Wii U immediate reaction

[Dread Cthulhu]

I was impressed with it, but then again, i was impressed with most things at E3.

[nemarious]

I've set up a new thread asking who you think won E3, check it out

http://forums.kametsu.com/showthread.php?t=17836

[Edder]

I got some new info on the wii U. nothing exceptional, but still interesting. I also saw a few pics from the new legend of Zelda, and its looking amazing!!

Well we weren’t expecting the Wii U to be “cheap”, but just how much will the new system cost? Below you’ll find a few quotes from Nintendo President, Satoru Iwata.

In an interview with CVG, Iwata wouldn’t get into the exact pricing of the Wii U but he did admit “This is not going to be cheap.” He continued by saying Wii U will probably cost more than 20,000 yen (about $250) when it’s released next year.

In another interview, Iwata told the London Evening Standard that Nintendo should have handled the system’s reveal a little different.

“Because we put so much emphasis on the controller, there appeared to be some misunderstandings. We should have made more effort to explain how it works.

We haven’t made any kind of blunder, but I should have shown a single picture of the new console, then started talking about the controller. The console is not drastically different, and Wii U is about the controller. The console itself will be almost invisible.

What Wii U will offer is very different, but I believe we have the strong potential to change the entire format of videogames and of entertainment.”

Now we can’t expect the Wii U to cost less then the Wii did when it was launched ($249.99), but with the PlayStation 3 now retailing for $299.99, and the Xbox 360 for as little as $199.99, what do you think the perfect price point for the Wii U is? Of course there’s still the controller issue to think about as well, another unknown – We can’t see the controller being any more (or less) then $99.99, but who knows? Tell us your thoughts below.

[nemarious]

Well, I don't know about the States but the Wii launched over here (UK) for £200 so I would expect about £250 for the Wii U and maybe $300-$325 in the US.

Having said that though the 3DS is about £200 over here so I think Nintendo may have to either increase the price beyond that so there is more of a difference between the consoles, or indeed, reduce the price of the 3DS.

I still can't see myself purchasing one immediately anyway.

We've also got to bear in mind that, in Europe at least, Nintendo cannot control the RRP of a price because of regulations to prevent different parts of Europe from having different prices. Instead, they control the price the sell it to the stores and recommend an RRP of say £250 but there may be a price war - like with the 3DS - and the prices start lower.

Once again, Edder, thanks for you information.

[Edder]

Well, I don't know about the States but the Wii launched over here (UK) for £200 so I would expect about £250 for the Wii U and maybe $300-$325 in the US.

Having said that though the 3DS is about £200 over here so I think Nintendo may have to either increase the price beyond that so there is more of a difference between the consoles, or indeed, reduce the price of the 3DS.

I still can't see myself purchasing one immediately anyway.

We've also got to bear in mind that, in Europe at least, Nintendo cannot control the RRP of a price because of regulations to prevent different parts of Europe from having different prices. Instead, they control the price the sell it to the stores and recommend an RRP of say £250 but there may be a price war - like with the 3DS - and the prices start lower.

Once again, Edder, thanks for you information.

[nemarious]

UPDATE:

Crytek - makers of Crisis and the original Far Cry - have announced they are supporting the Wii U, also stating that it will have CryEngine (3.0 presumably) support.

This engine is the same thing that runs Crysis 2 so is a huge boon for the Wii U. Perhaps they'll get a budget port of Crysis 2? I doubt that so far after its release but it would be interesting certainly.

On other news, some analysts are saying that the Wii U could have up to 50% more processing power than the PS3 and Xbox 360 but there has been wildy ranging speculation on that since announcement.

Oh, and it has just come to me that the Wii U must also have Unreal 3 engine support if thinks like Arkham City were announced on it

Whilst CryEngine is certainly more advanced technically (imo) Unreal 3 is used for more commonplace. There you go, that's your engine rundown of the week

[Edder]

WOW!!!! Looks like this new Wii U is really gona pack a punch!! im getting more and more interested in what this little machine is going to be capable of once its complete!! If you look at the way they are building support, it may just be a HUGE hit!! thanks for the update nemarious!!!

[nemarious]

Big update today folks. I was reading an article on gamesindustry.biz and whilst there are a few updates about the CPU in there the majority of it is a pretty interesting read if you know your hardware. Sorry for its length as well, I did paraphrase some of it.

In common with many of the more controversial elements of the Wii U spec, even the screen resolution has not been officially confirmed. However, a resistive 6.2-inch widescreen display sounds very much like the kinds of LCD screen utilised on satnav systems, so an 800x480 resolution with slightly rectangular pixels giving a 16:9 aspect ratio seems plausible and would tie-in with Nintendo's known modus operandi in sourcing off-the-shelf components and repurposing them in innovative ways.

