Ping 1.5+ creator Christopher Arnold has spoken out on Twitter regarding Digital Foundry’s feature about the Wii U and the trouble that developers supposedly went through with Wii U development kits. Arnold says that the unnamed developer was probably speaking about pre-retail release SDK problems. He says that the post release SDK kit doesn’t contain any of the issues mentioned in the article.
I keep on getting pestered about this @eurogamer article about ‘The Secret Developers: Wii U – the inside story’. It’s a bit obnoxious now..
Most of the main complaints pointed at in the article from the dev is aimed at pre-retail release SDK problems. I can safely say that
The post release SDK kit given to developers now do not contain any of the listed problems and being an early on developer on any new
Hardware will pose challenges to those unfamiliar. Programming and coding is most of the time trial-and-error.
Wii U game development takes the same amount of work and attention as a Xbox 360 or PS3 game development. They’ve done their process
Of making their API understandable and useful to seasoned programmers. Wii U development = any other game console development time.
That’s what it’s been like for me developing, and I’ve been pushing my PC harder than my Wii U during development also.
That’s all I have to say on the subject of Eurogamer’s clickbait article. They titled it to stir up the Nintendooom wheel again.
Wii U is struggling because of lack of 3rd party, 3rd party needs to make the move first. Stop playing coy and hop into bed already. ;)
Thanks to everyone who sent this in.
Excellent, we appreciate your lovely uttered words Mr.Arnold…
I had a feeling. :)
Doesn’t change the fact that no game prooved yet that WiiU is not weak.. Oh well let’s just keep hoping that 3rd party will develop for WiiU and that graphics wont be important this generation.
It will just be the “catch-up” console for them, just to get used to the entire HD development thing, but since they aren’t as limited as the 7th gen consoles this will help with future development
Did you even own a Wii? Graphics ARE important, as well as game play. Compared to Nintendo’s last-Gen console, the WiiU looks amazing.
The only people who take issue with the WiiU’s graphics are the multi-plat gamers who can afford to dish out a shit load of money, and are comparing WiiU graphics to PS3 and PS4. I haven’t see jack shit on PS4 or xBoxone to make me say “Ohh… My WiiU graphics are soooo shitty!!” When I had a Wii, then played a friends ps4 or Xbox, yeah, it was obvious the Wii was not HD.
Well, all the consoles are HD now. I’m perfectly happy with the WiiU’s graphics.
Their marketing, 1st party release schedule, how fucking far behind they are in software development for the WiiU – That’s stuff I consider bitching-worthy.
The graphics of the Wii U is good enough, especially at the price the console is being offered at. They just need to expand their library a bit more with high quality titles, which we’re getting later this year.
…I also hope they’ll add N64 VC on the Wii U soon.
Hell yeah. If they started offering N64 and a few select GC games on the VC… That could be a serious shot in the arm for WiiU.
However, God forbid Nintendo do something smart that could bring the fans coming in droves… :/
I thought the visuals in which Wii could pump out was bloody amazing if I am honest, and it was clocked at 200-odd-something MHz, it was pretty good.
And visuals are no where near as important. Gameplay more than anything.
Wii’s processor was clocked at 729MHz iirc. Anyway, nobody cares about MHz or GHz nowadays. The Wii U has some immense power from such a low clock that once developers actually put the effort in, they’ll see the rewards.
The key lies in utilising the GPGPU to its fullest with the graphics and effects, leaving the CPU to do the rest of the work. CPU-heavy ports won’t show off what the Wii U is capable of doing, hence the myriad of shitty early ports.
This …. yup its really not a big difference between the u and the p4xbone but fools will try to argue otherwise…..
I guess, NFS:MW doesn’t exist in your world.
No game on the XBOX One or PS4 have proven to me that they are more powerful than the Wii U either. The best looking games on each console just look like last-gen PC caliber at best. We won’t see any significant leap from anybody in games for at least another 2-3 years.
