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The Power of Wii: A Discussion
Ronen
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
deadonthestreet wrote: »There are plenty of reasons why the Wii can't do that. The sooner you accept this the happier you'll be.
I like the Wii and want it to succeed, but... yeah. The detail in the textures and the crispness of the graphics would be impossible to replicate on the Nintendo Wii. The game itself could work... it just wouldn't look this good. The backgrounds wouldn't "pop" the way they do in that clip and the characters would be made of simple gouraud-shaded polygons, rather than yarn and stuffing.
This thread is a discussion of the perceived lack of power in the Wii. The purpose is not to disprove its relative power; it is widely known that the Wii is not designed to pump out the graphics that the 360 and PS3 do.
What bothers me about the quotes above is the perceived notion that because the Wii isn't as powerful, there's no way it could produce a side-scrolling game as pretty as LittleBigPlanet (HD aside).
I acknowledge that a higher resolution results in a sharper picture, there is no denying that. However, I believe that if developers put their minds and resources to it (and that's a big if) they could easily produce a comparable looking game on the Wii.
I'm not naive enough to believe that any studio these days (outside of Nintendo itself) is going to spend months figuring out ways to abuse the Wii hardware to get the best performance out of it, because current development cycles and budgets probably don't permit it. That and, why would they when they can do it more easily on the other consoles?
So my question is: is the perceived lack of power in the Wii the fault of Nintendo, or is it laziness (or lack of caring, due to target demographics) on the developers behalf? Is this something that's going to majorly affect Nintendo this generation or will its different control scheme pull it through?
Go play MOTHER3
or Brawl. 4854.6102.3895 Name: NU..
or Brawl. 4854.6102.3895 Name: NU..
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If there was some absolute need to make a Wii game look indistinguishable from a pile of cardboard and yarn, I'm sure someone could phone up Factor 5 and dangle a big wad of cash in front of them.
As it stands theres no need for that. Nintendo was doing that shit on the N64. Yoshi's Story anybody?
Did you notice how there was no slowdown even when the PS3 was calculating fall trajectories and rotations for perhaps 45 blocks at the same time? Did you notice how there was no clipping into the background, even with the guy in the big cape?
Did you notice how the objects appeared in the world maker instantly without need for loading?
Seriously, LBP will be taxing the PS3 to its current limits. A wii would just explode, or melt into the ground even if it were 2 years from now and the programming techniques had been mastered.
I realize Nintendo's going for a different audience, but dammit, 2.5D Metroid on the Wii with crazy lighting would be amazingly awesome.
or Brawl. 4854.6102.3895 Name: NU..
So, by this logic, the PS3 has reached it's graphical limit with LittleBigPlanet? I'm pretty sure the Wii could pull off this game just as well, once developers get some time with it. People seem to be severely underestimating the power of the Wii, simply because it isn't as powerful as the PS3 or 360. It's not an Atari 2600 either.
EDIT: Seriously, if LBP is pushing the PS3's limits, then I'm glad I haven't bought a PS3 yet.
I have to disagree here because I've played Elebits. Now, there's major slowdown in some portions of Elebits due to crazy physics (see: the final few stages of the game) but it was also a launch game. If there's an Elebits 2, I've no doubt it would be a lot smoother.
or Brawl. 4854.6102.3895 Name: NU..
Seriously, different realm.
No, but they're also working on three dimensions instead of two, and while not realistic they are incredibly robust. And it's worth pointing out again that it was a launch game. If Konami can pull that game out with only a few months with actual hardware, imagine what they could do once they've become accustomed to it.
or Brawl. 4854.6102.3895 Name: NU..
do not mention metroid...it reminds me that mp3 is not yet here and only gets me...oh no...herewegoaGAINRANOGRAW!!
No, it's two Gamecubes duct-taped together. Duh. :roll:
Well, let's go through a laundry list of what LBP does and then see what the Wii can or can't do.
* HD resolution: no chance
* HD textures: wouldn't be necessary without hd, but definitely better textures than last gen
* Pseudo soft shadows: do-able. In fact, the first use of pseudo soft shadows was in RE4 on the GCN.
* Depth of Field blur: no problem... happens all the time in wii sports
* Motion blur: don't know, really. You don't need HDR, and you don't need very complicated shaders ... but it requires at least 3 rendering passes (render scene, render motion values, apply blur to scene). So I'll file this under maybe, but doubtful
* Vignette: no problem... just a 2D image overlaid on top of the scene
* Light bloom: ditto vignette... no problem
* Physics simulation: with the PhysX engine included in the Wii SDK, I think that it shouldn't be a problem.
So yeah, I think something on the level of LBP is somewhat do-able on the Wii. It would look a little worse being in SD instead of HD, but for the most part it could look the same.
LBP is a 3D game with mostly 2D gameplay, but the physics engine is still running 3D and doing the same amount of work. Really, I like Elebits a lot, but the physics in it aren't beyond anything we saw on Xbox or Gamecube. LBP however, is.
