Surprisingly, I am NOT as tired of this kind of earnest plea from gamers as I am from Ninty fanboys pretending that they don't know what people mean by "hardcore", and then insulting them or insinuating that they are immature for pointing out the obvious fact that the majority of people who spend money on and play games enthusiastically (in the US, at least) are FAR more excited about Xbox360 games than they are about Wii games.

COME ON... everyone knows that when someone says "hardcore gamer" they mean "gamer that likes the games that it is currently fashionable to like" - games like Call of Duty. And for whatever reason, these really are the games that people want, and the games that they will pay for. There is nothing inherently WRONG with liking Call of Duty - just like there is nothing inherently immature about preferring a beautiful, rich aesthetic experience to... well, what the Wii offers.

Now, if someone comes out and says "Skyward Sword is a terrible game, and its graphics suck... I much prefer Modern Warfare 3 because its graphics are better" then please go ahead and school them for their obvious inability to appreciate artistic styling and depth of play experience. Otherwise... can we please be charitable to the intention of the poster?

Ok... So I know there have been many threads focusing on different aspects of this topic.  Still, I want to know what you guys actually want most from the online service.  Does it matter if the Miis get customizable clothes?  Do you care about DLC, or even about digital distribution of any kind?  Do you like the idea of achievments/trophies adding up to a "gamerscore", or is it ruining gaming?  Are you a hardcore competitive multiplayer junkie - one who wants to be notified mid-game if friends of yours start playing another game so you can jump in - or do you mostly game solo anyway?

I think the pulse of the average Nintendo gamer might be significantly different from that of the average PS/360 gamer in regard to online functionality... but I don't know for sure... so let me know what you think!!!

Personally, I am dying for a strong friend/profile system.  The first thing I check when I turn on my 360 is what my friends are playing, and I almost always jump in to their game (whether cooperative or competitive).  I didn't include a "multiplayer gaming" option, because it seems like the variables of what people might mean by this are too complex.  I would assume, for instance, that the system would allow players to play games online (duh)... but as for the options regarding connectivity, dedicated servers, centralized billing, etc.... well, I'll leave that up to your comments.

Is ID Tech5 that good? I've looked up some screenshots of Rage and while it looks quite amazing for a current gen game (dat clouds! http://media.teamxbo.../1250708202.jpg and some nice rocks/shadows http://www.pcgamesha...90325093927.jpg ) I don't think it could compare with what UE 4 is likely to be. UE 3.5 impressed me more than IDT5.

I have to kind of agree that Rage doesn't look that good on a purely aesthetic level, but I might have to just blame the art resources for that.  stewox (and may others on these forums) are most likely admiring the engine on the level of programming and software development, I suppose... and of course the effects made possible using the engine itself are rather astounding.

thanks for sharing the Carmack video, stewox... hadn't seen that, or had forgotten about it.  I wonder, though, how may 3rd party developers are really going to bother developing "assembly-level" code specific to the WiiU hardware in order to fully utilize its power (or even write custom shaders to take advantage of the GPU's specific architecture)... it seems like even big studios have tended to balk at the process and give a "the-platform-doesn't-have-those-features" shrug.  and i get it... they're running a business and have to think about costs involved.  But in all honesty, do you believe that we will see a lot of developers focus on the WiiU in this way?

@stewox
not sure about the exact impetus for this explanation... but everyone who's confused about the issue should definitely read your post in its entirety.

@gameboysoadance
er... like nollog said, not exactly. an api is only a part of a dev kit (it's not an engine) - really, just a library or set of specifications that allow software compontents to communicate with one another. Unreal Engine (or CryEngine for that matter) uses the DirectX API for its PC version... what stewox is pointing out is that it's up to the 3rd parties to optimize their software for the WiiU, rather than Nintendo's job to "optimize" its hardware for 3rd party engines (whatever that would mean).

I think he was trying to be as diplomatic as he could with that statement, and you're taking it too hard.
He said wait for e3, which is where he will, along with the rest of us get some actual news about third party support.

agreed... i like to bash on the guy as much as anyone, but they were some of his more moderate statements. 3rd party support really is a key issue with this console's success (as well as a key determiner of how 3rd parties will develop games for the 'next gen'), and i am waiting for e3 with a fair bit of earnestness because of this very issue.