It’s already been proven that the Wii U power-wise is capable of doing anything that the PS4 and XBOX One does no matter how much people try to convince themselves that it’s not. It’s already been proven that out of the 6 physical cores the Wii U has (The Wii U has 3 CPUs: A Tri-Core PowerPC750, A Dual-Core ARM input/output processor, and a single core sound processor) 3rd party studios (including people like Slightly Made Studios who said that the Wii U version of Project C.A.R.S. will showcase the “hidden power” of the Wii U and that nothing would need to be stripped from the port or Shin’en Multimedia who says that their game uses 4k and 8k texture resolution) have only used ONE CORE on their games so far. ONE. The only games that has been rumored to use more than one core was Super Mario 3D World and that is only 2 out of the available 6. It is historical fact that x86 technology needs twice as much horsepower to match that of PowerPC. That’s why gaming-rig PCs can have 16-32GB of RAM, a Intel i7 8-core CPU and a GTX 600-700+ series GPU and still only look slightly better than the best looking XBOX 360 and PS3 with the only noticeable advantage being smooth frame rates and 60FPS. That’s if of course people are begin honest with themselves and aren’t the ones to rub-off to hardware specs. The Wii U has 2GB of RAM and 35 MB of eDRAM with 32 on the GPU and 3 on the CPU. The GDD5 RAM in the PS4 is much faster than the DDR3 RAM in the Wii U, but the eDRAM in the Wii U SMOKES the PS4 system RAM in bandwidth clock. It doesn’t need to have that much system RAM because of the fast and efficient communication of the RISC of the PowerPC.
PS4 GDDR5 176GB per second
Wii U eDRAM 1TB per second
So power is not the issue and the author of this report basically confirms what I and many people have been saying for months. Developers are either too lazy, too stupid, or BOTH to use the Wii U hardware properly. They choose not to follow directions and when they get a piss-poor result instead of self-accountability checks they look to blame someone else.
It’s really sad that these big, huge AAA studios can’t seem to figure out the supposedly “weaker” Wii U when these small independent studios are rocking away on Wii U dev kits. It’s the difference between looking to apply your craft and give the consumer the best available product, or looking to make a fast buck at the consumers expense.
He is an awesome guy, I replied to some of his tweets and he totally agrees with the original article being bs. I also told him more sites, like Kotaku, has spread the bs article further… and now IGN also has it… wow, such bad rumors are spreading fast and this is hurting Nintendo… :/
Of course! Developers have been lazy as shit when it comes to their Wii U ports it’s obvious as hell! There’s no reason why some of these companies shouldn’t be able to keep up with indie developers on their optimization considering the money and staff they have. Case in point AC4.
AC4 on Wii U lags like mad. I was really looking forward to it. Luckily there we’ve it for 360 so I may need to play on that to compensate.
Off topic but are the official sales of the Wii U 5.3 million now? Cause if so, 3 months ago (apparently) The Wii U was close to 2 million down from this. If that’s the case, the sales of September saw a 2 million unit increase in 3 months
If you got those numbers from vgchartz, they aren’t reliable…
No, but I’m asking because of a Tech professional was told the life-time sales so far of the Wii U is 5.3, i’m just asking around if this is true
I see…
Hopefully it’s more…
If you want the video, i’ll give it to you and what do you mean more? 2 million in 3 months for the Wii U is really good
Yes but it’s always nice to see a bit more…
*wink*
lol I see ya commander
he didn’t leave an article so I am assuming the guy who told him check vgchartz because I literally just checked it
I’m taking it with a grain of salt to be honest
Ok, yes it should be taken lightly…
yea, hopefully we get official sales figures soon
At least he predicts things better than that creature Pachter…
yea
vgz charts not reliable at all. but mostly 10-30% innacurate, they are just predicting there but they are pretty good at predicting. Will have to wait for official Nintendo to announce results, they announce like once in a quarter or something like that
I didn’t check VGChartz for this, this is just something I HEARD that a youtuber I watch heard from someone during his PodCast, that’s why I’m asking
Awesome, I know him ^_^ follow him on Twitter, awesome guy!
Well, everything the “anonymous” poster had said might have been true way back when the Wii U was still pre-launch, but those problems don’t exist anymore. This Ping developer probably never faced the same problems as anonymous did.
Nintendo has learned their lesson. 💋
If these “well established” and “reputable” anonymous devs has something to say, they should just say it with their names.
They’re making video games, not Mohammed caricatures.
It is ok to have own opinions, and if it was something real, maybe it would help Nintendo to fix, what ever problems there might be.
What I don’t get is why developers just abandon the console without doing anything for it.
How can they possibly expect the install base to grow, if they simply do nothing for it. Are they expecting Nintendo to do all the work for them?? It’s a bit ridiculous. There are some good titles coming out, with half skipping because no one can be bothered – it’s rather baffling if I am honest.
Hopefully when they learn X1 and PS4 correctly they should be able to port the games over and convert x86 code to PowerPC – can’t be that hard? The coding is smaller.
well we know this already,
“The post release SDK kit given to developers now do not contain any of the listed problems”
Its seems like the even some of the developers are getting tired of the trolling.
finally something worth reading
Isn’t it funny how this thread only have 30-some comments? Guess the truth hurts.
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This dev might not have any problems with the development side of it, but that doesn’t fix the fact that the wii u is underpowered. They should do a system update to clock the CPU higher so it would be easier to port games from the 360 and PS3.