AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
edited April 2011
I suppose it's very possible that Nintendo has a scheme to release a very, very minimal hardware upgrade. It wouldn't cost very much to do so, I reckon, but if that's their plan, I'm still very suspicious of its viability.
The draw of the Wii was based upon its low price and novel control technology. Like I said above, I question the demand in the casual-gamer market for a minor bump in specs. If this is what Nintendo plans on, the price point it has on release day is going to have to be remarkably low.
What you're missing here is that the Wii was already just that; an overclocking of an existing platform.
The Wii's tech is at its core from the late 90's. It's 2011.
The GCN was an extremely well designed system that Nintendo thought it could squeeze some more juice out of...so they did just that and released the most successful home console of all time.
I remember when we referred to the GCN as the Nintendo 65, due to its relatively unimpressive next-gen specs. Honestly, Nintendo has been on this same course for a while. Less aggressive hardware specs, less friendly to devs, hardware innovation that is more gimmicky than revolutionary, but selling hardware at a profit rather than a loss, poor games/console sales ratio, relying on first-party IP, and then flooding the platform with crummy third party shovelware. All of that can be said about the GCN and the Wii, and most of it can be said about the N64.
Also, the Wii and DS don't exactly compare. Unlike the Wii, the DS dominates from any perspective: critical, fan, business, casual, etc.
Also, the Wii and DS don't exactly compare. Unlike the Wii, the DS dominates from any perspective: critical, fan, business, casual, etc.
As well, Nintendo's handhelds have generally seen much better 3rd-party development because of that success.
Though, in my opinion, the Nintendo handhelds have much fewer developmental hurdles than the Wii. Even the DS' touch-screen approach generally just equates to d-pad mapping.
Less friendly to devs? GameCube developrs were actually able to take what they learned and apply it to the Wii, which was also fairly easy since the console uses OpenGL.
The last hard to developer for Nintendo console was the N64. Since then it's been the PS2 and the PS3 with the esoteric architectures.
Nintendo is not infallible by any means, but they are very conservative with their market strategies. As a rule, they don't release hardware if they're not positive it will be at least marginally profitable out of the gate, they don't make expensive gambles, and their current position in the console and handheld markets allows them reliable (if less-than-stratospheric) profits for some time.
This. Nintendo always leaves themselves an out when issuing new hardware. Their escape plan on the DS was the GBA port. Wii was the talk of an eventual "traditional controller shell" that they dropped when it took off like hotcakes (see also: the abandoned clip holes on the Classic Controller). 3DS is the ability for games to run in 2D mode without having to be 3D, which meant if it tanked they would run fine on a non-3D screen in an eventual successor.
On the data storage, the original Xbox did have a HD built in and the 360 does not, which was a fairly big step backwards in my opinion.
To be fair, that's not a design feature so much as a pricing feature. You need a HD to play, more or less, and I would be surprised if any game for the 360 in the past few years has been made that doesn't assume the player has a HD. MS just made it an "accessory" so that they could sell a version of the system for $300 at launch.
99% of 360 games are still made assuming you don't have a HDD. Heck, Bungie did some fantastic work optimizing Halo 3 for HDD users, and then had to back all of the code out for ODST and Reach because the new install feature doubled Halo 3's load times.
Now, some features don't work, like file share use or campaign co-op, but all games are still playable without a HDD unless you are FFXI
I'll make a prediction: Nintendo will announce a radically new style system (which will of course have taken cues from the Wii and other past successes) and claim it as a "third pillar" similar to their DS release. They are going to release a system that will sell along side the Wii.
Less friendly to devs? GameCube developrs were actually able to take what they learned and apply it to the Wii, which was also fairly easy since the console uses OpenGL.
The last hard to developer for Nintendo console was the N64. Since then it's been the PS2 and the PS3 with the esoteric architectures.
Yeah when the Wii first came out, every third-party dev was talking about how easy it was to code for, while they were all simultaneously stating how difficult the PS3 was. The reason third-parties stopped making games for the Wii is because third-party games that aren't mini-game shitfests don't sell on it.
Less friendly to devs? GameCube developrs were actually able to take what they learned and apply it to the Wii, which was also fairly easy since the console uses OpenGL.
The last hard to developer for Nintendo console was the N64. Since then it's been the PS2 and the PS3 with the esoteric architectures.
Yeah when the Wii first came out, every third-party dev was talking about how easy it was to code for, while they were all simultaneously stating how difficult the PS3 was. The reason third-parties stopped making games for the Wii is because third-party games that aren't mini-game shitfests don't sell on it.
You can lay the blame at the feet of the developers or Nintendo, but the point remains that a Wii port of a cross-platform title simply doesn't offer the same experience.
Now, the developers COULD decide to make their Wii ports a markedly difference experience (and thus justifying its existence on the Wii), but really if you're playing something like Madden 2011 on the Wii you're playing a lesser game than you could be.
Given my creepily accurate pre-ipad release predictions, I think I'll throw this out there as for what I expect out of the new nintendo system:
-more power than the PS3/360 (this seems like a given.)
-proper online marketplace support.
-proper online multiplayer support.
-proper HD support.
-3d support with appropriate hardware.
-motion control gamepad that is as practical for 'regular' gaming as a regular gaming controller.
-motion control gamepad that is as accurate as the best motion control... controllers? on the market today for motion controlled gaming.
-integration with a portable peripheral (this last because I'm in love with the idea of someone bringing back the dreamcast VMU during a time frame where I could actually experience it.)
