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Weekend Confirmed 97 - Nintendo 3DS and Wii U plans, FF13-2, Dustforce
by Garnett Lee, Jan 27, 2012 2:30pm PSTWith the holiday lull drawing to a close, Jeff returns to the cast just in time for Xav's last show as an official Shacker. Ariel Angelotti and Christian Spicer also join the show making this a fearsome fivesome with Garnett. There's plenty on the table, too, with Ariel sharing her experience with the Japanese version of Final Fantasy XIII-2 in advance of its US release next week, news from Nintendo's financial briefing including an update on 3DS and Wii U plans, budding love for Dustforce, Insomniac's farewell to Resistance, and more making the time fly by to the wrap-up with Finishing Moves.
Weekend Confirmed Ep. 97: 01/27/2012
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If you're viewing this in the GameFly application, you can play Weekend Confirmed Episode 97 directly.
Weekend Confirmed comes in four segments to make it easy to listen to in segments or all at once. Here's the timing for this week's episode:
Show Breakdown:
Round 1 00:00:00 to 00:26:56
Whatcha Been Playing Part 1 00:27:31 to 00:57:24
Whatcha Been Playing Part 2 00:58:21 to 01:24:55
Listener Feedback/Front Page News 01:25:55 to 02:03:57
Original music in the show by Del Rio. Get his latest Album, The Wait is Over on iTunes. Check out more, including the Super Mega Worm mix and other mash-ups on his ReverbNation page or Facebook page, and follow him on twitter delriomusic.
Jeff Cannata can also be seen on The Totally Rad Show. They've gone daily so there's a new segment to watch every day of the week!
Follow the Weekend Confirmed hosts on Twitter, too! Garnett Lee @GarnettLee, Jeff Cannata @jeffcannata, and Xav de Matos @xav.
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Comments
I'm wondering, where will Nintendo choose to go with the next generation? They've invested money in better graphics, new hardware etc, do you thing they will choose to go after the "hardcore" "AAA title" market? Or do you think they will stay with their "casual" audience?
I think they could do really well in the hardcore market, maybe start with titles like Call of Duty, or develop similar titles, instead of just relying on the standard Mario/Zelda formula.
So, what are your guy's thoughts on the future of Nintendo? Do you thnk they will take the risk of going after the hardcore audience, or play it safe?
PS: Thanks for answering/discussin my question last week. You guys brought up some good points. Unfortunately it really is just becoming the standard, and is a result of the age we're in.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 6 replies.
More specifically, most reports put the Wii-U between two and five Xbox 360's duct-taped together. The most generous report states that the next Xbox will be around six times as powerful as the 360, but only about 20 percent more powerful than the Wii-U. We'll see. I for one think that Zelda demo from E3 looked awesome, and would love to see that as a baseline for Wii-U's graphical fidelity.
I think it's been confirmed what graphics card series the Wii-U's GPU will be based off of, and I hear it roughly correlates to 2008-era PC-gaming technology - definitely more powerful than the current consoles, but by how much is up in the air. In regards to the other upcoming consoles, the increasingly popular prediction is that they definitely will not be able to render graphics like Epic's Samaritan demo. It's very possibly next gen Xbox games will look more like the PC versions of Battlefield 3, The Witcher 2, and Crysis 2 with effects cranked up to max.
But if you want a bottom line right now it's this: we really don't know shit.
As for their focus, I think Nintendo has confirmed they want to recapture the core gaming audience, but I still think they need to keep the casual audience as well. I obviously haven't held that controller, but I don't see the problem with it. It has all the buttons of a standard controller but adds the touch screen. Where the Wii Remote complicated, replaced, removed some possibilities that game designers were accustomed to, the Wii-U controller only adds to them. It's like a console version of the DS really, and developers are becoming more and more accustomed to designing games for touch screens.
I think the Wii-U's success depends primarily on two things:
1) Repeating the casual phenomenon: They'll need to have a big-seller like Wii-Sports or at the very least Mario Kart again at or near launch. Just to let people know that this is the successor to the Wii. They'll need to keep that up.
2) The support of western third party developers: Nintendo's third party issues since the Gamecube era have been problems with western third parties that aren't EA or Ubisoft. I don't think the Japanese companies will have a problem with the system (I wouldn't be surprised if a Wii-U version of Resident Evil 6 got announced at E3 since that franchise has a base on Nintendo hardware). The issue is the slightly smaller but more important guys like Rockstar, Irrational, BioWare, Visceral, etc. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Ubisoft announced a Wii-U version of Assassin's Creed III at E3, and you know the next Call of Duty will be on there, but it troubles me that the Wii-U isn't getting BioShock Infinite for instance.
The problem is that those developers don't really have any experience with Nintendo hardware in terms of marketing their games. They haven't been assured that Nintendo gamers will buy their games and many have been convinced of the opposite when there's little-to-no evidence to support it. I don't know how Nintendo is gonna overcome that problem. Maybe offer to publish one of their future games like the relationship Epic has with Microsoft in regards to Gears of War. Maybe make a big western-appealing game themselves.
Apparently Nintendo (Retro Studios more specifically I think) recently grabbed up guys from developers like Vigil, Naughty Dog, and Crytek, the last of whom was the guy primarily responsible for porting the CryEngine 3 to consoles. They definitely have something cooking in that area.
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