There are other challenges in pursuing a multi-screen approach to gameplay too. It's safe to say that the player's focus can only really be concentrated on a single-screen at a time, and switching focus in a fast-paced game is going to be something that could only be handled with very careful design. There's also the basic reality of RAM: even if we assume that the touchscreen will be handling very basic 3D rendering (or none at all), the Wii U is still going to require a set amount of memory put aside to deal with the multi-screen set-up.

A curious observation we made at E3 concerned the Wii U's use of video transmission technology to switch gameplay from the HDTV to the touchscreen. Nintendo's display featured both screen outputs running on external monitors. At several points we witnessed the transition of gameplay from the HD display to the secondary monitor, and noted that the images were being re-rendered at the lower native res as opposed to being downscaled. Interestingly, this could lead to higher frame-rates on certain games as the fill-rate requirement drops immensely moving from 720p down to 480p.

Looking at the positives, Nintendo has always made excellent game controllers with great ergonomics, and in terms of the size and shape of the Wii U tablet/pad, it's remarkably light and easy to use. Regardless of the provenance or resolution of the 6.2-inch display, picture quality looks good and while there is a clear resolution deficit up against the iOS Retina Display amongst others, the image is bright and sharp.

Details are starting to emerge about the Wii U's hardware technology, limited as they are. IBM has confirmed a bespoke, energy efficient CPU design with a significant amount of embedded DRAM, operating on a 45nm process and based on the POWER architecture. The official IBM Watson Twitter account even goes so far as to confirm that the company's latest POWER7 tech forms the basis of the new CPU, but really it could be nothing else since IBM's prior CPU architectures don't actually have onboard DRAM.

Current POWER7 chips operate with anything between four to eight cores, each with eight threads and featuring access to 4MB of eDRAM. The more accurate end of the Project Cafe rumour mill suggested a tri-core IBM CPU, which would require a significant redesign of the existing architecture, but this doesn't seem too unlikely: POWER7 is a server-level CPU that's monstrously large compared to the typical console CPU, and with IBM confirming a 45nm fabrication process, a basic quad would simply be too large and too hot for the Wii U's diminutive form factor. Indeed, by our reckoning, it would be larger than the 90nm Xenon core in the launch version of the Xbox 360. We'd expect to see the CPU significantly cut-down from its server-targeted sibling, but even so, we'd still hope for a useful performance bump when compared directly against the 360's processor.

Even less is known about the make-up of the AMD graphics core in the Wii U. The notion of it being sourced from the R700 line of AMD GPUs (a two-year-old design) seems likely, but very little evidence of the tech's capabilities could be discerned from the E3 demos.

Few conclusions can be drawn from these demos of course, but it is notable that elements such as anisotropic filtering and multi-sampling anti-aliasing are hardware features that will have been built into the AMD core - quite why they were not being used is a bit of a mystery. Anti-aliasing in particular would have really made a difference to the clean aesthetic that was on display in the Wii-style demos.

There's been plenty of speculation of late about the raw processing capabilities of the Wii U, with the 50 per cent processing boost claim from the pre-E3 rumours once again getting an airing courtesy of Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia. Aside from the odd mention of 1080p (not reflected in the demos), Nintendo has made no effort to distance itself from the 3D capabilities of the current generation consoles to the point where it was happy to showcase PS3 and 360 footage of upcoming cross-platform titles to illustrate forthcoming Wii U releases.

Perhaps more telling are the recent comments from id software technical mastermind John Carmack. He pegs Wii U at the same level as the PS3 and 360, and believes there's plenty of mileage left in the current platforms.

"The technology level... brings it up to parity with the other consoles, which is nice for us," he told Gamespot.

"The current platforms are so powerful and so sophisticated. I don't think there's any person anywhere that can really honestly say they know everything about one of these platforms."

Raw specifics on the Wii U GPU remain unclear, but even AMD's entry level enthusiast GPUs - the RV740-based Radeon HD 4750 and 4770 have an embarrassing amount of graphical power compared to the current Microsoft and Sony consoles. However, the cut-down HD 4650/4670 could be repurposed fairly easily into a tight, compact, efficient console GPU that would be a good match for the current generation consoles. By using modern GPU tech, Nintendo also gains other useful, non-rendering advantages. The Avivo video processing technology should give a significantly superior quality level compared to the first generation implementation seen in the 360's Xenos chip, resulting in superior upscaling and downscaling.