Less friendly to devs? GameCube developrs were actually able to take what they learned and apply it to the Wii, which was also fairly easy since the console uses OpenGL.
The last hard to developer for Nintendo console was the N64. Since then it's been the PS2 and the PS3 with the esoteric architectures.
Yeah when the Wii first came out, every third-party dev was talking about how easy it was to code for, while they were all simultaneously stating how difficult the PS3 was. The reason third-parties stopped making games for the Wii is because third-party games that aren't mini-game shitfests don't sell on it.
You can lay the blame at the feet of the developers or Nintendo, but the point remains that a Wii port of a cross-platform title simply doesn't offer the same experience.
Now, the developers COULD decide to make their Wii ports a markedly difference experience (and thus justifying its existence on the Wii), but really if you're playing something like Madden 2011 on the Wii you're playing a lesser game than you could be.
Original third-party games don't sell any better. Madworld, Conduit, No More Heroes, etc
To be fair, that's not a design feature so much as a pricing feature. You need a HD to play, more or less, and I would be surprised if any game for the 360 in the past few years has been made that doesn't assume the player has a HD. MS just made it an "accessory" so that they could sell a version of the system for $300 at launch.
99% of 360 games are still made assuming you don't have a HDD. Heck, Bungie did some fantastic work optimizing Halo 3 for HDD users, and then had to back all of the code out for ODST and Reach because the new install feature doubled Halo 3's load times.
Now, some features don't work, like file share use or campaign co-op, but all games are still playable without a HDD unless you are FFXI
Hmm.
Do you know, offhand, what the functional differences are between the PS3 and 360 versions of the same game, given that every PS3 has a HDD? Or do developers ignore the PS3's HDD for the sake of ease of portability? Maybe a more reasonable comparison would be a 360-only game versus a PS3-only game?
The 360 and the PS3 are pretty comparable on paper with a slight edge to the PS3, and the games I've played have reflected this - the very best PS3 games look just a hair better, to me, than the very best 360 games. Basically, if there's a functional gain to be had from 360 games not being designed with a HDD in mind, I've not seen it.
As to the handheld market comparison, I think those are different beasts. The market saturation point for handhelds is much higher than consoles, because A) they're way cheaper, it makes sense for a family to have more than one, and C) they are more likely to be broken, lost or stolen. It makes sense to introduce incremental improvements in hardware, because in addition to the (appreciable) sales you'd get if you never changed anything (look at the original Gameboy), you also get the sales due to people upgrading. And backwards compatibility makes this tenable, because the end user never (or rarely) loses anything from upgrading.
None of that applies to consoles.
ElJeffe on
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Less friendly to devs? GameCube developrs were actually able to take what they learned and apply it to the Wii, which was also fairly easy since the console uses OpenGL.
The last hard to developer for Nintendo console was the N64. Since then it's been the PS2 and the PS3 with the esoteric architectures.
Yeah when the Wii first came out, every third-party dev was talking about how easy it was to code for, while they were all simultaneously stating how difficult the PS3 was. The reason third-parties stopped making games for the Wii is because third-party games that aren't mini-game shitfests don't sell on it.
You can lay the blame at the feet of the developers or Nintendo, but the point remains that a Wii port of a cross-platform title simply doesn't offer the same experience.
Now, the developers COULD decide to make their Wii ports a markedly difference experience (and thus justifying its existence on the Wii), but really if you're playing something like Madden 2011 on the Wii you're playing a lesser game than you could be.
Original third-party games don't sell any better. Madworld, Conduit, No More Heroes, etc
It's a circular argument though. Madworld was very far from being an essential game, and was a less accomplished spiritual sequel to Godhand, which had abysmal sales on a console with a far higher install base. The Conduit was breathtakingly pointless and generic, and was the first game from a totally unknown (and honestly not very exciting) studio. No More Heroes was Grasshopper's best selling game ever, a company whose original IPs frequently sell in the thousands (remember Michigan: Report from Hell? Flower, Sun, Rain? Hell, even Killer 7?).
They are not top-tier stuff - they are the stuff that barely eked out a living on PS2. But the circular part is that 3rd-party Wii stuff won't see better sales until the quality rises and more resources are invested - and publishers aren't willing to invest resources and raise the quality until sales increase. The situation as it stands is that publishers are choosing what they see as the less-risky option (develop for 360, PS3 and PC), which requires a far higher initial investment than Wii development, but spreads the risk out enough that colossal failures are less likely (if you don't count the dozens and dozens of developers that have gone out of business recently following such failures). It's all a mess.
It would require display technology that, well, doesn't currently exist.
Well, glasses-free 3D does already exist; I think Samsung (or Toshiba) has already shown one at one of the various expos. However, the biggest model is something like 21", costs about $2,000, and has a terrible viewing range.
It would require display technology that, well, doesn't currently exist.
Well, glasses-free 3D does already exist; I think Samsung (or Toshiba) has already shown one at one of the various expos. However, the biggest model is something like 21", costs about $2,000, and has a terrible viewing range.
Yeah, they're kind of dependent on the TV makers for that. They could ship built-in 3D capability with the console that can output in any format (3D TV shutter, 3D TV polarized, regular ol' red/blue glasses, etc) without the developers having to worry about the actual final implementation that the person is using.
Then when we figure out glassless 3D TVs with wide viewing angles, Nintendo's already good to go with compatibility.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
It would require display technology that, well, doesn't currently exist.
Well, glasses-free 3D does already exist; I think Samsung (or Toshiba) has already shown one at one of the various expos. However, the biggest model is something like 21", costs about $2,000, and has a terrible viewing range.
