Alex Atkin UK

Build quality is better on Xbox One?  I beg to differ.

 

It seems clear to me they hadn't a clue about case design so just picked a plain box and kept the PSU external so they didn't have to come up with a good design for the cooling.  To me a company that is able to build a case with a bespoke cooling system so they can keep the PSU inside the case is clearly superior when it comes to build quality.

 

When you see the two consoles taken apart the Xbox One looks like I threw it together from off the shelf PC parts, the PS4 is clearly more intricately designed from scratch.

 

Both consoles are flawed by how deep they are though, very awkward to fit on a shallow shelf which all previously consoles had no problems with.

 

Another thing about Xbox One is why have two USB ports on the back when it supports external HDDs?  That means they expect you leave them plugged in all the time and even the one on the left is awkward.  The PS4 clearly wins there too IMO with easily accesible USB ports, although a bit narrow so you cannot fit some USB sticks in without an extension.

 

Now before anyone comments, the Wii/Wii U I count as decent designs because the reason THEY have the PSU external is to keep the console as small as possible - clearly not the reason on Xbox One a its HUGE.

 

Of course the REAL build quality will only really be known in a few years when we see the failure rate on the hardware.  But in general I consider external PSUs a bad idea particularly for Xbox where it has a fan that people forget to keep clear of dust because its stuck down the back of a cabinet somewhere.

Same here its 20mbit. with normal wifi (80% of my connection). 3ds however sucks to dl with.

 

with 32gb internal.

 

The problem is its STILL 20Mbit max even on 100Mbit broadband which when downloading a large game is annoying.

 

That makes sense over WiFi, its only capable to around 30-40Mbit at best, but on Ethernet it should be able to hit close to 100Mbit.

 

That said, even the PS4 only goes around 40Mbit.

• EskobarM92 likes this

Way to go guys, lets insult the game before you have even PLAYED it.

From what I can see, there is WAY more going on Watch Dogs than Second Son.

I mean I LOVED Second Son, its a gorgeous game and their particle engine is insane.  But when it comes to physics and personality of the AI characters, even from the trailers Watch Dogs looks superior.

Am I the only person who realises just how much effort it takes to simulate wind interactions and the lighting of Watch Dogs so you can actually cause the blackouts?  Even the little things like being able to crash into an electricity sub-station to cause a blackout, not just hacking, its a level of interactivity we haven't really seen before.  I think there are going to be a LOT of little details in Watch Dogs that the trailers have yet to really get across, you have to experience them.

You can only ever get a true picture of how good a game world in when you actually PLAY it and feel the world around you.  Sure some of the animations might be choppy (I haven't seen it), but if there are 1000 more of those animations than any other game its totally excusable.

This game is finally making me feel happy to own a Wii U again.  I just hope I am better at it than MK7 lol.

Whats innovative about the Wii U?

 

Sticking a touchscreen in the controller is no more/less innovative than a touchpad on the controller.  Heck, the Wii U is lacking one of the most useful things on modern consoles - the analog triggers.  I also find it the least ergonomic controller in a long while ESPECIALLY from Nintendo.  Both the N64 and Gamecube controllers felt comfortable in your hands, the Wii U Gamepad does not.

 

Its more about evolution.  The PS4 is an improvement on PS3 (hugely on the controller, its actually comfortable which no dualshock has ever been for me), the Xbox One is (or will be, once they put the functionality back in the OS) an evolution of the Xbox 360 + Kinect, they are just refinements over what went before.

 

If anything, the PS4 is the biggest improvement because I hated its old controller so much and it inherited the speaker in the controller that really enhanced surround sound.

 

For the record, I do find the touchscreen on Wii U useful especially for inventory management.  But when playing games like LEGO City Undercover, I never once felt that "this game plays better BECAUSE of the touchscreen".  It would have been just as much fun without the gimmicky bits.  Same when playing LEGO Marvel on PS4, the only time the touchscreen would have been useful is the map and the ONLY reason that was an issue is because the game was poorly optimised so took a few seconds to display the map screen.  Had it been better optimised so the map appeared instantly, it would have been no better as if you have to take your eyes off the TV you might as well just display it on the TV in the first place.

What i mean is all the features on ps4 are available on ps3 or its easy to create on ps3

 

No they are not, because of the huge increase in RAM mainly.  Also the fact it can access the HDD quicker than PS3.