The compact form factor of the Wii U also suggests that Nintendo isn't pushing out the boat on an expensive, power hungry architecture. The machine itself isn't very large, and with a 45nm CPU and what we would expect to be a 40nm graphics chip, Nintendo could be in danger of precipitating another RROD disaster if it went for higher-end, performance-centric components. The pre-production unit at E3 looked to be smaller than the current Xbox 360 Slim - and it contained an internal power supply (something Microsoft continues to externalise), another source of additional heat.

Overall impressions of Wii U are positive if not spectacularly overwhelming once you've had the controller in your hands and you've got some idea of the approach Nintendo is going for with its new design. Rendering performance on a par with Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 is absolutely fine so long as the concepts behind the games produce new and fresh experiences. That's the key challenge going forward, as John Carmack realises.

"I'm kind of excited about the touch-screen aspect on there," he says.

"I think that probably has broader general utility for games than most of the motion control stuff, where you really have to design a game around motion control and you can't just tack it onto a finely crafted FPS. But I think the DS has really shown what the extra little touchscreen can do - almost any game can do something useful with that."

[DrumRoll]

Oh I get it now:)

[nemarious]

Update

Current Wii U development kits are underclocked it would seem (for those that don't know this means that they are deliberately 'weaker' in performance terms than standard. It is the reverse of overclocking). Like everything with this at the moment though, this hasn't been confirmed by Nintendo themselves and is just the opinion of a consultancy group. Still, it's an interesting thought.

Developers working on titles for Wii U are reportedly using development kits which have been underclocked, meaning that the graphics they produce are almost indistinguishable from a PS3 or 360.

A report from consulting firm Hit Detection has suggested that Nintendo chose to show tech demos at it's E3 reveal "due to titles not looking much better than what is currently available on Xbox 360 and the PS3, Nintendo decided late in the game to not show those titles."

"Developers have underclocked development kits, and worked hard to deliver titles running on that hardware to demonstrate live at E3," reads the report.

"THQ stated that Darksiders II was running on development hardware and could have been shown. Also, Epic vice president Mark Rein tweeted during E3 that Gearbox's Aliens: Colonial Marines was being made for Wii U with Unreal Engine 3, showing that Epic is bringing its tech to Wii U."

However, third party developers have told GI that the Wii U is expected to exceed current consoles. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said that visual quality should be "at least" that of the 360.

"It should be even superior for some of the games. We don't know everything, so we have a few things Nintendo is telling us that will have such and such powers."

Hit Detection was founded by influential games journalist N'Gai Croal.

More good news also, many publishers are planning to release games on launch day it would seem with EA, Sega and Ubisoft all planning releases for the big day. Take-Two - publisher of Red Dead Redemption - is more cautious though and want to get the best of the hardware first.

It may not yet have a release date, but the biggest third-party games publishers are preparing to hit the ground running when Nintendo releases the Wii U next year.

Electronic Arts, Ubisoft and Sega are all backing the system day and date without hesitation, with only Take-Two remaining cautious of the first new home console to hit the market since 2006.

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot told GamesIndustry.biz that the publisher is pledging new intellectual property for the system and is keen to see early adopter feedback on the new hardware.

"We will announce one game that we want to launch day one that is a new type of game, which should be interesting. It is still very important, just because you can test a market and also see through the eyes of the first consumers.

For Electronic Arts it's a gamble to go big on the day of release, but Games label president Frank Gibeau is confident from previous form.

"With the Wii U it's important for us to get there on day one so we can get in and build as big an audience as possible. We've been doing this for 25 years and trying to pick platforms and more often than not we get it right. I hope we have this one right. That's the gamble," he admitted.

Although some third parties were stung by dedicating separate resources to the Nintendo Wii and seeing poor return on investment, Sega West president Mike Hayes said his company was confident a long-tail approach would pay off even if day one was daunting prospect.

"At some point we were the biggest, certainly top three third-party publisher on Wii, so for us it was a great platform... we've got absolutely no qualms about [Wii U].

Karl Slatoff, chief operating officer at Red Dead Redemption publisher Take-Two was more cautious, suggesting his creative teams need time to assess the hardware before committing to launch.

"For us it's really about understanding what the hardware capabilities are and understand how it's going to fit into what our goals are from a franchise creation perspective, really understanding what that platform can deliver and developing for that platform.

"So that's our philosophy, not just with the new Nintendo console but across the board. Whether we're looking at the 3DS or the PlayStation Vita or any of the new formats that are coming out. We can't look at them all the same way. We're not just going to port over."

Porting games from established Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 franchises is an opportunity now that Nintendo's Wii U is said to have comparable technology, and will help keep costs lower than an entirely higher spec console.

"It doesn't increase [costs] very much because the advantage is in being close to the other machines, you can do the game for all the formats at the same time," offered Guillemot.

But he also made it clear that Ubisoft is evaluating the Wii U for "both new content and a third location" for existing franchises.

