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Even New Super Mario Bros U is at 720p with no AA. If you have a TV that does a ton of extra sharpening on the image, it looks absolutely horrible. However, since God of War III introduced analytical AA methods in 2010, not many games suffer from aliasing any more. Rather than spending processing power to take multiple samples per pixel, it looks for jagged edges and smooths them out, producing a very crisp image for very little impact on performance. Since Nintendo's been catching up on HD development, they'll need to invest in an engine that can keep up with the ones developers have been tweaking and refining for over half a decade. I'd love it if Nintendo could make games as polished and impressive as Uncharted, God of War or even LittleBigPlanet, but it's going to be a long time before they're making anything more impressive than an HD Wii game. However, Pikmin 3 is absolutely stunning, as there aren't many games out there that try to capture the natural world in such a small scale. Until they reveal their new games at E3, that's the only game that's pushing the graphical power of the console. I don't know how Nintendo managed to make the Super Mario Galaxy games look and run so brilliantly on the Wii, but considering the similarities to the Gamecube hardware, they'd probably been working to those specs since about 1999, over 8 years before Super Mario Galaxy was released. I'm wondering if the next 3D Mario will just look like Galaxy running in Dolphin at 720p.
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May 21, 2013 04:07
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That loving Sned posted:I don't know how Nintendo managed to make the Super Mario Galaxy games look and run so brilliantly on the Wii, but considering the similarities to the Gamecube hardware, they'd probably been working to those specs since about 1999, over 8 years before Super Mario Galaxy was released. I'm wondering if the next 3D Mario will just look like Galaxy running in Dolphin at 720p. But yet completely failed with Skyward Sword  The videos of it running on Dolphin look so pretty too.
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May 21, 2013 04:35
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That loving Sned posted:I'm wondering if the next 3D Mario will just look like Galaxy running in Dolphin at 720p. That's almost a certainty. Unless they really shake the series up, the 3D Mario games haven't been about stunning visuals.
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May 21, 2013 04:36
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Winks posted:The graphics is one of my big problems with the Wii U. It can pump out 1080p, but only without anti-aliasing. Sure, it's not nearly as bad as the Wii's 480p with no anti-aliasing, but it's 2013 for crying out loud! I don't want to play the next Zelda game and see jagged edges everywhere...again. (Was aliasing really a problem in Skyward Sword? I don't remember noticing it too much, at least not in a way that distracted me from the game.) Quest For Glory II posted:Also in the case of publishers like THQ, there's something to be said about accrued bad karma from constantly pushing out bad licensed shovelware on the market endlessly, and they were the main culprit. It's a very similar story to Acclaim before them, who primarily shoveled out crap onto the market and then people eventually just stopped buying their horseshit. But the bigger danger is the reduction of diversity. AAA game development requires huge teams and takes a lot of time, which is a lot of money even before advertising and other factors are taken into account. So they make what sells, and make it again and again. Activision and Harmonix drove the peripheral-based rhythm genre into ground. Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, and now it looks like the Batman Arkham series do this annual or biannual thing and have to alternate between studios to get games out, which further reduces available studios to take risks and try something different. The need to sell 4 to 5 million to meet sales expectations is what leads to trainwreck's like Resident Evil 6. Even if the AAA development model is sustainable indefinitely, the sucking up resources from the middle isn't desirable. Chaltab fucked around with this message at 04:49 on May 21, 2013 |
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May 21, 2013 04:46
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Pyroxene Stigma posted:That's almost a certainty. Unless they really shake the series up, the 3D Mario games haven't been about stunning visuals. Except Sunshine which was amazing for 2002.
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May 21, 2013 04:54
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AngryCaterpillar posted:Except Sunshine which was amazing for 2002. I still think the game looks really pretty since it's all set in a beach resort and there's water everywhere.
