licensing fees if the Wii U ran UE4

So it would be in Epic's best interest if the thing ran UE4

Iwata: (laughs)

I don't think Nintendo cares so much for UE4 if they can get away with EU3 for this upcoming gen
 
UE4 support will tell us a lot more about Epic than it will about Nintendo. With UE3 and the Wii there was a good technical reason that it couldn't support the console: the Wii simply didn't haven the necessary feature-set (i.e. programmable shaders) that the engine was built around. The raw power of the console was of far less importance, Unreal Engine would be scalable enough to run on something as powerful as the Wii if it had a modern shader architecture.

This time round, no matter how big the power gap between Nintendo and the competition (a lot smaller than last time, anyway), there won't be any features the next XBox and PS4's GPUs will have that the Wii U's won't. They'll surely be faster, have more SPUs, etc. and will probably have more efficient tessellators, and so forth, but there won't be anything that the Wii U can't do, but slower. Any engine designed for those consoles will be able to run on Wii U, so long as the resolution/texture detail/effects, etc. are reduced appropriately. If UE4 isn't available on Wii U, it won't be because it's not technically capable of it, it'll be because Epic have made the decision that they don't want UE4 on Wii U.

The difficulty for Epic would be when someone like Crytek comes along with an engine that not only produces crazy-good graphics on the next XBox and Playstation, but can also scale down to Wii U as well, giving developers a lot more leeway to release their games on three platforms instead of UE4's two.

My personal guess is that Epic are playing the "we won't say what UE4 will run on" game to try to push Nintendo, MS and Sony into making their machines as powerful as possible. Being able to say to Nintendo "well, if you increased X spec by Y amount, we might be able to get UE4 working on it" is a good position for them to be in at the moment. Similarly, telling MS and Sony "If you make the console X times more powerful than Wii U then we'll be able to make UE4 XBox720/PS4 exclusive" can really prey on their desire to shut Nintendo out from the "mature" market again. Once the consoles are out, though, there's little reason for them to hold out, and they'll eventually announce Wii U support for the engine, although later than for the other two.

OK... but what's in it for EPIC? Surely they make more money getting as many licensees as possible... and covering more formats is one way to achieve this.


Additionally, porting from UE4 to UE3 is likely to be a LOT less hassle than it would be to take a current 360 or PS3 game and port it to Wii. Sure it's work but you won't have to completely chnage all your assets and art....
 

HylianTom

Banned
NO way that would happen. No amount of money those two could throw would match the money Epic would make in licensing fees if the Wii U ran UE4

That's what I was suspecting and trying to get a comparative measure on: money gained from moneyhat versus money gained from fees to Wii U developers.

Otherwise, with the strangely warm feelings for Nintendo that Rein has been expressing lately (really.. it still feels odd saying that), I have a hunch that they'll find a way to make UE4 work.

In which case, the next mystery will be regarding how Nintendo will convince developers..
 
Nintendo is going to be at the May 24-25 "Nordic Games - Pitch & Match" conference in Malmö, Sweden. They're there to seek out potential Wii U developers from Scandinavia.

"Nintendo is interested to meet with talented game development teams and explore publishing opportunities for original Nintendo 3DS and Wii U game proposals", says Tim Symons, Sales Planning & Strategy, Nintendo.

http://nordicgame.com/
 

Bagu

Member
Nintendo is going to be at the May 24-25 "Nordic Games - Pitch & Match" conference in Malmö, Sweden. They're there to seek out potential Wii U developers from Scandinavia.

"Nintendo is interested to meet with talented game development teams and explore publishing opportunities for original Nintendo 3DS and Wii U game proposals", says Tim Symons, Sales Planning & Strategy, Nintendo.

http://nordicgame.com/

Hopefully something good comes out of this.
 

Thraktor

Member
Welcome back, Thrak! (*slides shot of whiskey down the bar*)

Your comment on whether or not Epic will pretty much allow UE4 on the U is not very surprising at all. Honestly? I sometimes wonder if the competiton would go so far as to moneyhat Epic into boxxing-out Nintendo from UE4. Microsoft and Sony may act nonchalant as far as how severe a competitor they see Nintendo, but after what happened this past generation, something tells me that they're going to be a bit more cut-throat this time around.

Thanks, it's good to actually be able to post again (couldn't quite commit to going cold-turkey, so I was lurking a bit now and then). I'll be back in exile for another two months soon enough, though. At least I finish exams just before E3, so I'll be there popcorn in hand when everything goes down.