Would LBP, as a game, not work with less "realistic" physics?
You keep your filthy logic out of this thread. This thread is only for conjecture and fanboyism.
okay, fine
SONY OLOL ... KIDTENDO!
(Anyhow, did you guys notice how much faking was going on in LBP? For example, they're not using soft shadows on the background... they just use a normal shadow map and rely on the depth-of-field blur to take care of blurring it. You can see it when the DOF gets turned off for a second at the top of the ramp. I think it shows a bit of ingenuity ... getting a soft cast shadow for the computational cost of a regular cast shadow.)
I'd love to be wrong; maybe I'm underestimating the amount of power that's being used to display it in HD, and the Wii can actually compare to the 360/PS3 in standard resolutions. I certainly realize that most of the early titles are basically Gamecube ports in terms of graphics. But I'm not going to start blindly defending Nintendo on this until I see some real evidence of that.
So we couldn't play it and have fun because the videogame about little hyper intelligent critters solving puzzles and platforming their way around a cardboard and crayon world isn't real enough? You've got to be kidding.
You haven't really taken into account things like geometric complexity which would be the bigger kicker rather than the resolutions or the textures. I mean the Wii could do Call of Duty 3, but it did just look like crap compared to the 360/PS3. So I guess depending on what your definitions are, you could do pretty much everything on a Wii as long as you didn't mind losing out on polygons, textures, shaders, physics and AI. (That's not saying you can't come up with pretty smart workarounds for a lot of those things).
You've got to remember, videogames aren't supposed to be fun, they're supposed to be art. Keep up, mister.
means the game can't also be realistic, it is.
Where the Wii falls short is raw processing power. Any game that is processor bound will have to make compromises. So the Wii isn't the platform for complex AI or physics games... you all had to know this going in right?
LBP - The graphics are only a piece of it, the main thing is the seamless levels loading/live level editing, physics. Without a fair bit of compensation, no. But that's the catch, all those things make it what it is.
But if you're asking if the Wii could something similar, sure, I don't see a reason why it couldn't, but I don't see much proof of this more powerful than an Xbox either. It's still early in the system's life, but I haven't seen much effort from 3rd parties, notable exception being SSX.
So, in theory, sure. In practice? Time will tell.
Currently playing: Infamous, Resident Evil 5
Need to play: Shadow Complex, Uncharted 2, Ratchet and Clank: ACIT, MW2, Alpha Protocol
So this whole thread went from "Can't be done" to "Can be done but it wouldn't be as good" which seems to imply that when you throw flashy graphics out the window and use less sophisticated physics, the amount of fun you can have is somehow diminished.
Or are we not playing games to have fun anymore? I guess I'm lost.
As far as the "realism" in Little Big Planet, I am never going to confuse anything that happens in that game for something happening in real life. I don't think we are quite at "The Matrix" yet with Little Big Planet, sorry to burst your bubble.
When you throw out the "flashy" graphics and use less sophisticated physics, that seems like it would just make it a different game. It would be like saying, "Okay, we will make another Legend of Zelda game, except this time, you play as a raccoon, and instead of saving the princess zelda, you have to deliver a newspaper. Also the Borg are in it. And you dont have a sword, instead, you use a can of Dole fruit."
To summarize: If you take away what makes a certain game "that game", then you're left with something....else.
We probably won't be able to say for sure unless there's a big release with versions for all three consoles (that is to say, decent versions. For some reason the Wii is getting lumbered with shitty PS2 ports at the moment). The unique nature of the Wii's control scheme means this is probably unlikely.
Graphically, it does take a shitload more power to push HD resolutions. I brought this up in another thread, but compare the performance you get out of a PC GPU at 640x480 vs. 1280x720. For example, Splinter Cell: Double agent doesn't look massively better on the 360 than on the original Xbox, and we're told that the Wii is at least that powerful, and only uses SD resolutions. (This may not be the best example, I think SC: DA may have been developed for OXBOX and ported to 360.)
The big question is physics processing. The fact that the Wii uses PhysX licensed technology suggests that physics was at least considered as an area that required attention, but again, there aren't really any useful comparisons available yet.
That is a terrible analogy. Turning Link into a paper delivering raccoon is not remotely the same as toning down the graphics.
That's generally true... but did you see Little Big Planet? It's not exactly the worlds most complicated game geometrically.
Also, being in SD instead of HD means you can reduce textures and geometry without having an impact because whereas the polygons/texels may have taken up 1/4 of a pixel before, they now take up 1/2 a pixel, which is still more information than you need to make the final image.
I'm not saying that the Wii can do anything a PS3 or 360 can do. That's nuts. What I am saying is that LBP is more a triumph of design and planning than sheer graphical muscle. Corners are cut, but in hard to notice ways, and when you guys think about how many polygons there are, you're thinking of the whole thing. In reality you only draw what's on the screen. And what was on the screen at any given point was actually pretty simplistic.
And using less sophisticated physics. Because, what I saw of LBP, the physics really "sell" it.