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May 21, 2013 05:01
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Pyroxene Stigma posted:That's almost a certainty. Unless they really shake the series up, the 3D Mario games haven't been about stunning visuals. I feel really silly then, I thought Galaxy 2 looked amazing v  v
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May 21, 2013 05:03
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ThisIsACoolGuy posted:I feel really silly then, I thought Galaxy 2 looked amazing v Galaxy did look amazing but it was more due to art design than pure processing power.
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May 21, 2013 05:06
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I only played the first Galaxy but it was definitely the most beautiful Wii game I saw.
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May 21, 2013 05:06
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Honestly Nintendo hasn't skimmped on the graphics for the core Mario games since JSMB2. EAD did a remarkable job with the hardware they had to work with for Galaxy and 3D Land.
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May 21, 2013 05:07
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Chaltab posted:We really don't know what the Wii U can pump out until more developers have an opportunity to push the hardware further and learn shortcuts and tricks like the anti aliasing solution Sned mentioned.   *edit: It does look better than this in motion. And while they eventually might be able to figure out something like MLAA or adaptive AA for their 1080p titles, it's not going to happen quickly. 720p supports AA out of the box though, so there's no excuse for games like NSMBU. Winks fucked around with this message at 05:25 on May 21, 2013 |
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May 21, 2013 05:22
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It honestly never bothered me much, I think the splotchy watercolor look gave everything enough weird hard edges that it takes your mind off the artifacts. A lot of their Wii games seemed to take hardware limitations into their art styles, Galaxy was the same way. Probably why all those games look so awesome freed of those limitations in Dolphin, too. Third party poo poo doesn't scale nearly as nicely.
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May 21, 2013 05:31
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How did skyward sell anyways? I always thought the motion plus requirement to be a bit of an odd choice. Try telling a casual wii gamer the new zelda requires a morion plus attachment or a new controller with one built in. They just glaze over and carry on playing mariokart
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May 21, 2013 05:34
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juicecube posted:How did skyward sell anyways? I always thought the motion plus requirement to be a bit of an odd choice. Try telling a casual wii gamer the new zelda requires a morion plus attachment or a new controller with one built in. They just glaze over and carry on playing mariokart Wii Sports Resort came with the attachment so a lot of people would have had it already.
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May 21, 2013 05:40
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AngryCaterpillar posted:Wii Sports Resort came with the attachment so a lot of people would have had it already. Plus a Motion Plus-enabled controller was a pack-in bundle for deluxe editions.
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May 21, 2013 05:48
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juicecube posted:How did skyward sell anyways? I always thought the motion plus requirement to be a bit of an odd choice. Try telling a casual wii gamer the new zelda requires a morion plus attachment or a new controller with one built in. They just glaze over and carry on playing mariokart It did around 4 million, which is about average for a Zelda game but well below Twilight Princess and TOoT which both did closer to 7. (Discounting TOoT's re-releases but counting the Gamecube TP.) It's basically on par with Majora's Mask which had a similar "you need this gimmick to play" with the N64 Expansion Pack. The most poorly received Zelda in recent memory was Minish Cap which IIRC barely broke a million. After that was Spirit Tracks which did about half of what Phantom Hourglass did. The worst overall reception for a console Zelda was Twilight Princess GC but that's not really a fair competition because most people bought it on the Wii as opposed to just not wanting it. Edit: Excuse me, I was wrong here. The worst overall console release was Four Swords Adventure which was also the worst Zelda release period. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 06:00 on May 21, 2013 |
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May 21, 2013 05:48
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ImpAtom posted:The most poorly received Zelda in recent memory was Minish Cap which IIRC barely broke a million. How funny, I own both of these, and I'm far from a Zelda nerd. Just a top-down Zelda nerd. I was ready to reply with some awful sales figures for Skyward Sword, but the Wikipedia page states it's the fastest selling Zelda game.
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May 21, 2013 06:02
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fivegears4reverse posted:I don't even know what you're arguing at this point when you drop poo poo like "NEXT GEN IS ONLY ABOUT GRAFFIX". Every console generation has been accompanied by a leap in visual complexity as well as the overall complexity possible in game design as a whole.
