re: Fils-Aime: an artist at saying a lot without saying anything

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Good points. Do you think they shift their tech even further down the scale, making "indie-typed" sized games with higher production values? That might be the only way to make a game for both systems


See I think the Smash model is wrong, it's still making two separate games. That just doubles all of their efforts on fewer game types.

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I think the architectural confluence of Nintendo's future systems will allow them to proceed in the opposite direction, actually. Nintendo has been bogged down this generation by needing to support both the 3DS and the Wii U, which was particularly straining as they completely underestimated the difficulty and production costs of creating AAA titles in higher resolutions.

I think the Smash 4 model is the gold standard for Nintendo, and it's something they're probably going to want to execute with all of their major titles. The problem with Smash 4's development, however, was that there were two completely separate teams developing the game - one for the 3DS, and one for the Wii U. This is due to the wildly different architectures of the two systems - the Wii U is running on an outmoded PowerPC chip, while the 3DS employs an ARM chip. They essentially had to have two separate teams writing two completely different sets and types of code. Game logic, optimization, netcode, etc...all of it had to be created twice by two different teams. This was incredibly inefficient and resource intensive.

I think the goal going forward is to unify their development talent instead of spreading them thin, and it seems they're attempting to do this by homogenizing the hardware and software across all of their future platforms. Ideally, developers will only have to code for one specific architecture, which can then scale across both the handheld and console. This frees up development time and allows Nintendo to allocate resources to additional projects.