Yeah, they're kind of dependent on the TV makers for that. They could ship built-in 3D capability with the console that can output in any format (3D TV shutter, 3D TV polarized, regular ol' red/blue glasses, etc) without the developers having to worry about the actual final implementation that the person is using.
Then when we figure out glassless 3D TVs with wide viewing angles, Nintendo's already good to go with compatibility.
Except, like I pointed out earlier, Sony has already had this technology in place for a year now. Nintendo is going to have to pull out something amazing (and frankly, I can't think of what that might be) to really offer a new level of novelty to the market.
Maybe the 3DS will be the controllers for the new system? Or something along those lines?
Sony's technology only works by creating two separate executables on the blu-ray disc, requiring developers to re-write the wheel on both platforms (360 Black Ops and PS3 black ops both implement 3D in a different way, even though they're both doing it via HDMI). Developers are involved in the whole vertical toolchain.
What Nintendo could do is what they're doing on 3DS, where 3D comes "for free" as a natural part of the system's middleware/hardware. All they have to do is decide the distance between the two cameras in-game and they're done on that front. It'd give much wider support for the feature if developers could get it for "free" in hardware terms than having to go out of their way to implement it like on 360 and PS3.
It wouldn't be a main selling point of the console, but they could be the first ones on the home console front to have widespread support for the feature.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
edited April 2011
Nintendo also reported today that the opening US sales for the 3DS fell a bit short of their projections; 3.4 million units sold vs 4 million units projected.
As well, some curiously deflated statements were made by Nintendo president Satoru Iwata recently:
"I now regret that we didn't tie up with someone outside the company to market the Wii. If we had done that, the fate of the Wii might have been different," Iwata said.
"Now I am aware that we should not rely too much on ourselves. You will see what I mean by this when we market the 3DS and the Wii in the future."
Two concurrences that lead me to ask another question: does the market really want the 3DS?
To be fair, that's not a design feature so much as a pricing feature. You need a HD to play, more or less, and I would be surprised if any game for the 360 in the past few years has been made that doesn't assume the player has a HD. MS just made it an "accessory" so that they could sell a version of the system for $300 at launch.
99% of 360 games are still made assuming you don't have a HDD. Heck, Bungie did some fantastic work optimizing Halo 3 for HDD users, and then had to back all of the code out for ODST and Reach because the new install feature doubled Halo 3's load times.
Now, some features don't work, like file share use or campaign co-op, but all games are still playable without a HDD unless you are FFXI
Hmm.
Do you know, offhand, what the functional differences are between the PS3 and 360 versions of the same game, given that every PS3 has a HDD? Or do developers ignore the PS3's HDD for the sake of ease of portability? Maybe a more reasonable comparison would be a 360-only game versus a PS3-only game?
The 360 and the PS3 are pretty comparable on paper with a slight edge to the PS3, and the games I've played have reflected this - the very best PS3 games look just a hair better, to me, than the very best 360 games. Basically, if there's a functional gain to be had from 360 games not being designed with a HDD in mind, I've not seen it.
The functional gain is that they don't have to put an asterisk on the cover that says "Requires hard drive" when the folks who have the base 360 may not even realize what they are missing. Imagine being a kid and getting a game from your grandparents for Chirstmas, only to find you can't play it because your system isn't compatible for a reason that neither you nor they understand.
Microsoft was very dodgy about this a few years back, with fun quotes like "All games will work on every 360. Some games need a hard drive to experience them, just like you need a memory unit to save games." In the end it comes down to not wanting to split the market. They still sell 360's without a hard drive, it's one of only two "current" 360 SKUs. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the sales ratio of the different 360 models.
This does impact development, as you can only count on bulk storage on PS3 and PC. Most developers need to cast the widest net they can, in terms of market size - thus you see the holding back of features to fit the lowest common denominator. The most egregious limitation is the 360 with the lack of a hard drive. Lack of system/video memory is likely the next one. Get past those and it's back to just us PC folks being annoyed at the classics: too few buttons, unimplemented keymapping, UIs designed solely for people sitting far away from a low-res display, and poor understanding of precision pointing/selection schemes.
Well, that and have all these awesome graphics cards that don't get a workout very often, but I can understand the attitude of "good enough" when looking at today's console graphics on TVs
To be fair, that's not a design feature so much as a pricing feature. You need a HD to play, more or less, and I would be surprised if any game for the 360 in the past few years has been made that doesn't assume the player has a HD. MS just made it an "accessory" so that they could sell a version of the system for $300 at launch.
99% of 360 games are still made assuming you don't have a HDD. Heck, Bungie did some fantastic work optimizing Halo 3 for HDD users, and then had to back all of the code out for ODST and Reach because the new install feature doubled Halo 3's load times.
Now, some features don't work, like file share use or campaign co-op, but all games are still playable without a HDD unless you are FFXI
Hmm.
Do you know, offhand, what the functional differences are between the PS3 and 360 versions of the same game, given that every PS3 has a HDD? Or do developers ignore the PS3's HDD for the sake of ease of portability? Maybe a more reasonable comparison would be a 360-only game versus a PS3-only game?
The 360 and the PS3 are pretty comparable on paper with a slight edge to the PS3, and the games I've played have reflected this - the very best PS3 games look just a hair better, to me, than the very best 360 games. Basically, if there's a functional gain to be had from 360 games not being designed with a HDD in mind, I've not seen it.
The functional gain is that they don't have to put an asterisk on the cover that says "Requires hard drive" when the folks who have the base 360 may not even realize what they are missing. Imagine being a kid and getting a game from your grandparents for Chirstmas, only to find you can't play it because your system isn't compatible for a reason that neither you nor they understand.