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May 21, 2013 06:12
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OneEightHundred posted:The vast majority of games out right now could have been done 10 years ago with worse graphics. While higher performance can enable new gameplay, it been deep into diminishing returns for a long time. There's a reason that the PS4 presentation focused a lot on things that weren't just processor power boosts. Like RAM, which you can't do loving anything without.
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May 21, 2013 06:14
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Why hasn't this thread merged with the sad house of grumps that is the official Wii U thread yet? It loves repeating arguments and moaning about lack of games and ram. Wii U's ultimate saving grace may be that in a few hours we will see how crazy bad the new Xbox is or perhaps is not. Not being SEGA has saved Nintendo in the past, maybe not being Microsoft or Sony will be their saving grace this gen.
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May 21, 2013 06:25
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Chaltab posted:THQ was definitely felled by things other than the AAA business model, but Square-Enix's problems aren't soley related to Final Fantasy 14. They've developed a reputation of making really shiny, pretty games with undercooked story and gameplay. They chased some of their best creators off, who then turned around and created things like Xenoblade and The Last Story, games that are pretty in spite of their deficient hardware and more importantly fun to play. This right here is what makes this "fear" of AAA ridiculous to me. Unless the people from a studio get completely out of the industry, just because a dev house is closed down does not mean we completely lose that talent. Yeah, it sucks if a talented team is broken up, but it is the way it is. Dev houses have been opening and closing throughout the entire existence of the videogame industry. If those people stick with it and continue finding work for other developers or publishers, we will still have plenty of chances to see new games and new twists on older gameplay ideas or themes. OneEightHundred posted:The vast majority of games out right now could have been done 10 years ago with worse graphics. While higher performance can enable new gameplay, it been deep into diminishing returns for a long time. There's a reason that the PS4 presentation focused a lot on things that weren't just processor power boosts. The vast majority of SNES games could have been done to a reasonable extent on the NES, should we never have upgraded from the 8 bit days? I mean, it was already good enough.
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May 21, 2013 06:28
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fivegears4reverse posted:The vast majority of SNES games could have been done to a reasonable extent on the NES, should we never have upgraded from the 8 bit days? I mean, it was already good enough. Most of the greats really couldn't have. I understand the point you're trying to make, but I don't think the analogy holds true.
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May 21, 2013 06:35
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Pyroxene Stigma posted:Most of the greats really couldn't have. I understand the point you're trying to make, but I don't think the analogy holds true. Which ones? There were a number of downgrades the NES had done to it that made certain localizations of games suffer from certain issues. The Japanese Famicom could do a few things that the NES either struggled with or didn't do at all because the functionality was either taken out or altered in some way and then never supported. For example, Gradius 2 on the Famicom suffers from little sprite flicker and slowdown compared to say, Lifeforce and Gradius 1 on the NES (actually played this the other day, blew my little mind how much smoother it was compared to just about everything I'd played on the NES). The wiki entry on the NES even goes into how a much larger number of companies in Japan produced their own cartridges, which allowed them to insert special custom chips that improved sound and visuals on a number of games. By contrast, many fewer companies produced the cartridges in North America, with fewer specialized chips to enhance the games being one of the results. It's a silly thing to even suggest that the only thing that is coming from the next gen consoles is just a boost in visuals.
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May 21, 2013 06:49
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I will say that in regards to what little experience I have with testing a multiplatform title, the console versions were generally a nightmare because running out of video memory happened extremely often, leading to the developers needing to find various things to not have actively loaded at certain times which often contributed to more issues. The massive leap in terms of RAM that the PS4 has (and presumably the 360x2 will have because duh) will hopefully deal with that core problem. Still though, I don't see myself buying any next-generation console for at least a couple of years; on one hand because money is extremely tight these days, and on the other you have this current generation which has gone on for so long that I've built up a pretty big library of games that I won't be able to conveniently access if I upgrade. At the risk of sounding like I'm projecting, I wonder how many other people will feel the same way about these new consoles.
