What Developers Want From the Wii's Successor

donniebaseball23 writes "Wii 2 rumors are flying in advance of Nintendo's official reveal at E3 in June, but what would game developers like to see in a Wii successor? 'Without a doubt, my first request would be for an improved digital marketplace more along the lines of XBLA and PSN,' said one developer. 'We'd love more processing power, which is essential, and a better GPU as well,' said another." A related article asks whether a high-powered new console really fits with Nintendo's strategy: "Nintendo is undoubtedly building its new system around a chipset it can buy for cheap and develop for with ease, and it'll be the system's peripheral capabilities (literally peripheral, if rumors of its fancy controller pan out) that catch people's attention — that the company will bank on using as the hook for consumers."

Anticipated Hardware Specs

[Apple Acolyte]

I hope I'm wrong, but I hear serious Nintendo fans vastly overestimating the hardware capabilities of the successor to the Wii. They're hoping for hardware that will rival next gen offerings from Sony and Microsoft despite the fact that Nintendo has shown it doesn't want to compete in that high-end console space anymore. I hope I'm wrong though. With all Nintendo's success in the last generation perhaps they can come out with a Wii successor that has beefy hardware.

Re:High Def

[serviscope_minor]

It's a serious embarrassment to have a modern gaming console still outputting SD video quality.

If by "embarrassment", you mean "top selling console that never had to be sold at a loss" and "massive profit", then yes they should be embarrassed. I would like to be embarrassed like that too.

Re:OT, but...

[declain]

And we are also tired of:

Are Linux users lemmings collectively jumping off of the cliff of reliable, well-engineered commercial software? -- Matt Welsh

Re:OT, but...

[thegarbz]

They are aware. They just don't give a damn.

No one can release an update this buggy and not do a thing for so long otherwise. I love comments of massive depth where clicking on the reply textbox will simply expand the above comment and defocus the reply text box. Yes great feature that one.

And tell me again why the "Working" symbol flashes up for 3 seconds when I ctrl-F4 the page away!

Re:Anticipated Hardware Specs

[metalmaster]

compared to?

.....and no, PC is not the answer. I cannot walk into a big box and pick up a budgetbox($399 orso) that has outpaced the PS3. The offerings I find will have a mid-range dual core processor or maybe a cheap quad core thats worse off. It'll have integrated graphics that would struggle to render modern games, and I'd be lucky if it had HDMI/DVI. Simply put, thats shit. The hardware is still tops for the console market

Whats more, the games designed for consoles work(for the most part) for consoles. Devs dont have to worry about supporting a shitload of hardware configurations; thers one.

Re:High Def

[BenoitRen]

Analog for the win, because it doesn't have lag.

Re:Nintendo doesn't have a choice, they must compe

[ProppaT]

They didn't get away with anything on the GameCube. It was a highly competent system that blew the PS2 out of the water and nearly matched the X-Box with processing power. It was a fantastic system that came out at a weird time and just never gained traction. Had Reggie been at the helm when the GameCube launched, we might have seen a different outcome.

Why should console game hardware be vastly superior to PC design? Your TV only does 1080p at best, with the majority of HDTV's out there being 720p. Granted, newer consoles need to allow for higher resolution textures, but when we have videocards pushing 3 monitors at a time these days, we certainly don't need anything that powerful. Not only that, I don't want to have to pay for anything that expensive.

The Wii 2 has to be able to do things your PC can't? The Wii already does that. I don't see your PC using anything like the Wiimote for input. That's the difference. Also, I'm thinking you're going to have a hard time playing a FPS in your lay-z-boy with a PC.

And a modular design would be absurd for a console. You'd end up fragmenting the console user base with too many configurations. Then you'd end up with the inefficiency of PC games, where software vendors have to take a massive array of different configurations into account. The beauty of console games are that you can highly optimize them for a specific hardware set, thereby letting you get away with less powerful hardware. If you look at Nintendo's past, it's riddled with add-ons, ram upgrades, etc. that never caught on. That's because console games want to take the console out of the box and never have to touch it. Once you make the investment, that's it for the lifetime of the console.