Posted by
on 18 February 2013 - 02:49 PM
I have this for PS3 and I was very impressed by it. I am glad it is coming to Wii U. It is funny: You guys whine about ports, yet you want as many 3rd party games on the Wii U. Beggers can't be choosers, you know.
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on 18 February 2013 - 05:23 PM
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on 18 February 2013 - 05:20 PM
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on 18 February 2013 - 07:01 AM
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on 14 February 2013 - 05:50 PM
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on 13 February 2013 - 03:48 PM
So I guess it's pretty much back to the drawing board for those who were insisting the Wii U was not capable of much more then what was being shown in early ports like AC3, BLOPS2. What the Need For Speed port is showing is quite amazing considering the size of the Wii U console, and the PSU.
Posted by
on 13 February 2013 - 09:51 AM
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on 13 February 2013 - 08:19 AM
"The difference with Wii U was that when we first started out, getting the graphics and GPU to run at an acceptable frame-rate was a real struggle. The hardware was always there, it was always capable. Nintendo gave us a lot of support - support which helps people who are doing cross-platform development actually get the GPU running to the kind of rate we've got it at now. We benefited by not quite being there for launch - we got a lot of that support that wasn't there at day one... the tools, everything.
There's a switch in our build pipeline that says 'use PC textures' and we flipped that and that was all. I can take no credit for that, it was literally ten minutes' work... we are using PS3/360 geometry. It's just the textures we upgraded.
Tools and software were the biggest challenges by a long way... the fallout of that has always been the biggest challenge here. [Wii U] is a good piece of hardware, it punches above its weight. For the power consumption it delivers in terms of raw wattage it's pretty incredible. Getting to that though, actually being able to use the tools from Nintendo to leverage that, was easily the hardest part.
When they first looked at the specs on paper a lot of developers said, 'Well, you know this is a bit lightweight' and they walked away. I think a lot of people have been premature about it in a lot of ways because while it is a lower clock-speed, it punches above its weight in a lot of other areas," he explains.
So, I think you've got one group of people who walked away, you've got some other people who just dived in and tried and thought, 'Ah... it's not kind of there,' but not many people have done what we've done, which is to sit down and look at where it's weaker and why, but also see where it's stronger and leverage that. It's a different kind of chip and it's not fair to look at its clock-speed and other consoles' clock-speed and compare them as numbers that are relevant. It's not a relevant comparison to make when you have processors that are so divergent. It's apples and oranges.
The Wii U has had a bit of a bad rap - people have said it's not as powerful as 360, this, that and the other. That, by and large, has been based on apples to oranges comparisons that don't really hold water. Hopefully we'll go some way to proving that wrong," he says. - Idries Hamadi, technical director
Ward believes Need for Speed Most Wanted U is the title's definitive version because of play opportunities created by its new features.
"It's not just the best-looking version of the game, we developed it after we had already finished the original game," he said. "It allows you to almost go back in time. Whenever you're finishing a console game, there are always things you want to do that can't get done on time. On Wii U, we were able to take a break, come back to it, understand the hardware and put in all the fixes and additions we wanted to.
"Wii U is best enjoyed with a group of people, and for years Criterion has thought about expanding the experience to more players," he explained. "Wii U helped us solve that problem."
Since the tail end of 2011, a core team of engineers at Criterion has been working with the Wii U. The final hardware launched in November, and Criterion started to scratch its collective noggin and figure out how it would work for Need for Speed: Most Wanted.
This meant missing the Wii U launch, but Criterion Games' Alex Ward was fine with that during a preview session last week – if Need for Speed: Most Wanted had been at launch, it would've lacked all online functionality.
"The reason we didn't do the game for launch is because the online side of it wasn't very clear to us," said Ward. "We weren't sure how much we could do online or how it was going to be, because obviously Nintendo were making a lot of changes up until their run-up to launch. So we didn't want to bring the game out at launch on Wii U with no online play.
The extra time was not spent in vain, something that became obvious once Most Wanted was up and running on a television. The Wii U port pulls in the PC assets and immediately sports a much longer draw distance and better frame rate than its console cousins. Having played my fair share of Need for Speed: Most Wanted, the work that went into this Wii U version was clear – and not just in graphical fidelity, either.
"When we got the final hardware in November, we started to look at it, to really experience it, and start to think that just a port isn't going to cut it. Like we'd be embarrassed if we didn't do anything extra; putting something out, any team could do that."
Posted by
on 13 February 2013 - 09:38 AM
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