Although the costs of bringing existing titles over to the Wii U won't be high, Hayes said Sega is willing to spend more money on implementing the unique tablet controller, helping to distinguish the Aliens: Colonial Marines experience on Wii U from the same game on Sony or Microsoft hardware.

"That controller is absolutely brilliant and we have to think of innovative ways to use it. We're doing high definition Sonics, we're doing obviously Aliens: Colonial Marines, so you can bring them across, and that's relatively low cost, which is good news.

"Then you spend your money on how do you use that controller effectively to make it unique and differentiate it."

Both the articles are from gamesindustry.biz. Once again, sorry for the length. I have removed some paragraphs that were just the writers thoughts and tried to leave you with quotes...

[Edder]

dude, you are seriously keeping us up to date!! thanks a lot!! with all this info it gets a bit easier to decide if i want one or not (well i probly want one anyway, lets say if i should buy one or not)

[nemarious]

Glad I helped. Only problem is the increasing length of my posts :confused:

[Koby]

Wii U Cannot Play Standard DVD & Blu-ray Discs

Nintendo Global President Satoru Iwata confirmed at a question-and-answer session for analysts during last week's 2011 E3 Expo that his company's upcoming Wii U game console cannot play DVD or Blu-ray Discs. Iwata said that the increased costs that playing video DVD and Blu-ray Discs would add, due to patents, outweigh the benefits. He added that he thinks people who would need to play DVDs and Blu-ray Discs would already have players.

[nemarious]

Wii U Cannot Play Standard DVD & Blu-ray Discs

Nintendo Global President Satoru Iwata confirmed at a question-and-answer session for analysts during last week's 2011 E3 Expo that his company's upcoming Wii U game console cannot play DVD or Blu-ray Discs. Iwata said that the increased costs that playing video DVD and Blu-ray Discs would add, due to patents, outweigh the benefits. He added that he thinks people who would need to play DVDs and Blu-ray Discs would already have players.

[JU4N4K4JT]

i might buy the new wii but i want to know if we would be able to mod it.or if nintendo took care of there glitches and backdoors we found to modify the original wii i hope we can my wii is moded to the limit

[Edder]

http://youtu.be/5UFoJbfPozg

Head of EA sports talks about the wii u.

[evilchavdude]

I don't really want another generation to come. I'm quite happy with the current one, besides increasing graphics capabilities is just gonna increase costs of development, and developers are already struggling.

[nemarious]

I don't really want another generation to come. I'm quite happy with the current one, besides increasing graphics capabilities is just gonna increase costs of development, and developers are already struggling.

I agree with you, spiralling development costs has led to hundreds and thousands of job losses in the game industry. In fact, the UK industry actually shunk last year.

That's why we're seeing an increase in middleware being used for games such as Unreal 3 Engine and Cry Engine as well as other software like Gamebryo which is used less.

A lot of people think that this will lead to 'cookie-cutter' games with people changing a few features - like what I'm currently doing with RPG Maker lol - but I disagree; there are still plenty of creative people out there that can do wonders with these engines.

An example of this would be games using Unreal 3 engine including:

• Gears Of War Games
  
• Borderlands
  
• Bioshock
  
• Batman Arkham Asylum/Arkham City
  
• Mass Effect games
  
• Mortal Kombat
  

All of which have different styles. There are three shooters with three different styles entirely, an Action-Adventure game, RPGs and fighting games.

Besides, people have been using these engines for years and nobody really complained about 'cookie-cutter' games then. Gears Of War used the Unreal 3 engine way back in 2006 and, whilst people now label the series as 'brown' in a derogatory fashion, it maintains an above 90 metacritic score as does the second, by which time the number of games released using that engine was in the late teens at least.

I think sometimes people used to technology become technophobes for some reason. Maybe they just have good memories of what there is now and don't want it to end? I don't know. Either way, I'm becoming more focused on PC gaming aside from the odd Xbox Indie game so I'll largely sit back and see what happens over the next few years.

[† ballard]

Wii U Cannot Play Standard DVD & Blu-ray Discs

Nintendo Global President Satoru Iwata confirmed at a question-and-answer session for analysts during last week's 2011 E3 Expo that his company's upcoming Wii U game console cannot play DVD or Blu-ray Discs. Iwata said that the increased costs that playing video DVD and Blu-ray Discs would add, due to patents, outweigh the benefits. He added that he thinks people who would need to play DVDs and Blu-ray Discs would already have players.

It's a shame that it wont be able to play DVDs, but I can understand Nintendo's point on this matter. I do hope however that the Wii U will at least have Netflix support. It would be a really nice alternative.

[jaisonx12]

The demos I have seen are nice, but until more information is released I can't form any opinions on this console just yet.