Microsoft was very dodgy about this a few years back, with fun quotes like "All games will work on every 360. Some games need a hard drive to experience them, just like you need a memory unit to save games." In the end it comes down to not wanting to split the market. They still sell 360's without a hard drive, it's one of only two "current" 360 SKUs. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the sales ratio of the different 360 models.
This does impact development, as you can only count on bulk storage on PS3 and PC. Most developers need to cast the widest net they can, in terms of market size - thus you see the holding back of features to fit the lowest common denominator. The most egregious limitation is the 360 with the lack of a hard drive. Lack of system/video memory is likely the next one. Get past those and it's back to just us PC folks being annoyed at the classics: too few buttons, unimplemented keymapping, UIs designed solely for people sitting far away from a low-res display, and poor understanding of precision pointing/selection schemes.
That's not really what I meant by "functional difference". All of what you said is true in theory. What I'm wondering about are the practical upshots of the 360's lack of HDD. I know that when I play a PS3 game for the first time, I get to sit there for 10-30 minutes while it installs itself. Which isn't a huge deal, I suppose, but I've yet to see any appreciable difference between a PS3 game and a 360 game. I haven't noticed super-fast load times on the PS3, I haven't noticed appreciably better graphics. I look at the PS3 exclusive games, like MGS4 and Ratchet & Clank and God of War 3, and they're all nice looking (okay, honestly I thought MGS4 was fairly bland looking), but they aren't much better looking then the nicest 360 games - the Gears of Wars, the Mass Effects, the Ninja Gaiden IIs.
So yeah, on paper, the lack of a guaranteed HDD on every 360 sounds like a major issue. But in practice, what am I losing as a 360 gamer? And really, what proportion of 360 owners don't actually have a HDD, given that you can buy one separately if you please? I mean, to play any game you either need a $100 HDD or a $50 memory card. If 98% of 360 owners have HDD, for example, I, as a developer, would probably just assume that figure was 100% and craft my game to take advantage of it.
That's what I'm getting at. In the real world, in games as they actually exist today, what is the lack of a guaranteed HDD doing to the state of 360 games?
ElJeffe on
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Plus, as the comic clearly pokes fun at, most of the titles being hyped are just ports of 15-year-old N64 games.
I mean, I have my old N64 somewhere, and I have the OoT disc that plays on the GCN (and by extention, the Wii). I really don't need another way to play that particular game. The GBA's line of direct 8-bit ports of classic titles was fun, but those are exactly the kind of games that lend themselves to portable gaming; simple, quick to master, able to be beaten in a relatively timely manner.
What's the draw with OoT or Mario64 on a handheld device other than dragging it around with you? If I gotta play those games, I certainly can wait to do it at home on my 57" screen and normal controller.
The big reason the PS3 does the install (and the big reason it needs a HD) is that BlueRays afaik don't load from the disk as fast (though they store more, obviously) and thus they need to install shit to the HD to be able to load game data fast enough.
That's not really what I meant by "functional difference". All of what you said is true in theory. What I'm wondering about are the practical upshots of the 360's lack of HDD. I know that when I play a PS3 game for the first time, I get to sit there for 10-30 minutes while it installs itself. Which isn't a huge deal, I suppose, but I've yet to see any appreciable difference between a PS3 game and a 360 game. I haven't noticed super-fast load times on the PS3, I haven't noticed appreciably better graphics. I look at the PS3 exclusive games, like MGS4 and Ratchet & Clank and God of War 3, and they're all nice looking (okay, honestly I thought MGS4 was fairly bland looking), but they aren't much better looking then the nicest 360 games - the Gears of Wars, the Mass Effects, the Ninja Gaiden IIs.
So yeah, on paper, the lack of a guaranteed HDD on every 360 sounds like a major issue. But in practice, what am I losing as a 360 gamer? And really, what proportion of 360 owners don't actually have a HDD, given that you can buy one separately if you please? I mean, to play any game you either need a $100 HDD or a $50 memory card. If 98% of 360 owners have HDD, for example, I, as a developer, would probably just assume that figure was 100% and craft my game to take advantage of it.
That's what I'm getting at. In the real world, in games as they actually exist today, what is the lack of a guaranteed HDD doing to the state of 360 games?
You won't notice a huge difference for a lot of games (even with an install option) between 360 and PS3 because the game has been designed and optimized for the situation where there is no HDD. The install just places some of the game content on the HDD, where it could possibly load faster. Very little time would be spent figuring out how to take advantage of that extra speed, because it wouldn't apply across the board, so the game gets designed with the optical drive in mind and at the end of the day, you don't see much of an advantage.
If you can count on a HDD, you can compress the data on the game disc, and install the data to the HDD. You end up with more space for say, textures and sounds then you have today. Think about the the oft-maligned area and texture reuse in Dragon Age II - more space means more varied texture sets, and potentially more areas. Obviously DRAM size is going to impact this as well, but the performance gain of a HDD is less important than the art storage size gain, especially with Microsoft's wonderful multi-disc license policy...
Two of the big reasons the Uncharted 2 developers cited for PS3 exclusivity were storage related: BD capacity and guaranteed HDD. Of course, there may have been money-hat related shenanigans as well. As stated upthread, Halo:Reach has some features unavailable without a HDD, and Bungie had to scale things back for ODST and Reach to avoid a full-on HDD requirement for the whole thing.