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May 21, 2013 06:51
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fivegears4reverse posted:Which ones? Anything too big for an NES cart, excluding graphics for obvious reasons. Maybe Super Metroid, definitely Super Mario World, SMRPG, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, Megaman X-X3, Super Castlevania IV, Secret of Mana, really anything with Mode 7 graphics including F-Zero... the list is kind of huge. Graphics really mattered more back then compared to now, because of the huge jumps in technology. Indie gaming being such a big deal is because graphics aren't the barrier they used to be.
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May 21, 2013 07:04
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fivegears4reverse posted:This right here is what makes this "fear" of AAA ridiculous to me. Unless the people from a studio get completely out of the industry, just because a dev house is closed down does not mean we completely lose that talent. Yeah, it sucks if a talented team is broken up, but it is the way it is.
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May 21, 2013 07:13
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miscellaneous14 posted:I will say that in regards to what little experience I have with testing a multiplatform title, the console versions were generally a nightmare because running out of video memory happened extremely often, leading to the developers needing to find various things to not have actively loaded at certain times which often contributed to more issues. The massive leap in terms of RAM that the PS4 has (and presumably the 360x2 will have because duh) will hopefully deal with that core problem. I might just be completely out of touch, but I still feel like Steam is the biggest threat to any of the consoles. Getting games for massive discounts, having them available to me anywhere I go with internet, and not having to deal with the clutter of physical media makes buying a dedicated game console just seem incredibly archaic. And being able to build an HTPC for so cheap makes the consoles seem even less appealing. It will take some absolutely killer exclusives to bring me back to consoles, and even though I grew up a Nintendo fan through and through (I owned a Super Scope for christ's sake), the Nintendo franchises are so stale at this point that they don't even come close to being system sellers.
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May 21, 2013 07:17
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Papercut posted:I might just be completely out of touch, but I still feel like Steam is the biggest threat to any of the consoles. Getting games for massive discounts, having them available to me anywhere I go with internet, and not having to deal with the clutter of physical media makes buying a dedicated game console just seem incredibly archaic. And being able to build an HTPC for so cheap makes the consoles seem even less appealing. It will take some absolutely killer exclusives to bring me back to consoles, and even though I grew up a Nintendo fan through and through (I owned a Super Scope for christ's sake), the Nintendo franchises are so stale at this point that they don't even come close to being system sellers. Maybe someday I won't need game consoles, but as long as games like that stay PC only (that is to say, if Japan as a whole starts seeing PC games as something other than the realm of porn games), this is the way it's going to be for me.
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May 21, 2013 07:23
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Pyroxene Stigma posted:Anything too big for an NES cart, excluding graphics for obvious reasons. Maybe Super Metroid, definitely Super Mario World, SMRPG, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, Megaman X-X3, Super Castlevania IV, Secret of Mana, really anything with Mode 7 graphics including F-Zero... the list is kind of huge. Graphics really mattered more back then compared to now, because of the huge jumps in technology. Indie gaming being such a big deal is because graphics aren't the barrier they used to be. A big reason why SNES games are "too big" for an NES cart is due to their...graphics and sound. Better technology so far leads to both (though I think sound is actually harder to push forward with than visual fidelity), and other improvements to technology can enhance how a game plays (which is a bit harder to illustrate than fancy lighting effects or improved water). You could easily do any of those games without the fancy graphical niceties of the SNES' Mode 7, or its amazing sound capabilities, just like how you could easily do Modern Warfare 1-3, Crysis, Uncharted, Rayman, Skyward Sword, Mario Galaxy, or Donkey Kong Country Returns on a PC or Console from 10 years ago and it'd still be more or less the "same game", at least according to OneEightHundred. Sure, it may not look as nice, but graphics aren't important (unless they are). It's not like the core gameplay of games like, say, the MMX titles couldn't be done on the NES (especially considering the fact that we did see TWO MMX titles on the GameBoy Color, and believe it or not they actually play surprisingly well). You would be missing out on some the nice stuff that came from having more buttons on the controller though. EDIT: VVV Holy shiiiiiiit fivegears4reverse fucked around with this message at 07:49 on May 21, 2013 |
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May 21, 2013 07:36
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fivegears4reverse posted:The vast majority of SNES games could have been done to a reasonable extent on the NES, should we never have upgraded from the 8 bit days? I mean, it was already good enough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBeD-kEHy3E
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May 21, 2013 07:37
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fivegears4reverse posted:The vast majority of SNES games could have been done to a reasonable extent on the NES, should we never have upgraded from the 8 bit days? I mean, it was already good enough. fivegears4reverse posted:It's a silly thing to even suggest that the only thing that is coming from the next gen consoles is just a boost in visuals. That's practically cheating, DKC was such a dumbed-down platformer that you could have done it on a TI calculator. 
