Is the Wii U underpowered?

[Baron Teapot]

I think the 'Wii U' is onto something: we're seeing game studios spend increasingly larger budgets on creating high-resolution graphical assets for their game, including textures, shadows, reflection-maps, etc; they are increasing the graphical quality whilst neglecting the other aspects of games.

What games are neglecting other aspects, and what are those aspects they are neglecting? You don't know how much Nintendo is spending on development. Their games can be considered AAA as well. Just because they have different art styles, doesnt necessarily mean that they aren't spending a lot of money as well, especially since a lot of their games are in development for years longer than a lot of AAA games. Those Call of Dutys and Battlefields are usually churned out in 2 years or so...

I just hate it when people try to imply that other companies that aren't Nintendo are neglecting aspects of their games because they decide to make them look good.

I'm saying that chasing after realism in graphics technology is a bit of a lost cause, not because games don't need or deserve high-quality graphics, but because games do not need high-quality graphics to be enjoyable; we all know that amazing games have been made for all consoles, and so disqualifying the Wii U for its poorer graphics technology seems a little foolish.

What games are neglecting other aspects? Most of them, to be frank: I recall thoroughly enjoying the Fallout games on PC enough for several replays, but after becoming a 3D sandbox, I feel that the game has become shallower, even if it still has a beautiful and varied world, it's just not as deep.

I consider games like BioShock and Half-Life 2 to be great games, and they were fully 3D. But a lot of titles that try to ape the success of these titles cram in similar features but lack the depth and sophistication of their plots and characters. I feel that if the developers had focused less time on the graphics and more time on storyline and gameplay, we'd have another Deus Ex by now.

Recently I played through Duke Nukem 3D again and thoroughly enjoyed it, even if some of the level-design was fairly unintuitive. After popping in Duke Nukem Forever, there's little of the original game's charm to make me want to come back for more. The controls are clunky, the physics unreliable and the enemy AI fairly stupid. Seems to me like they could've simply continued using the 'Build Engine' to produce a fun title without implementing poorly-done graphics.

I say poorly-done because plenty of textures were low-quality, the shadow-maps had sharp and pointy edges as opposed to the smooth, rounded edges you get with PCF or other shadowing techniques, and the maps felt a little empty with fewer monsters on-screen at once and, though more environment objects to play with, there weren't enough in my opinion. It just felt... unpolished; a lot of these problems probably could've been fixed with a little more time, but it's not as good as the original with its slick gameplay and simplistic controls.

Oh, and I'm in no way suggesting that cutting-edge graphics technology is a bad thing, but it's more that focusing mostly on graphics ends up being to the detriment of other aspects, like enemy intelligence, physics, plot, characters and dialogue, etc.

I'm saying that nobody ought to count out the latest Nintendo console simply because its hardware cannot compare favorably to the Microsoft or Sony consoles. They're all good, powerful machines, and will all have good games I'm sure. But graphics don't contribute a whole lot to whether a game is memorable, or even worth buying.

Take Id Software and RAGE. It was beautiful and functionally great, but I can hardly remember any of it because it was barely there from a story perspective.