The only info I can find about the relative rates put it 3:1 in favor of HDD models, but that doesn't include anyone who added a HDD after buying the other version. It's also a year or two old so it may very well have skewed more since then. That's still a not-insignificant chunk of the market.
In any case, I hope the Wii2 has either a hard drive, or the ability to use a large SD/CF card (purchased separately, and look for the Nintendo Seal of Quality*) for storage of game install data.
Part of the reason we don't see functional differences could be because most developers develop for the 360 and port to the PS3. That just makes business sense.
Although I understood the non-HDD 360 to be just a marketing ploy initially, so they they could claim a lower launch price.
Nope. It was because the hard drives are fucking expensive compared to all the components on the console.
As I said before, the #1 reason for the HDD on the OXbox was to overcome the slow DVD drive tech by letting games install core data as the game booted up and then only consult the disc sparingly during play, which is why you still need a HDD on the 360 even with a faster DVD drive, because the game still expects HDD seek times during use. It was also the reason why Nintendo went with smaller CAV DVDs, load times.
Even now the main reason for HDD use is disc latency. It's still leagues ahead of a DVD disc, but it's even worse from a Blu-Ray drive in a PS3 than it is to seek data from a 360 DVD. A 360 can read data twice as fast from a game disc than a PS3 can from a game disc.
I wrote a giant explanatory post on this somewhere on the forums a long time ago but I can't find it with the googles, so here's the short version:
PS3 is a 2x Blu Ray. Sony's next console will more than likely be >6x on it's drive, negating the need to include a hard drive on every console.
I think all 3 next gen consoles are going to support standard SATA drives being plugged into them somewhere, though.
If you can count on a HDD, you can compress the data on the game disc, and install the data to the HDD. You end up with more space for say, textures and sounds then you have today. Think about the the oft-maligned area and texture reuse in Dragon Age II - more space means more varied texture sets, and potentially more areas. Obviously DRAM size is going to impact this as well, but the performance gain of a HDD is less important than the art storage size gain, especially with Microsoft's wonderful multi-disc license policy...
Well, yes, I know all this. I know what the HDD gets you, in theory. But theory is only as good as what it buys you in practice. If the PS3 is 20x more powerful than the 360 (for the sake of argument), but the games look, feel, and play exactly the same, then that 20x is pretty irrelevant.
Two of the big reasons the Uncharted 2 developers cited for PS3 exclusivity were storage related: BD capacity and guaranteed HDD. Of course, there may have been money-hat related shenanigans as well. As stated upthread, Halo:Reach has some features unavailable without a HDD, and Bungie had to scale things back for ODST and Reach to avoid a full-on HDD requirement for the whole thing.
Okay, that's fine and all. And U2 was a pretty game. Ditto God of War 3, and a few other exclusives. But still, the graphics weren't really better than the best of the 360 games, and the overall game experience was not above what can be found on the 360 in any real tangible fashion.
I'm not saying that an onboard HDD isn't nice, or that, as a developer, I wouldn't prefer to have one over not having one. I just think that when push comes to shove, the difference between having one and only possibly having one doesn't translate to much when it comes to the actual gameplay experience for the user.
ElJeffe on
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Okay, that's fine and all. And U2 was a pretty game. Ditto God of War 3, and a few other exclusives. But still, the graphics weren't really better than the best of the 360 games, and the overall game experience was not above what can be found on the 360 in any real tangible fashion.
I'm not saying that an onboard HDD isn't nice, or that, as a developer, I wouldn't prefer to have one over not having one. I just think that when push comes to shove, the difference between having one and only possibly having one doesn't translate to much when it comes to the actual gameplay experience for the user.
There's a lot more to games than just the graphics, as I know you're aware. I get what you're saying - that graphics quality isn't governed by bulk storage since texture resolution is currently limited by the amount of gpu/system ram. I'm trying to make the point that we don't have games designed to use the HDD as a large storage device because it's less effective from a development standpoint to spend resources on something you can't count on. If you only have enough room for the texture sets for three environments on one platform, you probably aren't going to bother designing a fourth environment that's only available the other platform.
You are asking for examples of multi-platform games that show the advantage of a HDD, and I'm saying we don't have many such examples because it's a waste to use the HDD as anything but cache as they aren't reliably available.
Wouldn't the most logical reason that Uncharted 2 is exclusive to the PS3 be that, well golly, Sony owns Naughty Dog, the developers of the game?
Yeah - hence the "money hat" comment. I was just struggling trying to find info about PS3 exclusives regarding anything besides money-hats, and pretty much failing.
Question: How much of the 3DS' price is influenced by the 3D functions? My main objection to the 3DS is that I don't want to pay extra for a feature that I'm not going to use; if it turns out that the 3D contributes very little to the overall cost then I may possibly consider getting it in time to buy the Mega Man Legends 3 Prototype.
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Irond WillWARNING: NO HURTFUL COMMENTS, PLEASE!!!!!Cambridge. MAModeratormod
Question: How much of the 3DS' price is influenced by the 3D functions? My main objection to the 3DS is that I don't want to pay extra for a feature that I'm not going to use; if it turns out that the 3D contributes very little to the overall cost then I may possibly consider getting it in time to buy the Mega Man Legends 3 Prototype.
you can't split out the cost of something as fundamental to the device as the 3D aspect
it would be like asking how expensive the extra screen is on the DS. You can't really model the cost of a DS that was engineered to play without the second screen, since the cost includes the R&D, the increased processor & GPU requirements, the cost of developing software to a new architecture, the cost of the case and housing, the cost of the extra LCD, etc.