As long as it includes user names, friends list, voice chat, a messaging system and all that other good stuff I'll be fine with it. It'd be cool if Nintendo could take some tips from Steam and have instantly changable display names, community groups etc. as well.

Yeah, see, this is what actually makes me WANT a pay service. I agree that Nintendo will most likely NOT charge for a unified online service... but what this leaves open (and what some of Ninty's own comments and the comments from EA have seemed to indicate) is that the online play component will be fragmented into a plethora of individual services on a company-by-company basis, some charging and some not. In Japan, Monster Hunter Tri has its own subscription fee for online play, and other games have fees of their own... it's the 'friend code' headache all over again, but this time one that potentially involves me subscribing to a different service every time I want to play a new game online... and if I have to pay $5-10 USD to get a robust, intuitive, unified online experience, so be it.

No i dont think they will charge.

With that being said i find it to be rather annoying that everybody wants nintendo to have a better online service then xbox live and psn yet they arent willing to pay.

this. people are used to receiving robust social networking services for free, and I get the feeling of not quite being certain about what Xbox is actually selling you with the Live service... but really, a clean, intuitive interface that brings all gaming and media services together under one gamer ID? It's a valuable service to me, at least.

Consoles don't rely on APIs - developers can suck out all the features and performance the hardware has, regardless of API features. But advanced machine code programming is very hard - only a few developers have the knowledge, skills and programming resources to fully ulitise the power - these are companies like ID Software, EPIC, Crytek ...etc ; Crytek doesn't have that much of a good skills for console games obviously in design/creativity - crysis 2 disaster.

So the capabilities of the console would appear more than actually when comparing raw hardware, to the equivalent performance on PC benchmarking since becase of all the driver, API , OS overhead 40% of the performance is lost.

Good point to bring up. Companies like High Voltage were able to squeeze a lot more out of the Wii's hardware because they were designing their engine from the ground up to be optimized for the Wii's exact hardware... knowing the precise CPU they were working with, they were able to tweak the code pretty specifically, even down to the level of writing some catered code in assembly language (I don't think anyone actually "writes" in machine language, do they?). They were able to imitate several of the effects that PCs produce with shaders, by using the baked-in hardware features that the Wii's GPU did have. Still, there are physical limitations imposed by "fixed" pipelines and built-in operations on the GPU... even The Conduit, while pretty "for the Wii", was nothing close to a comparable PS/360 title in terms of graphical performance.

Also, it is worth noting that, while it is technically possible to avoid using APIs at all in programming for a console like the Wii, the dev kits provided by Nintendo include APIs similar to OpenGL for graphics (which many low-end devs will use) and, as you said, very few developers producing cross-platform games are going to go through the immense effort of bypassing APIs (or even have the technical muscle to do so) when they code for the WiiU. It's just not efficient!

Here's hoping that we get some intrepid devs on the platform, who are able to squeeze every last ounce out of that GPU...

yay... this is great news, indeed.  seems like the perfect game to show off some of the innovative ways the controller can be used!

mostly to comfort others, that tessellation is not a microsoft protected thing... it is free for all, and wii U, will use that. As many people think that this feature appeared in direct x 10-11, so it belongs to MS.. Its not true.. (direct x made use of it..) Nintendo can update their api's and use it also.. simple as that.

ah... yes, good point. i guess people do seem to think that tessellation was invented with DX11, lol (as if breaking polygons into smaller pieces was anything new)... and I definitely agree that Nintendo developers will be able to make use of some of these advanced processes (after all, many devs admitted that they could have pushed the wii a lot farther if they wanted too, even with the gpu's "fixed" pipeline, by emulating shaders using the wii processor's existing tools). out of curiosity, do you personally think that the gpu Nintendo chooses will be a capable piece of hardware, able to support the kind of demanding processes that make cutting-edge graphics really "pop" these days?

tessellation is not a software feature, its a hardware feature, existed from 3xxx or 2xxx series amd cards (cant remember which nvidia series tessellation was a feature), they just used it very recently, its not because of direct x.. So basically Wii U is the first console that will use tessellation.

ok, yes... i was once again not being specific. while "tessellation" has been around for a very long time, it is MUCH more effective in the latest batch of high-end GPUs, which allow displacement mapping to work seemlessly with streamlined, instantly-scaleable tessellation processes when over a billion triangles are being rendered at any given second - the parallel units (and engine rasters) allowing for a much more dynamic programmable pipeline...

