Nintendo set to reveal new Console at E3

[grim-one]

[Jarrod]

[LeonJ]

I saw an interview with some Nintendo guy (cant' remember his name) and they made a point of 'we aren't supporting anything pior to the Wii'. While you may be correct in saying this includes the Wii's backwards compat, I took it as Gamecube support is dropped.

I assume they don't want to include a gamecube memory/controller port/disc with the Wii U.
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Shin J Leon.

XBL - LeonJ
PSN - LeonJ

[G3ck0]

If they did support it though, they would have supported Gamecube games for three generations. Supporting it for too long would make people expect it to be continually supported, and then be disappointed when it isn't. I think backwards compatibility for one generation is the best way to go, as it gives people more than enough time to play the games from the last generation, and then not be TOO disappointed when it isn't supported next generation.

[Jarrod]

[admeister]

According to Sega, Aliens: Colonial Marines is only being considered for development on the Wii U. I'm surprised that they showed footage of it in the sizzle reel for the Wii U.
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"The first person to prove that cow's milk is drinkable was very, very thirsty." - Fact Sphere.

[LeonJ]

They could be the BEST match ever. The controller screen could be the motion sensor. Get rid of the on-screen HUD and just have your controller-screen as the noisy sensor. That would be so intense.

GOD DAMN AWESOME. They should make it the lead platform.
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Shin J Leon.

XBL - LeonJ
PSN - LeonJ

[Furianshi]

[Sin Ogaris]

I will rage like a mofo if Aliens doesn't come out for Wii U, not after how frigging excited I am for the very thing that LeonJ described. I think the only thing that would make things even freakier is if as a facehugger gets closer to you the "scuttling" sound starts coming from the controller, so it's literally "right on top of you". That would scare the absolute **** out of me.

[Jarrod]

I hope it comes out for the Wii U with the tracker on the pad.

But I'll be getting it on PC .
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[Frozencry]

Confirmed that Wii-U is being powered by AMD's R770 chipset, aka the 4xxx series of cards. What card is it based on exactly it's not confirmed as they haven't released VRAM and Clock Speeds, but these cards are DX 10.1 supported and quite a lot more powerful than the 360's and PS3's GPUs. That being said knowing Ninty, I'm doubting the API will be DX based but more OpenGL.

Pretty cool stuff.
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[Jarrod]

Im still thinking it will be ~350/PS3+ levels of practical performance. Nintendo are so stingy with specs we wont know how beefy the system truly is until it's been out on the market for a few years and developers have really pushed it to the limits :/.

I'm expecting it to be destroyed by the PS4/XboxWhatever though. Their seriously underwhelming E3 reveal makes me think that they're hoping "third party support" = "ports ports ports", and they'll be dicked over come the next Sony and Microsoft systems.
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[Furianshi]

I've been reading all over the place that PS4/Nextbox will blow WiiU out of the water, but I don't know... Technically, if you look at the spec sheets, yeah, they probably will. Visually though, I'm predicting there won't be much separating them.

This gen, as far as actual possibilities with graphics, taking into consideration development costs, this gen just slightly missed the mark. We have HD graphics, but the power isn't quite there to make it fully-realised HD. Games on current-gen consoles have to make concessions, whether it's a drop in resolution, a low framerate, and/or object and texture popup. Plus shader effects are fairly basic.

The WiiU might not be a giant leap, but to fix the problems that the current consoles suffer, it doesn't need to be. 1080p games, running at 60fps, with no textures loading before your eyes and no objects popping into view, nice texture palettes with a decent amount of variety and nice shader effects. That's what we need, that would be fully-realised HD graphics. That's what developers will use.

If the PS4 or 720 came out, and it was 10x as powerful as PS360, would developers create mind-blowing experiences, unlike anything we've seen before? No. They'd still just do what they are doing now, except 1080p games, running at 60fps, with no textures loading before your eyes and no objects popping into view, nice texture palettes with a decent amount of variety and nice shader effects.

... the same as if the new console was just 2x the power of PS360.

If you're expecting the first COD on PS4 to look like this:



prepare to be disappointed.

[Jarrod]

While I'm inclined to agree for most part, no system will ever set a 60fps standard. A lot of people seem to treat 60fps as some out-of-the-box feature, when its really just about optimisation and rendering performance.

No matter how good the hardware is for next generation, and the generation after that, and after that, and so on, there will never be a 60fps standard. People expecting next generation to bring on a world of 60fps games are too going to be very disappointed.
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[Furianshi]

It depends on whether developers will continue to push limits with on-screen geometry. With this generation, and previous generations, Seeing off into the horizon has often been troublesome. The answer has been lots of fog/pop-up OR lower framerate. As this becomes less of a problem, I see framerates improving overall.

It's almost not a problem with current gen. Just not quite there yet. Plus with this gen, there's been problems adjusting to the higher resolutions that come with HD TVs.

Take Red Dead Redemption. What could they possibly do to make that game better graphically? There are a few things. I think the main one would be to double the framerate though. It doesn't need a larger draw-distance. Maybe less texture loading and object pop-up. Better lighting and shadows? Does there need to be more polygons used in the character models? More realistic animations... It's basically there.

[Jarrod]

They'll push more detailed geometry, higher resolution textures, nicer particle effects, a (hopefully) 1080p standard over 720p, better AA and AF, additional effects, etc.