Well, I was asking more generally for any PS3 game that showed a significant advantage to having a HDD. Yes, yes, I know there's more to a game than graphical fidelity. There's variety of graphics, variety of gameplay, seamlessness of transition between different areas, and so on. And my point was that, for whatever reason, the HDD in the PS3 doesn't seem to have translated into any of this stuff. Even the first(ish)-party games for the PS3, which seem like they would be the ones most likely to show off the PS3's unique strengths, are not markedly better in any capacity than the HDD-less 360. Load times aren't shorter, graphics aren't much better, they don't tend to be longer, they don't tend to have a wider variety of textures or graphics.
I think a major reason for this, which I've hinted at elsewhere, is that time and money are much more limiting than system power or storage space. Having twice as much storage because you can unzip stuff ahead of time to the HDD is awesome, but the extra content doesn't magically create itself. If you can now have twice as many textures, you still have to make all those textures, and that takes twice as much time. If you can have twice as many levels, that's twice as much stuff to build and then test afterward. If you can have twice as much voice work, that's twice as much money paid to the voice actors and twice as much time spent by the writers.
My suspicion is that, in practice, having a HDD doesn't provide a substantial benefit as far as the games are concerned, not because all that storage space is useless, but because actually taking advantage of it requires more time than is really profitable as far as the producers are concerned. I think the value of the HDD is really in things like downloading demos and DLC and more passive functions like those.
Also, this speaks to why I think game graphics have plateaued, at least for awhile. Because I think games have reached the point where making anything really dramatically prettier or more sprawling or more detailed isn't just a matter of pushing more polys or utilizing more material channels. We have all the fancy tricks, now it's just a matter of inputting raw time. And time is freaking expensive.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Question: How much of the 3DS' price is influenced by the 3D functions? My main objection to the 3DS is that I don't want to pay extra for a feature that I'm not going to use; if it turns out that the 3D contributes very little to the overall cost then I may possibly consider getting it in time to buy the Mega Man Legends 3 Prototype.
you can't split out the cost of something as fundamental to the device as the 3D aspect
it would be like asking how expensive the extra screen is on the DS. You can't really model the cost of a DS that was engineered to play without the second screen, since the cost includes the R&D, the increased processor & GPU requirements, the cost of developing software to a new architecture, the cost of the case and housing, the cost of the extra LCD, etc.
I'd have to see to be sure, but I question how inherent to the process the 3D actually is for most titles. OoT3D is still OoT, n'est ce pas?
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The draw of the Wii was based upon its low price and novel control technology. Like I said above, I question the demand in the casual-gamer market for a minor bump in specs. If this is what Nintendo plans on, the price point it has on release day is going to have to be remarkably low.
Also, the Wii and DS don't exactly compare. Unlike the Wii, the DS dominates from any perspective: critical, fan, business, casual, etc.
As well, Nintendo's handhelds have generally seen much better 3rd-party development because of that success.
Though, in my opinion, the Nintendo handhelds have much fewer developmental hurdles than the Wii. Even the DS' touch-screen approach generally just equates to d-pad mapping.
The last hard to developer for Nintendo console was the N64. Since then it's been the PS2 and the PS3 with the esoteric architectures.
This. Nintendo always leaves themselves an out when issuing new hardware. Their escape plan on the DS was the GBA port. Wii was the talk of an eventual "traditional controller shell" that they dropped when it took off like hotcakes (see also: the abandoned clip holes on the Classic Controller). 3DS is the ability for games to run in 2D mode without having to be 3D, which meant if it tanked they would run fine on a non-3D screen in an eventual successor.
Yeah when the Wii first came out, every third-party dev was talking about how easy it was to code for, while they were all simultaneously stating how difficult the PS3 was. The reason third-parties stopped making games for the Wii is because third-party games that aren't mini-game shitfests don't sell on it.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
You can lay the blame at the feet of the developers or Nintendo, but the point remains that a Wii port of a cross-platform title simply doesn't offer the same experience.
Now, the developers COULD decide to make their Wii ports a markedly difference experience (and thus justifying its existence on the Wii), but really if you're playing something like Madden 2011 on the Wii you're playing a lesser game than you could be.
-more power than the PS3/360 (this seems like a given.)
-proper online marketplace support.
-proper online multiplayer support.
-proper HD support.
-3d support with appropriate hardware.
-motion control gamepad that is as practical for 'regular' gaming as a regular gaming controller.
-motion control gamepad that is as accurate as the best motion control... controllers? on the market today for motion controlled gaming.
-integration with a portable peripheral (this last because I'm in love with the idea of someone bringing back the dreamcast VMU during a time frame where I could actually experience it.)
Hmmmm. Yep, that tickles my happy spots.
*waves hands*
Go forth, Nintendo! Build!
Original third-party games don't sell any better. Madworld, Conduit, No More Heroes, etc
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
Hmm.
Do you know, offhand, what the functional differences are between the PS3 and 360 versions of the same game, given that every PS3 has a HDD? Or do developers ignore the PS3's HDD for the sake of ease of portability? Maybe a more reasonable comparison would be a 360-only game versus a PS3-only game?
The 360 and the PS3 are pretty comparable on paper with a slight edge to the PS3, and the games I've played have reflected this - the very best PS3 games look just a hair better, to me, than the very best 360 games. Basically, if there's a functional gain to be had from 360 games not being designed with a HDD in mind, I've not seen it.
As to the handheld market comparison, I think those are different beasts. The market saturation point for handhelds is much higher than consoles, because A) they're way cheaper,
None of that applies to consoles.