... and, while the tessellation itself is handled by hardware, it seems pretty misleading to me to say that APIs like Direct3D have NOTHING to do with its effective implementation (but that may not have been your point)...

Wasnt direct X for Microsoft only?

well, technically DirectX is just a set of APIs that allow software to communicate with hardware... but yes, it was developed specifically by Microsoft for Microsoft, and is proprietary. To my knowledge, Xbox/360 is the only console to actually use a version of DirectX. Sony and Nintendo have their own libraries, optimised specifically to suite their graphics cards (and OS). When people (well, me at least) talk about a console "supporting DirectX11", they are probably talking about the set of features supported by that version of Direct3D (the graphics API in the DirectX suite)... things like tesselation, multithread rendering, and some advanced blending modes.

Some of these features are really revolutionary, but they depend upon the GPU being able to receive certain kinds of programmable instructions...

I just hope that Nintendo's GPU is better than what we're being told!

wow, this would be an interesting turn, indeed... I'm not inclined to believe it, as most of the "interviews" with "developers" that have been "leaked" (I put all of this in scare quotes in an attempt to acknowledge what everyone is constantly pointing out about the lack of any real method of confirmation) have referred to DirectX10 support only... but it would sure be nice.

i have a hard time seeing Nintendo spring for a powerful gpu... i just do. the solid, quality, efficient ones are too expensive, and the alternatives are all too risky, inefficient, etc. As you pointed out, Nintendo's hardware has been nothing if not reliable.

They bought it a few years back, it's first party now.

wow, this is good to know... and yeah, I'm really excited for Monolith's future games. Thanks to jono for bringing this studio up...

Metroid Prime
Metroid Other M

LOL... exactly!!! It's kind of like saying you don't mind which director makes your comic book movie as long as it gets made (*sob, sob*)... and we all know how that has worked out for us...

I'm interested in whatever company gets to make the next Starfox game.

YES, YES, and HECK YES... and, at risk of being droll/predictable, I'd really love it if it turned out to be Retro.

I want it to be like the Vita's touchscreen. As far as touchscreens go, it's pretty good.

Agreed... a capacative (OLED) screen with a decent physical texture to its surface and good point correction for multi-touch is actually very nice for gaming, though as several people have already pointed out, all the plans that have been mentioned have indicated a resistive, single-touch screen (ergo, the stylus).

Believe me people, you do NOT want a capacitive touchscreen for gaming.

Right... because NOBODY uses their iPhone for playing games... oh wait!

Seriously, though, the iPhone/iPad screen is (technically speaking) WAY more responsive than the DS variety of old, old, old resistive screens. It responds to a very light touch and can be incredibly precise (ask any Infinity Blade enthusiast).

I think gamers can easily get used to either style though, to be honest, so I'm not too worried about the WiiU controller in this department

I want a diversity of games, because everybody has a different definition of fun. I have fun with Mario to God of War to Zelda to Uncharted.

agreed, and I think this is the hope for me as well. perhaps the true gaming enthusiasts are the ones who have replied consistently that they really just want a fun game from any genre, and I really respect that, too. I think I, personally, tend to be a "mood" gamer who wants the title I'm playing to match a particular theme that i'm currently "in to"... and I think I was wondering where the real pulse is in gaming, and what would bring these dedicated gamers to the new console in droves (because I want to see the new system succeed)

You always get your Nintendo fans who are hoping for amazing performance from new Nintendo consoles and on the face of it, its realistic to expect the wii U to be more powerful than 360/PS3 because of the wii U being much later but both of those consoles were brought to market making a huge loss and financially neither have been successful...
Personally I think the new Xbox and PS4/Orbis won't be as ambitious as many are hoping for either. So we may find that despite the wii U not being as powerful as we hoped it still won't be that far behind Orbis and PS4 which may end up being only 2-5x as powerful as the earlier generations. The xbox 360 is at least 10x as powerful as the original xbox overall and I don't think we are going to get that difference this time around. I think its all about launching at a competitive price point. I personally think this is the sane thing to do. I went through about 7 faulty 360s as I was an early adopter and it was a complete farce. My 60GB PS2 compatible PS3 has never gone wrong but many have reported problems. This time around it seems like consoles will use mature technology that will hopefully be robust and reliable which I'm quite happy about.

