I'm still thinking many people are jumping the gun on this , neogaf has pretty much become intolerably awful lately - full disclosure I have a wii U on the way and I don't really give 2 craps how powerful the thing is , it's a nintendo console that outputs in HD and thus it's the only place I'll be playing nintendo games in HD. That is the only reason I bought it.
For the last 2 years there's been thread after thread concerned more with the systems power levels then the games themselves and this past week we've had a new thread every time the system farts a different letter in the alphabet. Now it's out so we've got, by my count, about 6 threads (some of them resurrected old ones) that are ranting about how "underpowered and terrible" the system is.
Really people ? It's been out barely 24 hours and well, I'm sure many of us realized that most if not all of the port jobs would only be aiming for , at best, parity with the 360/ps3 versions. In many cases we're talking games that spent 2 years getting hammered out for PS3/360 , the last 6 months of which , if the developer was lucky- they had to cram it onto a completely different architecture. It's not as though these guys can just take the game and slap it on a wii U and bam it runs - it needs a bit of finessing and some custom coding just like putting a 360 game on a ps3 does. For many developers I'm sure the goal was simply to get it running "good enough". Now I've heard all the horror stories about arkham city armoured and mass effect apparently just not quite up to snuff with the other 2 systems and again, I think it's because they DID slap the code on there and had a few weeks to get it working "good enough" and instead of cleaning that up to the point of perfect parity they had to shoehorn in controller streaming technology and gimmicky nonsense to use that gamepad for otherwise.
Optimization is usually the last thing to be done for any game and it's part of the polishing phase that games never seem to quite get enough of. For 6/7 years now developers have been tweaking their engines, middleware, communication with hardware manufacturers to perfection. Outside of exclusive content the wii U versions of all these games have only had a few months. The consequence of trying to have a ton of games ready day 1 - half of them will be kicked to the curb.
If we still see multiplatform games running worse on the wii U , say 6 months from now, when the next big wave of new titles hits then perhaps I'll be a bit more concerned for the systems long term viability beyond the nintendo fans but for now I hardly think it's worth pulling a chicken little.
Thank you. This thread (among others) needed a little bit of positivity. This actually cheered me up a bit. I agree.