It's a circular argument though. Madworld was very far from being an essential game, and was a less accomplished spiritual sequel to Godhand, which had abysmal sales on a console with a far higher install base. The Conduit was breathtakingly pointless and generic, and was the first game from a totally unknown (and honestly not very exciting) studio. No More Heroes was Grasshopper's best selling game ever, a company whose original IPs frequently sell in the thousands (remember Michigan: Report from Hell? Flower, Sun, Rain? Hell, even Killer 7?).
They are not top-tier stuff - they are the stuff that barely eked out a living on PS2. But the circular part is that 3rd-party Wii stuff won't see better sales until the quality rises and more resources are invested - and publishers aren't willing to invest resources and raise the quality until sales increase. The situation as it stands is that publishers are choosing what they see as the less-risky option (develop for 360, PS3 and PC), which requires a far higher initial investment than Wii development, but spreads the risk out enough that colossal failures are less likely (if you don't count the dozens and dozens of developers that have gone out of business recently following such failures). It's all a mess.
Who the heck did that? The GCN was a lovely spec for the time.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
That would just break Sony.
Wii 2: Holographics yo!
Well, glasses-free 3D does already exist; I think Samsung (or Toshiba) has already shown one at one of the various expos. However, the biggest model is something like 21", costs about $2,000, and has a terrible viewing range.
Yeah, they're kind of dependent on the TV makers for that. They could ship built-in 3D capability with the console that can output in any format (3D TV shutter, 3D TV polarized, regular ol' red/blue glasses, etc) without the developers having to worry about the actual final implementation that the person is using.
Then when we figure out glassless 3D TVs with wide viewing angles, Nintendo's already good to go with compatibility.
Except, like I pointed out earlier, Sony has already had this technology in place for a year now. Nintendo is going to have to pull out something amazing (and frankly, I can't think of what that might be) to really offer a new level of novelty to the market.
Maybe the 3DS will be the controllers for the new system? Or something along those lines?
What Nintendo could do is what they're doing on 3DS, where 3D comes "for free" as a natural part of the system's middleware/hardware. All they have to do is decide the distance between the two cameras in-game and they're done on that front. It'd give much wider support for the feature if developers could get it for "free" in hardware terms than having to go out of their way to implement it like on 360 and PS3.
It wouldn't be a main selling point of the console, but they could be the first ones on the home console front to have widespread support for the feature.
As well, some curiously deflated statements were made by Nintendo president Satoru Iwata recently:
Two concurrences that lead me to ask another question: does the market really want the 3DS?
The functional gain is that they don't have to put an asterisk on the cover that says "Requires hard drive" when the folks who have the base 360 may not even realize what they are missing. Imagine being a kid and getting a game from your grandparents for Chirstmas, only to find you can't play it because your system isn't compatible for a reason that neither you nor they understand.
Microsoft was very dodgy about this a few years back, with fun quotes like "All games will work on every 360. Some games need a hard drive to experience them, just like you need a memory unit to save games." In the end it comes down to not wanting to split the market. They still sell 360's without a hard drive, it's one of only two "current" 360 SKUs. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the sales ratio of the different 360 models.
This does impact development, as you can only count on bulk storage on PS3 and PC. Most developers need to cast the widest net they can, in terms of market size - thus you see the holding back of features to fit the lowest common denominator. The most egregious limitation is the 360 with the lack of a hard drive. Lack of system/video memory is likely the next one. Get past those and it's back to just us PC folks being annoyed at the classics: too few buttons, unimplemented keymapping, UIs designed solely for people sitting far away from a low-res display, and poor understanding of precision pointing/selection schemes.
Well, that and have all these awesome graphics cards that don't get a workout very often, but I can understand the attitude of "good enough" when looking at today's console graphics on TVs
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=301
That's not really what I meant by "functional difference". All of what you said is true in theory. What I'm wondering about are the practical upshots of the 360's lack of HDD. I know that when I play a PS3 game for the first time, I get to sit there for 10-30 minutes while it installs itself. Which isn't a huge deal, I suppose, but I've yet to see any appreciable difference between a PS3 game and a 360 game. I haven't noticed super-fast load times on the PS3, I haven't noticed appreciably better graphics. I look at the PS3 exclusive games, like MGS4 and Ratchet & Clank and God of War 3, and they're all nice looking (okay, honestly I thought MGS4 was fairly bland looking), but they aren't much better looking then the nicest 360 games - the Gears of Wars, the Mass Effects, the Ninja Gaiden IIs.
So yeah, on paper, the lack of a guaranteed HDD on every 360 sounds like a major issue. But in practice, what am I losing as a 360 gamer? And really, what proportion of 360 owners don't actually have a HDD, given that you can buy one separately if you please? I mean, to play any game you either need a $100 HDD or a $50 memory card. If 98% of 360 owners have HDD, for example, I, as a developer, would probably just assume that figure was 100% and craft my game to take advantage of it.
That's what I'm getting at. In the real world, in games as they actually exist today, what is the lack of a guaranteed HDD doing to the state of 360 games?
Exactly.
Plus, as the comic clearly pokes fun at, most of the titles being hyped are just ports of 15-year-old N64 games.
I mean, I have my old N64 somewhere, and I have the OoT disc that plays on the GCN (and by extention, the Wii). I really don't need another way to play that particular game. The GBA's line of direct 8-bit ports of classic titles was fun, but those are exactly the kind of games that lend themselves to portable gaming; simple, quick to master, able to be beaten in a relatively timely manner.
What's the draw with OoT or Mario64 on a handheld device other than dragging it around with you? If I gotta play those games, I certainly can wait to do it at home on my 57" screen and normal controller.
