A World Without Wii?

[Astray]

yes. But on a lighter note, I do agree that Nintendo might have saved the industry with the Wii. For a while now I've been saying that more horsepower and better graphics are not the future of the gaming economy, so to speak. Game Developers are struggling as it is, lesser known companies have gone bankrupt because they spend so much time (2-4 years) and money (millions) on just graphics. But when that game is released, it takes people one day to beat and many aren't satisfied. The problem is that these consoles keep improving themselves every 6 or so years and when they do that, most developers who aren't established with megahits like Final Fantasy fall short and can't sustain themselves.

I'm convinced that if companies continue releasing bigger and badder systems then they will effectively kill their own market.

Hell, I mentioned Squaresoft but even Square could not stay afloat in the market and was forced to merge with their long rival, Enix to become Squarenix.

Really, I would not be surprised if one day we saw Capcom and SNK Playmore merge. Or Konami and Namco. Who knows. But Nintendo took a bold step and said "let's try to improve game play and not the graphics".

Graphics are like a drug though, once you've seen the best you don't ever want to go back. But I strongly feel that the graphics seen on PS2 (such as recent titles like God of War 2 or Kingdom Hearts 2) or Wii are just fine! They look good enough to get you by and let you focus on what's important, gameplay. Hopefully their major titles like Metroid and Mario do not disappoint this time.

I would like to argue a point on graphics one moment.

Some games are already at their graphical peak because they use style rather than uber realistic stuff. One could say the Wii is powerful enough to make a perfect game graphically should you choose to have more originality than using 'realistic' styles.

But then look at RE44 on the cube, that game is damn pretty and last gen.

 

[The Big One]

Graphics are at a peak, due to the main fact that there is no possible way ever to realistically simulate every single little nook and cranny that you can pump onto your computer or television screen. Not even the PS3 itself, or any other gaming platform for that matter, could ever come close to simulate real life scenery. There's just too many sacrifices to make in order to achieve such goals, and in the end, you would just end up proving the "graphics are at a peak" claim to be even more true. Game development is already expensive enough as it is, and with the common-day mentality that games need to be more defined in terms of realism, how far will you go until you realize that too much realism will just destroy the entire point of video gaming?

To me, video games is just another way for you to just run from reality for a few hours or so, and to play out your fantasies in a digitized world. Even though some people will take my claim differently, the problem is how much realism can you throw into a game until you realize that you could be restricting the game's own freedom and creativity in a way you wouldn't have even bothered to notice?

So Nintendo's claim of "gameplay over graphics" has some merit to it.

 

[Alf17]

So Nintendo's claim of "gameplay over graphics" has some merit to it.

I totally agree with this! In the 'old days', graphical improvements were a major factor and the difference was really noticeable. Now however, we've reached a stage where some extra polygons won't matter so much, so it's back to the core of a game: game play!