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May 21, 2013 07:39
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I was kind of dicking around on craigslist to see how cheap I could possibly grab a Wii for (very cheap for the ones not sold by clueless people) and noticed most of the Wii's listed included like 20+ games of shovelware. How many people bought that thing and ignored every good game for it? It reminded me of when I went to my uncles house last year. He must have bought 30+ Wii games for his son and not one of them was decent or a first party Nintendo game. My theory as that a huge percentage of people that bought it just immediately gravitated towards the cheapest used game they could find in Gamestop, and Nintendo games never price drop. Mario Kart=$50 Dale Earndhart Kart=$5. veni veni veni fucked around with this message at 07:42 on May 21, 2013 |
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May 21, 2013 07:39
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For anyone saying "Graphics Don't Sell Consoles" The Playstation.
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May 21, 2013 07:44
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Saturn already had PS1 graphics and Dreamcast has Ps2 graphics (at least at launch) and they both bombed.
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May 21, 2013 07:50
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OLIVIAS WILDE RIDER posted:For anyone saying "Graphics Don't Sell Consoles" Could you have picked a worse example? The Playstation was a graphical leap, but nothing anyone was ready for. It was 3D adolescence, awkward and ugly.
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May 21, 2013 07:55
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Pyroxene Stigma posted:Could you have picked a worse example? The Playstation was a graphical leap, but nothing anyone was ready for. It was 3D adolescence, awkward and ugly. It was also a god drat revolution in home gaming and drove sales. Looking back on it now it is loving awful, yes, but in 1994 it was mind blowing. Tobal No.1 was a 3d charactered fighting game running at a locked 60fps, for example.
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May 21, 2013 07:57
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Pyroxene Stigma posted:Could you have picked a worse example? The Playstation was a graphical leap, but nothing anyone was ready for. It was 3D adolescence, awkward and ugly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhUpx4QHuaw This commercial donned a decade of Square's dominance of rpgs. I bring it up because I don't know what the hell this thread is for anymore. But I remember high school kids yelling about how amazing this game looks based on those gameplayless commercials alone.
