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Originally posted by: hudsonhawk Sorry, but, that's a terrible definition. Whether or not games suffer due to being multi-platform is largely conjecture.
No, it's a quantitative
certainty. It's not even a question: if you have 15 people working on a game, you will not be able to convince me that the game would not turn out better if all 15 of them were working with the same hardware and the same code instead of three teams of five all trying to adapt the code, graphics, sounds, etc. to three completely different platforms.
I accept the fact that sh*tty developers will violate this rule, but decent developers who spread their resources across three platforms undoubtedly have their games either suffer or at least never meet their TRUE potential.
Take a console like the GC, for example: a game like RE4, which was built from the ground up for it, took advantage of a plethora of graphical capabilities which most people were STUNNED that the GC even possessed. Had RE4 been developed on all consoles right off the bat, there's no way in HELL the dev team would have taken the time to explore the GC's graphical prowess to the extent that they did.
The GC had plenty of bells and whistles when it came to graphical capability, but this ability was seldom tapped into because, when a developer is making the game for two other consoles as well, it's time constraint-prohibitive to bother to write code to take advantage of them.
As for "AAA" titles, the term can easily apply to games that DON'T sell well but are still critically acclaimed, like Okami. I'm not talking about a game's selling power or dev budget, I'm talking about it being an absolutely
stellar game, and those tend to come more often from exclusives than not.
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That's a philosophy that stems directly from you owning a console that isn't the market leader. The vast majority of exclusive PS2 titles are shovelware. I'd venture a guess that the formula is the exact opposite of what you're proposing - that non-exclusive titles are the ones that are of higher quality - the high investment in multi-platform development means the developer can't risk releasing a low-quality title (except in cases where the strength of the license will do the selling for them).
I understand what you're saying, and while I do believe it to be the case that it's years of GC ownership which brought me to this conclusion, it's still advice I'd highly suggest people follow.
Yes, there's less risk developing for the market leader, but at a certain point, the market leader will have a flood of games so immensely huge that games need to rise to a certain level of quality to even be noticed at all.
Obviously, reviews are a godsend for this reason, but take a game like Sonic and the Secret Rings: if this were coming out on all three consoles on the same day, I wouldn't have it reserved right now. Since it takes specific graphical advantage of the Wii and was built around the idea of the Wiimote, I have a great deal more faith in the potential quality of the game and the reviews and impressions coming out now all indicate that I haven't been led astray by my assumptions.
Topic: Looks like Capcom still hates money. (Read 83035 times)