The big reason the PS3 does the install (and the big reason it needs a HD) is that BlueRays afaik don't load from the disk as fast (though they store more, obviously) and thus they need to install shit to the HD to be able to load game data fast enough.
You won't notice a huge difference for a lot of games (even with an install option) between 360 and PS3 because the game has been designed and optimized for the situation where there is no HDD. The install just places some of the game content on the HDD, where it could possibly load faster. Very little time would be spent figuring out how to take advantage of that extra speed, because it wouldn't apply across the board, so the game gets designed with the optical drive in mind and at the end of the day, you don't see much of an advantage.
If you can count on a HDD, you can compress the data on the game disc, and install the data to the HDD. You end up with more space for say, textures and sounds then you have today. Think about the the oft-maligned area and texture reuse in Dragon Age II - more space means more varied texture sets, and potentially more areas. Obviously DRAM size is going to impact this as well, but the performance gain of a HDD is less important than the art storage size gain, especially with Microsoft's wonderful multi-disc license policy...
Two of the big reasons the Uncharted 2 developers cited for PS3 exclusivity were storage related: BD capacity and guaranteed HDD. Of course, there may have been money-hat related shenanigans as well. As stated upthread, Halo:Reach has some features unavailable without a HDD, and Bungie had to scale things back for ODST and Reach to avoid a full-on HDD requirement for the whole thing.
The only info I can find about the relative rates put it 3:1 in favor of HDD models, but that doesn't include anyone who added a HDD after buying the other version. It's also a year or two old so it may very well have skewed more since then. That's still a not-insignificant chunk of the market.
In any case, I hope the Wii2 has either a hard drive, or the ability to use a large SD/CF card (purchased separately, and look for the Nintendo Seal of Quality*) for storage of game install data.
Although I understood the non-HDD 360 to be just a marketing ploy initially, so they they could claim a lower launch price.
As I said before, the #1 reason for the HDD on the OXbox was to overcome the slow DVD drive tech by letting games install core data as the game booted up and then only consult the disc sparingly during play, which is why you still need a HDD on the 360 even with a faster DVD drive, because the game still expects HDD seek times during use. It was also the reason why Nintendo went with smaller CAV DVDs, load times.
Even now the main reason for HDD use is disc latency. It's still leagues ahead of a DVD disc, but it's even worse from a Blu-Ray drive in a PS3 than it is to seek data from a 360 DVD. A 360 can read data twice as fast from a game disc than a PS3 can from a game disc.
I wrote a giant explanatory post on this somewhere on the forums a long time ago but I can't find it with the googles, so here's the short version:
PS3 is a 2x Blu Ray. Sony's next console will more than likely be >6x on it's drive, negating the need to include a hard drive on every console.
I think all 3 next gen consoles are going to support standard SATA drives being plugged into them somewhere, though.
Microsoft and Sony, eager to replicate the success, might also include pack-in games in their next console. Plausible?
Well, yes, I know all this. I know what the HDD gets you, in theory. But theory is only as good as what it buys you in practice. If the PS3 is 20x more powerful than the 360 (for the sake of argument), but the games look, feel, and play exactly the same, then that 20x is pretty irrelevant.
Okay, that's fine and all. And U2 was a pretty game. Ditto God of War 3, and a few other exclusives. But still, the graphics weren't really better than the best of the 360 games, and the overall game experience was not above what can be found on the 360 in any real tangible fashion.
I'm not saying that an onboard HDD isn't nice, or that, as a developer, I wouldn't prefer to have one over not having one. I just think that when push comes to shove, the difference between having one and only possibly having one doesn't translate to much when it comes to the actual gameplay experience for the user.
You are asking for examples of multi-platform games that show the advantage of a HDD, and I'm saying we don't have many such examples because it's a waste to use the HDD as anything but cache as they aren't reliably available.
Yeah - hence the "money hat" comment. I was just struggling trying to find info about PS3 exclusives regarding anything besides money-hats, and pretty much failing.
you can't split out the cost of something as fundamental to the device as the 3D aspect
it would be like asking how expensive the extra screen is on the DS. You can't really model the cost of a DS that was engineered to play without the second screen, since the cost includes the R&D, the increased processor & GPU requirements, the cost of developing software to a new architecture, the cost of the case and housing, the cost of the extra LCD, etc.
I think a major reason for this, which I've hinted at elsewhere, is that time and money are much more limiting than system power or storage space. Having twice as much storage because you can unzip stuff ahead of time to the HDD is awesome, but the extra content doesn't magically create itself. If you can now have twice as many textures, you still have to make all those textures, and that takes twice as much time. If you can have twice as many levels, that's twice as much stuff to build and then test afterward. If you can have twice as much voice work, that's twice as much money paid to the voice actors and twice as much time spent by the writers.
My suspicion is that, in practice, having a HDD doesn't provide a substantial benefit as far as the games are concerned, not because all that storage space is useless, but because actually taking advantage of it requires more time than is really profitable as far as the producers are concerned. I think the value of the HDD is really in things like downloading demos and DLC and more passive functions like those.
Also, this speaks to why I think game graphics have plateaued, at least for awhile. Because I think games have reached the point where making anything really dramatically prettier or more sprawling or more detailed isn't just a matter of pushing more polys or utilizing more material channels. We have all the fancy tricks, now it's just a matter of inputting raw time. And time is freaking expensive.
I'd have to see to be sure, but I question how inherent to the process the 3D actually is for most titles. OoT3D is still OoT, n'est ce pas?