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Comment on "John Siracusa on Wii Hardware"
by John — Oct 23
The trouble is, are the graphics advances of the PS3 and XBox 360 being used for advancing game play? So near as I can tell, they're not.

I think there's already some evidence that they are, even in these early/launch titles. Consider the new camera styles and effects (e.g., the over-the-shoulder "shaky cam" in Gears of War) which really does appear to affect the play experience, or the "free-roaming crowd/stealth" gameplay demonstrated in Assasin's Creed, made possible by the large number of realistically reactive NPCs and a complex city with fewer invisible walls and reduced-polygon "dead" areas.

I think Nintendo's worry is that if you have all this extra graphical power, you're suddenly obligated to spend 6 months building a "dynamic grass blade physics simulator" and ensuring that each generic enemy has his own particular set of scars and facial features, when what they would rather spend their time is learning how to program interesting new things for the player to do, not just to see.

Well put, but they say that every generation. Somehow, the best game developers manage to pull off both :)
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