Kilrogg said:
I have a hard time believing that accessibility alone causes 3D Mario to sell millions and millions less than its 2D and racing counterparts.
Wait, really? But that's, like... the entirety of Nintendo's whole new market approach these days. :lol
3D gameplay, I'd say, fundamentally falls victim to what I've called the accumulated-knowledge trap -- the same issue that the controllers built to enable 3D gameplay have. 2D gameplay uses a direct and
unchanging correspondence of four directions on a pad to four directions on the TV, and then, generally, a limited number of buttons to perform actions.
3D is a
huge conceptual leap from there. You have to understand that the stick corresponds to directions on the ground that are based on the current camera -- i.e. they're
non-fixed and they'll change as your view of the action changes. Many people just can't make the conceptual leap
(This is why, I think, certain genres translate mucn more easily to 3D. TPS, RPGs with MMO-style control/navigation, and racing all have an advantage that platformers don't: they all tend to come with a
fixed or semi-fixed perspective behind the character, so that there's no conceptual leap required -- the stick always behaves "the same" regardless of what's happening onscreen.)
I mean, to me, accessibility is really the biggest possible obstacle to growing the sales of a title you could possibly have. If five million people think a game looks cool, but only one million of them can figure out how to play it well enough to enjoy themselves, that's really only one million potential sales.
Generally, in order to have the kind of mega-hits Nintendo is capable of,
everything needs to be right. Any one singular obstacle is enough to keep the series from blowing up to those heights. To my mind, Nintendo's entire strategy this generation is based around the idea that an inaccessible HCI stunts sales, so it only makes sense to me that the sales cap for a series with a difficult or advanced interface is much lower than for one that's extremely accessible.
It's not even like successful 3D platformers are unheard of. Heck, Japan, for all its "dislike" of 3D Mario, had no problem buying Crash Bandicoot and its sequels back in the day.
Aren't we still talking like... one million copies, though? It's pretty obvious that a 3D platformer can hit 1m since two have done that this generation, but there's a huge gap between 1m and 5m.
I just wish they had spent their energy on a new 3D Mario (as in, not a Galaxy sequel), but that's just me
I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that even targeting the same Wii hardware, a reinvented 3D Mario game would probably take literally twice or more the budget and development time of SMG2 -- no asset reuse, maybe no
engine reuse, new control tweaks, new camera development, tons of prototyping stages to work out whatever new "hook" they're using, etc.
Basically, I can't imagine them having such a thing ready for release on the current Wii system
anyway, even if they'd started it at the tail end of SMG1 development (maybe they could have it as a last hurrah, but in that case they'd probably push it back to the next system anyway) so they might as well squeeze out an obviously profitable sequel and either put a different team on skunkworks for "3D Mario Next" or split off a small part of EAD Tokyo to think about how to move that genre forward while the rest of the team polishes off SMG2.
BowieZ said:
I think it's pretty well established at this point that your opinion on these matters is way too disconnected from how everyone else perceives reality as to be of little use in analyzing these games. :lol
SMG2 is the only 3D Mario title that applies the SMB3/SMW template exactly. There's no hub. You walk around on a mostly-linear world map. Each world has stars that, even moreso than SMG1, have you proceed on a straight, linear path from your starting point to the goal. Sometimes you break off and go in a different direction to unlock a secret star instead,
exactly like you do to unlock alternate exits in SMW. It's the same freakin' thing.