 

Streaming to twitch.tv/Remote Play/Saving your last 15 minutes of gameplay.  This is all done due to hardware encoding, the PS3 didn't have that which is why only a few games worked with remote play as those games had to specifically use LESS CPU power for the game and be optimised to work with the software video streaming tech.  Also to be able to remote play from power off you effectively had to leave the PS3 powered on, the PS4 uses ten times less electricity in standby than the PS3 did in remote play off mode.  Likewise the PS4 will be able to suspend your current game in RAM and go into standby in the future, so you can instantly resume playing.

 

Then there is just general OS improvements.  Being able to go into the Playstation Store without quitting your active game, how quickly you can go look at your trophies without quitting the game (PS3 is very slow as it has a tiny amount of RAM for system tasks), how background downloading works.  Its just a more pleasant OS to use and that is because of the improvements in the hardware.

 

These are the sorts of improvements I expected Wii U to have over Wii and sadly it does not.  Its still slow and clunky going into different sections of the OS.

• Auzzie Wingman and Mignaga like this

You also have to bear in mind that the TV in use will make a BIG difference.

 

When I upgraded to a TV with horrific input lag it was particularly obvious on the Wii.

Yet companies like eurogamer say otherwise.

No, they said that when trying to PORT a game that is completely optimised for Xbox 360/PS3 to Wii U, its hard and expensive.

Its unlikely small indie devs ever pushed those consoles that hard, its certainly unlikely they heavily optimised the engine.

As an example, it should be very easy to port between ALL platforms when using Unity, as the engine developers did the most important work of optimising for each platform.  However if your game heavily modified the engine or was optimised for specific consoles over the past 7 years, its going to be very very hard to port to Wii U.

The question is not "is the Wii U more powerful than Xbox 360/PS3" because the answer is clearly yes.  The question is can your game be ported to Wii U and actually take advantage of its unique architecture so you are actually tapping that power, in a cost effective manner.  So logically for small indie projects the answer is more likely to be yes than for the big developers like the Eurogamer articles are clearly from.

Bottom line, PS4/Xbox One are enough of a jump forwards to temporarily offset the problem of optimisation.  Combine that with the fact many games are also ported to PC anyway, so they already have a version of the engine partially optimised for PS4/Xbox One hardware.  Even if they don't, they have the PS4, Xbox One AND PC market that benefit from doing so, making it cost effective.  The fact that optimising for Wii U benefits ONLY Wii U, is by far its biggest stumbling block and is what those big developers are moaning about.

• 3Dude likes this

I read it. Sounds like someone's butthurt over Nintendo not doing his job for him.

 

I disagree, its clear that Nintendo screwed up.  No way a developer should have been struggling to get a simple "Hello World" to run on a new console and if the debugger has issues, how exactly do you expect the developer to do their job?  Having to GUESS that the network code would work okay because you couldn't run it on proper debugging mode, seriously?

 

It sounded clear to me that Nintendo made it almost impossible for them to do their job and the end results makes it seem totally plausible.  Its perfectly understandable that with a poor experience like that, no developer is going to give it a second chance.

 

I mean come on, the sheer fact that the WiiU OS is still such a slow laggy mess should be a clue.  Sony aren't exactly fantastic when it comes to OS coding but the improvements between PS3 and PS4 are huge, its finally is up to Xbox 360 quality of experience (when ironically the Xbox One seems WORSE).  In comparison the WiiU OS experience is just a joke.  If the end user experience is poor, I can only imagine how bad the underlying code must be.

 

I am still very much looking forward to Mario Kart and Zelda, but that's not going to make me say the WiiU is something its not.  The only thing I can really say that is positive about the WiiU OS is that the backwards compatibility is fantastic.  Although that said, they could easily have made it compatible all the way back to Gamecube and I wouldn't have to go out and buy a Classic Controller to play N64 games.  So even there, its not perfect.

• EvilMoogle likes this

yes i know, but they don't need to have TVii or whatever it's called, all they need is a app.

 

You still seem to be missing the point of TVii, that you only need to perform a single search to obtain results from ALL the services you have. 

 

So if you searched for Doctor Who it would tell you which episodes are available on iPlayer, Netflix and Lovefilm.  Even though I never use Netflix on WiiU due to the lack of surround sound support, I would use this.

• NintendoReport likes this

I think saying that basing a console on PC hardware is being "lazy" is very narrow minded.

 

The point is that costs have been constantly going up and if developers say they need thing to be easier you would be a fool to ignore them.