Also lets not forget the wii U will have advantages not directly understood on analysis of the specification to do with modern manufacturing processes. If the gpu, gpu memory, cpu, cpu cache and a few other functions are all integrated onto one large i.c. then the wii U will have incredibly low latency and huge memory bandwidth which will enable the console to be pushed beyond what you expect for the hardware and even just fitting 768M or 1GB of memory gives it clear advantages over 360 and PS3. Also the wii U has a high density optical drive which the 360 hasn't.

this is just a perfectly-phrased analysis... thanks for this

Miyamoto's new IP, perhaps? Monolith's next game (Xenoblade is amazing, after all)? A potential new IP from Retro?

yeah, man... i totally forgot about Monolith for some reason. just the thought makes me stoked for the future. and I'm DYING for a new Retro IP!

They need games that make 14 year old boys feel like they own the world and are special and can blow things up.

That's for today's "hardcore gamer".
The rest of us just want a fun game.

yes, yes, you're clever in your satire and i certainly understand your point... but I don't want to write off those "14 year old boys" simply due to their conventionally touted narcicism! I mean, I like to blow things up too (and own the world, come to think of it)... aren't those valid avenues of enjoyment in video games, after all? I loved sim-city on the SNES, and Blast Corps was fun on the N64 because I got to blow things up. I played both smash bros. and goldeneye at college because I wanted to "own" my friends (and I had to break down and move on to Halo when it came along because Nintendo wasn't willing to continue pushing into new territory on this road... though they made what I consider to be the best first steps of anyone).

I doubt that you yourself have criteria as simple as "a fun game"... right? I mean, what kind of game do you like to play? What would make you run out to buy a new console that you hadn't planned on purchasing already?

I just think that, if Nintendo wants to reach a broad range of gaming enthusiasts, it will need "fun games" of both the endearing-characters-in-charming-environments-trying-to-solve-engaging-puzzles variety, as well as the intense-sci-fi-ownage-with-big-explosions-and-stuff variety.

I'd like to see F-Zero but a little bit like StarFox adventures. I mean half of the time would be racing, while the other half would be an (open?) world adventure game. It would be IMO amazing.

man, this is an amazing idea... actually most of them are things I could get really excited about.  i wish I had been following this post more closely!  what strikes me is how many of these ideas are really innovative ways of "expanding" current franchises into new territory

... What?

I just don't think that amazing tech specs would do it... you couldn't make an affordable console that could approach what PCs are doing atm, even if you wanted to.

Like the recently made statement says, it's got to be the games... but what kind of games? Certainly 3rd party ports with marginally better graphics won't do it (why buy a whole new system so you can play the new Battlefield with a few more particle/lighting effects?).

Is it the HD versions of beloved franchises like Metroid and Zelda? Will that bring people to the big N (or bring them back)?

Is it a new 1st party IP? Some good 1st/2nd party exclusives?

I wonder this in all sincerity, as I often waver in my own resolve to pick the system up at launch. What kind of game would it take to put me in line on day one, happy to fork over my $400 for hardware + game?

At the moment, I think that in the absense of a serious reboot (i.e. full reimagining) of Zelda/Metroid/StarFox, it would take a rather epic new adventure game to capture me hook-line-and-sinker. I really want a fresh and compelling universe (no matter who it comes from) - one that I could only get on Nintendo's console; something as captivating as Uncharted, as addicting as Halo, but as polished and solid as Mario. Ninty has taken the risk before with games like Eternal Darkness... and I think it will take that kind of boldness to attract the gaming enthusiast.

What does everyone else think?

I think Jikayaki's (very valid) point is that a console version of Monster Hunter simply WILL NOT sell as well as a portable version, even though it costs more to make... at least as long as the franchise remains mainly a Japanese affair.

For reference, Monster Hunter Tri has sold roughly 1 million copies in Japan (the US numbers are rather abysmally low in comparison).

Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, for the PSP, was released the very next year and has sold more than 4.5 million copies to date (and is still going relatively strong).

Console versions just don't make business sense to Capcom...

1. Being that the 1st party offerings we've seen so far have been pretty slim, I would certainly bet on some big announcements/reveals at E3.  Nintendo has historically been pretty good at keeping quiet about big projects (with some notable slips, as mentioned above).

2. As everyone else says, it's very unlikely.  Announcing the specs creates a centrifugal force, propelling people away from the tightly-controllable presentations and hyped-up game teasers at the conference as they run off to coldly prophesy/calculate the system's potential in terms of numerical values on their own.  Nintendo wants to coax and guide your thought process and your expectations through engagement with their experiences, helping you to see their project as they envision it; not turn you loose to spiral down into the paranoia of a tech-based inferiority complex.  I mean, have you heard some of the crazy-unrealistic hopes that people have for this tech?  No console could live up to these expectations in terms of raw power...

lol... flc, you crack me up.

On the topic-side of things... I guess consoles are kind of in a tight spot right now with where to shoot, spec-wise. They just CAN'T make something on par with high-end PCs, because consumers won't pay that much for a console, and they can't cheap out on the specs because people have seen games running on high-end PCs and tend to expect similar experiences...

On the other hand, the functional gap really is not that big right now. Yes, Crysis 2 really does look astounding on a gaming PC with all the settings cranked to 11... but the difference between that and the Xbox360 version of the game is still not as big as the difference between, say, Black Ops on Xbox360 and Black Ops on Wii. Whatever Microsoft and Sony manage to squeeze out for their next generation, it will certainly not represent a challenge for 3rd party ports to the WiiU. The real question, as has been said, is whether or not the lost fanbase even cares about Nintendo any more...

ok, ok, everyone... it's clear that Nintendo isn't saying that their console will be "underpowered" by telling fans to focus on games rather than specs...

but seriously, who can deny that this kind of statement pushes certain kinds of very predictable response buttons in people's heads? Is Nintendo really ignorant of the fact that people are GOING to hear "underpowered" when you tell them not to think about specs?

I just think that it is a very disappointing angle to take with consumers... I mean, they point blank admitted that what "a lot of people like" (dissecting specs) doesn't really matter to them, and that kind of statement can be disheartening to consumers already suffering from trust issues with a company due to its perceived willingness to ignore them.

Nintendo's track record with hardware has included a great number of significant lost opportunities due to the decisions that they have made, and I think that people have a right to be nervous about this...

When nintendo says "specs dont matter, enjoy the game" its a turn off for many hard core gamers, because we know what good specs do and thats what we want. (Its because the knowledge hard core gamers have, from pc mostly... its not just a fetish to see good specs.. because hard core gamers, know very well, what does what.. inside the machine )

lol... yeah, as a loyal apologist for Nintendo since the NES days (where is your hedgehog now, you smug, smug SEGA kids from my childhood!!!) I have had ample opportunity to appreciate the irony of my posture toward the company. On the one hand, it feels somewhat awkward being told by a company what you want ("no Mikey, you want to play with this now... that thing that you think you want really doesn't matter at all")... but on the other hand, the people have crafted some of the most compelling, enjoyable, and beloved IPs of all time, and there's something to their idea that the experience is built of far more than visual complexity.

I do agree with you when you say that their attitude will not win back the so-called "hardcore" gamer (and I like your distinction between hardcore and enthusiast... it is quite a useful distinction). The people that they lost are not the mindless trend-followers that they are so often painted to be (as much as I would love to indulge in the vindication afforded by that caricature) - they are consumers, with money, who know what they want, and they will spend money on what they want. They are interested in a certain aesthetic, and a certain kind of horizon of wonder that is afforded by cutting-edge technology, and I don't really think that they will be persuaded that what they actually want is solid play mechanics within a fresh and robust approach to interactivity in games... no matter how compelling the experience might really turn out to be.

yeah, none of the info on these links is new, and it's STILL just rumor and speculation! this disparity between reports is really starting to wear my nerves thin... especially as my personality is disposed to believe the doom-and-gloom "not-even-as-powerful-as-the-current-gen" reports over the rainbows and unicorns reports of a mega-machine that will soar confidently into the next generation of technology.