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Re: Why Xenoblade would have only been possible on the Wii
It's a bit different to make a retro first person dungeon crawl and Mass Effect.
Here is a kind of old RPG where we once had to rely on graph paper to make maps and imagine what things looked like in a wireframe dungeon or just text. For that genre, the is no high visual standard, textures and reskins are now suddenly something you can get away with as padding.
And your audience and publishers have a totally different set of expectations from console gamers and massive third party publishers. That helps, too.
It's almost as nice to be a small indie studio with a loyal niche audience as it is a Nintendo first or second party. There is a ton of freedom to make the game you and your customers want there.
As for the rest industry vs. gaming experience - strongly disagree.
There's a reason gamers are justifiably upset at Capcom and Bioware, it's because the men holding the leash think they can just make them go "I'm the developer. Trust me. Help me. We're on your side."
And then someone with "light" expertise changes one line of code and makes the developer look like an asshole and becomes a target of thier ire. See, just haveing a mild corporate experience is enough to let you see the politics. That's really all they need to see.
So yes, the folks who make Legend of Grimlock can do what Bioware can't. It's the difference of big corporations and small private business/indie studios. I don't need technical expertise to understand the pressure of a job. I've been in the pressure cooker. I've had to be part of productions that had only weeks or sometime hours within on day to get done and my reward is hate mail and experience constantly questions.
You got 50/50 on hate and praise, so you learn to live with the hate. Chris Priestly - on public actions alone - shows me he misses the asskissing he and his friends used to get. The localization teams at Atlus get the 50/50, for obvious reason like guys much much worse than Raydeus could ever get.
I know games aren't made by magic, so don't tell me I can't see the man behind the curtain operating the mighty Wizard of Oz.
Oh, and since you like to keep citing Rage by iD Software - their CEO makes expensive model rockets and launches them in his spare time. iD is a studio that has a lot of privilege, money and freedom that most developers wish they could have. They're kind of in that same set of special cases like Monolith Soft and Almost Human Games live in. Anyone that knew what Doom was and also live and breathe first person shooters is going to buy them from the grandaddy of the genre. As such, they get to make their own deadlines.
Rage is pretty much all they did this gen, too. The fact that they're the only case that you can present me as proof it can be done proves my point.
You have to be in a very precious position in this industry to milk any console to its fullest potential. You have to be an iD Software, Kojima Productions, Nintendo, 343 Studios - all of which stand worlds apart from your bog standard third party. Even Eidos is now in this unusually cushy position. There are most certainly benefits there lots of studios don't have. And one of those business are run by artists and game developers, so its hardly surprising Nintendo could create the environment to pull it off.
It's a bit different to make a retro first person dungeon crawl and Mass Effect.
Here is a kind of old RPG where we once had to rely on graph paper to make maps and imagine what things looked like in a wireframe dungeon or just text. For that genre, the is no high visual standard, textures and reskins are now suddenly something you can get away with as padding.
And your audience and publishers have a totally different set of expectations from console gamers and massive third party publishers. That helps, too.
It's almost as nice to be a small indie studio with a loyal niche audience as it is a Nintendo first or second party. There is a ton of freedom to make the game you and your customers want there.
As for the rest industry vs. gaming experience - strongly disagree.
There's a reason gamers are justifiably upset at Capcom and Bioware, it's because the men holding the leash think they can just make them go "I'm the developer. Trust me. Help me. We're on your side."
And then someone with "light" expertise changes one line of code and makes the developer look like an asshole and becomes a target of thier ire. See, just haveing a mild corporate experience is enough to let you see the politics. That's really all they need to see.
So yes, the folks who make Legend of Grimlock can do what Bioware can't. It's the difference of big corporations and small private business/indie studios. I don't need technical expertise to understand the pressure of a job. I've been in the pressure cooker. I've had to be part of productions that had only weeks or sometime hours within on day to get done and my reward is hate mail and experience constantly questions.
You got 50/50 on hate and praise, so you learn to live with the hate. Chris Priestly - on public actions alone - shows me he misses the asskissing he and his friends used to get. The localization teams at Atlus get the 50/50, for obvious reason like guys much much worse than Raydeus could ever get.
I know games aren't made by magic, so don't tell me I can't see the man behind the curtain operating the mighty Wizard of Oz.
Oh, and since you like to keep citing Rage by iD Software - their CEO makes expensive model rockets and launches them in his spare time. iD is a studio that has a lot of privilege, money and freedom that most developers wish they could have. They're kind of in that same set of special cases like Monolith Soft and Almost Human Games live in. Anyone that knew what Doom was and also live and breathe first person shooters is going to buy them from the grandaddy of the genre. As such, they get to make their own deadlines.
Rage is pretty much all they did this gen, too. The fact that they're the only case that you can present me as proof it can be done proves my point.
You have to be in a very precious position in this industry to milk any console to its fullest potential. You have to be an iD Software, Kojima Productions, Nintendo, 343 Studios - all of which stand worlds apart from your bog standard third party. Even Eidos is now in this unusually cushy position. There are most certainly benefits there lots of studios don't have. And one of those business are run by artists and game developers, so its hardly surprising Nintendo could create the environment to pull it off.
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