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May 21, 2013 08:00
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OneEightHundred posted:To be clear, I don't think it's true that the only thing coming is a boost in visuals, and I don't agree with the idea that graphics won't sell the console. What is true though is that in the most recent generation switch and the upcoming one, the interest in performance increases has been almost entirely for the sake of getting better graphics, not to enable new gameplay or user experiences. But this isn't entirely the case? In addition to the obvious visual improvements, the more powerful the consoles have become, the larger the in game worlds can be, the more content can be provided. Enemies are capable of doing more than just following obviously pathed routes, or even a larger number of enemies (or allies, or random NPCs) can help further immerse the player or make for a more challenging game. Look at games like Dragon's Dogma or Dark Souls: the detailed animations of both your player and the monsters themselves add additional personality to the game visually while also adding to the gameplay by giving you things to actually look for to help combat the enemies and avoid taking serious damage. quote:Pretty much every new user experience in recent years has been from the introduction of new non-performance capabilities (i.e. online connectivity) or the use of new input peripherals. Things like motion controls are rarely, if ever used properly. The games that nail motion controls on the Wii are still subject to debates among fans and detractors of those games. Ultimately, waggling or swinging your controller like a sword isn't innovative, it's just ultimately changing how you input commands to your character/avatar on screen (and arguably adds nothing to the actual quality of the game). One of the most important addition to how videogames control is basically adding more "buttons" for the player to use, which can open up more options if the hardware is capable of supporting it. Online connectivity for videogames has been around a lot longer than when things like the Dreamcast and the Xbox made them standards for consoles to reach for. We can go as far back as the Famicom for consoles having network functionality (thanks Satelliview), but we've had online gaming as far back as the early 70's. NESguerilla posted:Saturn already had PS1 graphics and Dreamcast has Ps2 graphics (at least at launch) and they both bombed. They didn't fail because of some (totally wrong) law that states MORE POWERFUL=MORE FAIL, they failed because Sega had been doing worse than its direct competition since the days of the Master System and ultimately could not be supported by Sega. The Saturn did not benefit nearly as much as the PS1 did from the third party exodus away from Nintendo, and it had very few games that reached out to the broader market compared to its competition. The Dreamcast died because Sega simply ran out of money to keep supporting a console while being involved with game development. fivegears4reverse fucked around with this message at 08:09 on May 21, 2013 |
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May 21, 2013 08:03
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fivegears4reverse posted:They didn't fail because of some (totally wrong) law that states MORE POWERFUL=MORE FAIL, they failed because Sega had been doing worse than its direct competition since the days of the Master System and ultimately could not be supported by Sega. The Saturn did not benefit nearly as much as the PS1 did from the third party exodus away from Nintendo, and it had very few games that reached out to the broader market compared to its competition. The Dreamcast died because Sega simply ran out of money to keep supporting a console while being involved with game development. I don't think there is any sort of law that says that. If graphics were the big draw in PS1, people just weren't paying attention because the saturn was out for quite a while before the PS1 and the games looked just as good. As a Saturn owner I wasn't impressed by the PS1's graphics in the least. I eventually gravitated towards it because it had better games. I was just saying that the games where what sold the PS1, not graphics. Or PS2 for that matter. Dreamcast games looked better than PS2 games when the PS2 launched and yet no one cared about the Dreamcast and people camped out overnight for the PS2. veni veni veni fucked around with this message at 08:33 on May 21, 2013 |
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May 21, 2013 08:28
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Yeah, a big part of PS4/Xbox Whatever's appeal is going to be graphics. That's fine, that's the way it should be. I know it's oh so hip and trendy to act as if graphics don't matter, or even holding games back; and there's almost a fever among indie devs to see just how far down they can strip a video game while still having it be considered a sellable video game product and not modern art wank, but these are video games. It's in the noun. Consumers sure aren't going to pay $400 or $500 to play Minecraft or Thomas Was Alone or whatever. They will put down that kind of money if it means they can get a (moderately closer to) photorealistic Call of Duty, or a visual showpiece like Crysis 3 to run on the television at PC levels without actually having to be a PC gamer. Quantity and quality of software/mechanics give a system its legs, but graphics move consoles. They foster the buy-in. Consoles usually suffer when they lack "that game" at launch, and spike when they show up. Halo singlehandedly kept the Xbox from being a short-lived industry punchline. One look at Mario 64 made you believe in a system that launched with literally 2 games. Does anyone remember what happened when Gran Turismo 3 showed up on the PS2? Final Fantasy VII on PS1? The Wii had ridiculous numbers, and still did not get the vast majority of PS3/360 titles, because the hardware just wasn't up for it. You are absolutely going to see the same situation with the Wii U, because as development shifts away from current gen consoles, nobody is going to be thinking about how to scale down their ambitious next-gen titles to run a shortbus edition on a console that can't handle UE4. bloodysabbath fucked around with this message at 08:48 on May 21, 2013 |
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