As far as moneyhatting Epic prevent UE4 appearing on Wii U, it would almost certainly be illegal. Moneyhatting an exclusive game or exclusive content is one thing, you're effectively paying for the development of the game or content, so you can say "this'll only be available on our platform", just as you would for first or second-party games you've funded. However paying for a third-party to not provide software or technology for one specific competing platform would almost certainly be considered an anti-trust violation, and if MS and Sony explicitly colluded to do so it would very definitely be considered as much.
 

Nibel

Member
The gameplay in Conker is quite terrible. Tons of tedium and annoyance packed in there, one of the worst Rare games on N64.

What in the flyiiiiiiiing fuck?
I assume you had no friends with which you played the game in split screen mode. This is the best Rare game for me, period. The dark toned humor alone is award worthy.

Have this been already posted?:

http://www.nintengen.com/2012/03/darksiders-2-interview-wii-u-is-pretty.html

Basically he says just the contrary than the other Vigil guy.

So we have a game director versus the art director.. this is getting annoying.


Now... this has not been discussed for a while although i know it was posted a while ago (earlier this year if i remember correctly).

http://www.linkedin.com/in/markatkinson99

What could this guy be doing at Nintendo knowing his technical background?

Well, there have been rumors of Nintendo teaming up with CryTek and this could be the guy that switched from there to Nintendo. I bet he helps to make some engines - CryEngine 3 is one of them - run on the Wii U hardware.
 

tkscz

Member
Really long quote

This is a good quote for those who know little about CPU architecture. Though most will look upon this in sadness, fearing the WiiU's CPU will suck, those who understand CPU architecture, will know how good this is. Remember a few things before taking this quote negatively.

1. 2-way SMT: Multi-threads can make a single core CPU, think like a duel core, and while originally they weren't that good, they've come a long way. Yes, the 360 has a tri-core 2-way SMT CPU, but it's 7 years old. The WiiU's is much newer, making it more efficient in the way it runs data.

2. cache: Like Thrak already said, WiiU has more cache than the 360, allowing for more efficient data processing. Now I would like to know if its 3MB L2 cache is 3MB per core, or 1MB per core and it adds up to 3MB (hoping for the former). But we also know that WiiU also will have the eDRAM in the CPU (I believe it can also be considered, or is the L3 cache), which is suppose to be way above the 360's, with most of us believing it's 32MBs of eDRAM. This will kill latency and probably help for better load times, and less pop-in.

3. OoOe: OoOe, was explained pretty damned well by Thrak, don't think I need to explain it anymore, just remember it.

4. Optimization: Optimizing a game specifically for the WiiU could show incredible results. Just look at Skyward Sword for the Wii, Uncharted 3 on the PS3, Gears 3 on the 360, Star Wars Rouge Squadron on the GC, Shadow of the Colossus on the PS2, Conker's live and reloaded for the Xbox, or hell Conker's bad fur day on the N64. These were games that pulled off results so amazing, you wouldn't think they were done with the console they're on. This is what good optimizing can do. It wasn't seen very well this gen, as most devs just said fuck it, and made it with a pre-made engine. But some devs, Crytek for example, optimized they're own engine so well, they pulled off what they themselves deemed impossible.
 

frostbyte

Member
Nintendo is going to be at the May 24-25 "Nordic Games - Pitch & Match" conference in Malmö, Sweden. They're there to seek out potential Wii U developers from Scandinavia.

"Nintendo is interested to meet with talented game development teams and explore publishing opportunities for original Nintendo 3DS and Wii U game proposals", says Tim Symons, Sales Planning & Strategy, Nintendo.

http://nordicgame.com/

Hmm...what notable game dev teams are based in Scandinavia?

Have this been already posted?:

http://www.nintengen.com/2012/03/darksiders-2-interview-wii-u-is-pretty.html

Basically he says just the contrary than the other Vigil guy.

wut? It's like every different director of Vigil is looking at a different version of Darksider II Wii U.

lol, might as well wait till E3 since these conflicting comments aren't giving us one bit of salient info.
 
Not being able to stream VC games to the Upad is something I'm pessimistically counting on. Even if it happens, it won't be until a future firmware update is my theory. I'm hoping I'm wrong because as an example, it'd be nuts if you could play NSMB Mii in bed but not Super Mario World, ya know? :/

Agreed. I know where you're coming from not counting on it, but it would be pretty stupid if it couldn't. Being able to play Castlevania Rebirth on the pad would be so nice.
 
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