Hello all
I follow these boards since the Gaming Age days, currently I am especially on this topic, I must say that it has been a great pleasure to read you all, and I finally decided to post to share my informations and my ideas. To introduce myself a little, I am a former French game journalist, since the 90s. I’ll not enter into details but for example, I’ve contributed, at different positions, to large French gaming websites. I want to reach the other side of the fence and am looking for a creative content job (gamedesign, writing, producing, etc.) in a big studio. I kept a few contacts in the industry from my activities, and so I could get some news about the Wii U, console that I wait with impatience.
Some warnings before i start:
1 - To retain my sources who are obviously under NDA and not put them in difficulty, I will not quote them. Also, I love this sector, and a large part of the presentation impact of a new hardware at E3 and other shows depend on the respect by all the actors of the confidentiality of important information, such as power and therefore what a console is capable of displaying. I do not want to spoil this momentum that Nintendo is building for the E3. For all these reasons, I will stay more or less evasive, but I can give some news that are not huge revelations. They are rather positive and interesting, I hope that they will nurture the constructive debates around here, and put an end to bad speculations on the console I've read here lately. I want somehow to participate in the buzz that will gradually be built around the Wii U, and I think that Nintendo public relation guys should be more active on geek boards like this one, to counter when it’s necessary, some rumors that dampen seriously the enthusiasm of hardcore gamers, who could then relay these bad vibrations to fellow gamers in their circles. The “just on par with xbox360” drama has even spread to french forums, so it can’t hurt to deny it fast.
2 - Read all this with caution. It's second-hand knowledge, I have not seen Wii U dev kit myself. My sources are reliable but they are not close friends in life, there are also some parameters that have as consequences that what they told me might not reflect the full reality of the Wii U power.
3 - My sources do not occupy very technical positions, like programmers, coders, who have daily access to the kits guts, they are not the best suited to quantify the machine capacities, there is a great deal of subjectivity in their infos.
Here we go
I can already say that this come from European big studios which have logically the latest dev kits available to third parties. To be clear, these are not small studios that could have remained at earlier dev kits because they are not important enough to receive Nintendo's latest updates quickly.
So, from what my sources saw on their screens, they clearly stated that they experienced superior capabilities in comparison to the Xbox360. This is the positive aspect of my info: you can be sure that the Wii U is not on par with current gen HD. You can remove this idea from your heads, and stop speculating about it, it will not happen. The point more negative now: On the power scale, they told me that it’s closer to 2x Xbox360 than 5x. On paper, some components (you can guess which) are mathematically 4 or 5 times more powerful, more in quantity/number, than in the xbox360, but it does not translate for the moment in 5x prettier images, with 5 more complex and finest scenes, etc.
Further details: These impressions are from a time when studios used revision 4 of the dev kits. Lately, 4.2 kits shipped from Singapore. I don’t know if there is a significant power gain with “.X” type of revisions, I guess it’s the case, but not as important as a change of revision number (from Rev 3 to 4 for example). I’ve heard that V5 kits may exist. It is likely, as for many other consoles before, that Nintendo and first-party have more advanced and therefore more powerful/optimized dev kits. However, these v4 kits are apparently from the end of the year / beginning of 2012, and they are those which have benefited from the hardware boost reported on the net. For people who hoped that this upgrade would make the Wii U 5 times stronger and 5 times more capable of displaying beautiful stuff on screen, from what I know, this is not the case for now, but there are several variables that can explain this, I'll come back to this subject in other posts, but can say that this “not 5x Xbox360” is only valid in the context from which I gathered my informations (third-party, second-hand, subjectivity, news given at a certain time knowing that the console will come out maybe 10 months later so will receive more upgrades, etc.). But again, I put the emphasis on the fact that it’s clearly not on par with the xbox360, it’s at least 2x.
Furthermore, but read that with a grain of salt, many graphical effects are applied near the “end” of the visual development of a game. I guess some parameters that cause what is rendered on the screen to be more or less clean, complex, for example the type of shadow, the AA applied, and new effects that the Wii U GPU is probably capable of fall into this category (the shiny stuff that developers adds at the end, once the engine is running well), and therefore the final result will feel more like a 3 or 4 or even the famous 5x than 2x Xbox360 to the eyes of my sources, I keep in touch with them to know if it will be the case.
That is all I can say for now, there will be other posts to come. Do not expect revelations from each of my interventions though. This in not the main purpose of my decision to post on NeoGAF. As my nickname implies it, I want to share my ideas (of game design, background, etc.) confront them, do theorycrafting which I love. I’ll participate on topics that interest me, and of course this one, by writing “normal” and light messages with some funny things, gifs, images, and above all, ideas !
See you soon