The roof is still a long way from being hit. Just as framerates have never improved from advancements in previous generations, so too will they not improve going into the next. There will always be engines with poorer optimisation than others. There will always be developers pushing hardware as hard as they can at any expense.

We're not 'there' yet. Throw in high quality bokeh depth of field, true global illumination, high quality per object motion blur, soft shadowing, SSAO, tessellation and tons of other stuff that a vast majority of modern 360/PS3 games dont use and watch the framerate crumble.

There will never be a framerate standard and it wont get better. It will always be mixed. Personally I put huge value on 60fps, but the mass market doesn't.
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[Furianshi]

At least games ported from PS360 to WiiU should have a 60fps standard. Power7 and R770... it would be make more sense to just buy cheaper parts than to underclock that stuff to 360 standards. It's practically guaranteed to trounce current gen.

[Benza]

If next Gens COD had a minimap like that I would be pissed off, it's not even detecting all the soldiers?

Also I completely disagree, there most deffintley is room for graphics to grow in games.

Things like Lighting, Shaders, Particle Effects etc still have tonnes of room to improve on. I don't think there's a single game that's used proper sub surface scattering on skin for people. (Basically the translucency of skin) Wich really ads so much when you're attempting realism. Other things like dynamic and interactive particle effects for smoke and dust, proper reactive animation, under skin musculature for characters, dynamic interactive foliage etc etc.

A lot of that stuff can be done relativity simply man hour wise but is incredibly complex to do computationally. Something like Sub Surface Scattering, probbably the most compuationally intensive thing on there (Maybe less so then dynamic interactive particle effects but don't hold me to that) would only require one extra map being made for each character and only for the skin/ other translucent bits. No the next gen won't look photo realistic were still miles away from being able to achieve that even in pre-rendered. But there is still deffintly room for improving the graphics of games over what the consoles are pushing now.

On top of that mechanically more horse power lets you do far more. Take the current gen games, if the difference between the Wii U and the PS4 whatever is similiar to the difference between the Wii and the PS3/360. Games like Assassins Creed etc, mechanicaly would just not be possible on the Wii, (You only need to see Dead Rising) If the new gen of games on the PS4/x-box 3 take full advantage of the consoles horsepower to do things games mechanically couldn't do this gen, it's going to be a struggle to get them running on the Wii-u.

Of course this is assuming that there is the same kind of difference between the Wii-u and the PS4 etc, It could turn out there only an incremental upgrade and everything I said is completely wrong.
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[LeonJ]

360 #2 and PS4 won't be out until mid 2013 at best but ...

What are they thinking? I have a bad feeling this console is really going to flop hard. The only reason the Wii has a crazy success was Wii Sports and waggle friendly games.

I mean, I'll buy one but can you see the Wii owners who never use their console upgrading?

Nintendo's best bet it to launch the console at a very aggressive price and hope all the 3rd party devs create the 'ultimate' console version on the Wii U.
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Shin J Leon.

XBL - LeonJ
PSN - LeonJ

[Benza]

[Frozencry]

SSS has been done in games, but not realtime, just baked. To actually pull off SSS in a game would be ridiculously expensive technically, as hell doing a simple render in some of my 3D scenes with SSS nodes applied puts me at about 5-10 minutes render time for a frame. I mean it'll be great to see it come to fruiton, but I'm not expecting it for a long time, especially if we want it to be hitting the levels of CG in quality.

I definitely agree that there are tonnes of things we can improve on with gaming. More complex volumetric lighting and particles for starters, actual fibre effects, voxel based modeling, high resolution real time radiosity, and hell raytraced shadows/lighting if we're gonna go the extreme way.

The problem with it though is that we're still held back by the common API's of today. AMD and NVIDIA have both expressed that they can do A LOT more with their GPUs and such if we were to ditch the DirectX API and go with a new approach, but sadly I don't see that happening any time soon.

I mean, I like DX11, I dig the way it's going and tesselation has a lot of potential, but we definitely have the potential for more if we were to ditch it and have an API that's far more optimised to utilise the modern GPU capabilities. I'd say this goes the same for OpenGL too.

So TL;DR, visuals on Wii-U won't be very different, just sharper and more high resolution. It'll still use the same Shader Models and properties of this gen.
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[Furianshi]

[Jarrod]

Yeah, subsurface scattering would murder modern hardware. I dont even expect it to be common next generation.

Then you've got procedural...anything. Procedural destruction, procedural physics, procedural animation, etc. We're only seeing the tip of the iceberg at the moment. There hasn't been a single game with true, complex 3D liquid physics calculations. Procedural physics destruction still has a very long way to go too.

I mean, imagine a game with the city size and scope of something like Grand Theft Auto and Assassin's Creed, yet gameplay heavily based around interacting with and destroying the city/world. Procedural destruction for all the buildings as well as some terrain. Procedural generation for interiors as well.

Stuff like this is possible on future technology, but if a hypothetical PS4/XboxWhatever were running it you'd be hard pressed to get it working the same way on the theorised Wii-U.
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[Benza]

[Nietzsche]

I think graphics wise the wii-U compared to the PS4, Xbox 3 will be about as powerful as the wii was to the 360. Probably more.