 

You also make it sound like neither Sony or Microsoft did any customisation at all which is not true.  They did exactly what Nintendo did, started with off-the-shelf designs and revised them accordingly.  The PS4 has a custom network processor and DSP, the Xbox One also has a custom DSP although arguably sticks much closer to the PC design - but as the company who makes Windows that is hardly surprising.

 

Consoles were custom because they had to be, PCs were very inefficient and this has slowly improved.  Nintendo stick with custom because it means exclusive titles have a huge advantage, but that is also why their key titles have taken so long to come out on Wii U.  Its also really annoyed the third-parties which is hardly a logical business decision.

 

So if anything, I would say its Nintendo that are shooting themselves in the foot here stubbornly refusing to change with the times.

Its nothing to do with flash memory wearing out as it only wears from writes and installed games will be reading not writing, except when saving the game.  The Wii U internal memory is still flash memory, as well as most game console memory cards.  I use a USB memory stick on Xbox 360 and that writes quite a bit in some games, it hasn't failed yet.  Good flash memory will more than likely last LONGER than a modern HDD, as you would have to write a LOT to wear it out whereas HDDs age regardless of use.  The only caveat being that flash memory only retains data for about 10 years after it is written, so making sure everything on there is re-written periodically is a good idea.

 

The reason they do not recommend using USB sticks is purely due to the fact their speed varies from downright awful up to really good, whereas even the slowest HDD will perform good enough.  That's why on Xbox 360 they actually benchmark the memory card when you format it to let you know if meets the recommended specifications, something perhaps Nintendo should also do rather than discouraging their use.

 

As long as you use good memory sticks, they will work fine.  I use a relatively slow memory stick (doesn't meet the Xbox 360 recommendations) in my Wii U as it speeds up downloads compared to using internal memory, and it works exactly the same as internal memory.  On the other hand when I tried a HDD it kept telling me it had been removed, I think because the external PSU for the caddy was loose.  So memory sticks are actually a good option.

The best way to look at a game engine is like building a car.  If you had to build a car entirely from scratch, including designing and building every single part, it would take ages and be very very difficult, time consuming and expensive. However, building a car from existing off-the-shelf components, or even a kit, is much simpler and cheaper.

 

A game engine is basically the same principle, a bunch of existing components you can assemble how you like to create a game.  It allows you to concentrate on how those components combine together to make your game.

For starters, Ghosts looks carp even on the best PC so is the LAST game you should be comparing.

 

AC4, even the developer has admitted that its not much of a showcase of next-gen due to it being designed cross generation.  Plus, you used the least impressive scene of the whole game to compare AND its just been patched up to 1080p as apparently the launch version was only 900p.

 

The place in AC4 where you really see the difference are on the ship during a storm.  The PS4 version has a LOT more rain and you see waves washing over the deck of the ship.  Also any shot where you see the sun shining through the sails of the ship look impressive, although I'm not sure if the WiiU has that effect too I just know it looks vastly improved over current-gen on those bits.

That is also why I claimed a few times that "perhaps" some games on PS4/Xbone CAN'T be ported to Wii U.

 

For example, if they used 10% of those consoles GPU for GPGPU that would potentially work out as much as the entire Wii U GPU.

 

Now how likely it is that they would do that, I do not know, but its certainly theoretically possible.

 

Its one thing to scale graphics down to fit a less powerful GPU, but once they start relying on GPGPU I doubt that will scale quite the same way as AI, physics, etc may be tied the how the whole game works.  It just wouldn't be worth hobbling the PC, PS4 and Xbox One versions of a game "just" to make it work on Wii U.  Of course, they MIGHT make a Wii U exclusive version from the ground up, but the above article suggests they would not want to do that.  Besides, the Wii multi-platform games which did that were largely panned for being completely different to the 360/PS3 versions.

If the latest tests are anything to go by the WiFi performance is much improved. 

 

If http://www.broadband...dchecker.co.uk/ is to be believed:

Wireless: 30739Kbit down, 3071Kbit up. (this is about right for 65Mbit WiFi, you only get around half the link speed due to overheads)

Wired: 59415Kbit down, 3277Kbit up.

 

Actual downloads from the shop however still remain below 20Mbit even when downloading to USB storage.  Its nice that Nintendo have added progress details now though (how many MB done so far out of total size) although it would be better if they included a MB/s measurement too.

 

Its STILL annoying that its limited to 65Mbit link speed as I would expect at LEAST 150Mbit and ideally 300Mbit capable.