Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs on Consoles? No!

[thomin]

Is there any chance that this game will find its way to the Wii U? I'd love to play this on the big screen and with surround sound and I hear that Nintendo is doing everything to make it easy for independents to release their games on the Wii U...

If it's not too much of a hassle to port the game, you should definitely give it a try...(here's me hoping )

[Sakonosolo]

Frictional has said that the Amnesia games on consoles is very slim, I think the main reason was the difficulty and money required to do that.

[thomin]

Too bad. I was hoping that it wasn't too difficult to port games to modern consoles, also I heard that Nintendo offered to port third-party mobile apps, so maybe they're also willing to help out non-mobile indies?

...and I fear that my Mac is too old to handle the game.

[maarten12100]

Any Intel based mac will probably run it on low.
But the chances for it coming ot wii U are pretty much nil what you however can do it buy a BT adapter for your PC and use the wiimote to play (not good for immersion but you get a fair bit of exercise that is for sure)

[LHudson]

The biggest problem with porting Amnesia for consoles would be it's architecture. Wii U would be a nightmare to port to because it would have to have something on the control pad otherwise Nintendo will lock them in their creepy basement.

With the PS4 completely ditching the Cell processor, porting over to consoles isn't as tricky as it is, but it is also stupidly expensive.

[thomin]

I didn't know that it was this expensive to port a game...I thought given the PC like architecture of modern consoles, it was more a matter of adjusting to the controls and menus and then recompiling it for the system. If the costs are still somewhat reasonable, maybe a kickstarter campaign could do the trick? Although I guess that given the slow Wii U sales so far, it could be a difficult proposition for that particular system.

Anyway, I've got a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook with 8 gigs of RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 MB and an SSD, which is slightly below the minimum requirements stated on Steam. The system can run TDD just fine, but that also had an older engine.

I guess I'll give it a try anyway (it's well worth supporting even if it doesn't run smoothly on my system) while still hoping for a Wii U version...maybe Nintendo would be interested in supporting something like this. Given the sluggish Wii U sales so far, they can't have enough exquisite content like AMFP. Yeah, I know, I'm dreaming...

[Sakonosolo]

What's expensive is all the licensing stuff that has to be done. With current gen consoles at least it costs something like $40 thousand to put out patches for games. I don't know how much it costs to actually put games on the system, though it would be difficult because of how different the architecture is. Doing it on next gen consoles will be much easier as they've made them more indie friendly and you're right, the architecture is much more like PC. Honestly though I can't imagine playing Amnesia with a controller. It would be so awkward. Also, the WiiU's architecture is similar to the 360, so it's not very PC like. It's up to Frictional/Chinese Room though. All I know is that last time the question was answered it was about costs and such really.

[thomin]

Wow, that's really serious money.

Though I did read the following Tweet by Brian Provinciano:
"FUN FACT: Every developer on Wii U gets a free Unity license and can self-publish, thus keeping all revenue & no pitching, no negotiation."

As Tweets go, it's not exhaustive, but I read it to mean that all you really need is a dev kit which comes in at $7,000 which should be within reach of a Kickstarter campaign. But as I said, I really have no idea about licensing costs and neither about the work needed for a port to a PowerPC layout, though I'd still think that this is mostly a compiler thing. I don't think that programmers do access the hardware directly very often in this day and age.

As for controls, it's surprising how fast you get used to it. Sure, a dual stick gamepad will never be as fast/precise as a keyboard+mouse combo, but after playing Black Ops 2 on the WiiU for a while, I prefer the overall experience to playing on the PC. And for a game like Amnesia, it should be even less critical than for a shooter where you have to aim very precisely.

Do you have a link to the older thread? It would really interest me to learn more about licensing and all that.

[emaper]

Anyway, I've got a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook with 8 gigs of RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 MB and an SSD, which is slightly below the minimum requirements stated on Steam. The system can run TDD just fine, but that also had an older engine.

I guess I'll give it a try anyway (it's well worth supporting even if it doesn't run smoothly on my system).

Your Mac will run AAMFP just fine, trust me. I tried Amnesia: The Dark Descent with maximum settings on every Mac I have in my house; I've got an iMac with the 9400M... It's a really old chipset but the game runs well with medium-to-high settings.
I also tried it on a 2005/2006 Mac Mini with 64MB of VRAM shared, and the game runs pretty well with ultra-minimum settings.
Lastly I tried it on a i5 MacBook Air and... MEGA SURPRISE: It runs incredibly well with maximum settings, 32x SSAO, and Edge Smooth.

So, don't worry... AAMFP will run just fine on most of computers 'cause is pretty similar to TDD, you know

[Plectrum61]

Is there any chance that this game will find its way to the Wii U? I'd love to play this on the big screen and with surround sound and I hear that Nintendo is doing everything to make it easy for independents to release their games on the Wii U...

If it's not too much of a hassle to port the game, you should definitely give it a try...(here's me hoping )

There is another way to play it on the TV. If it's on a laptop you can try to plug it into the television and play it on steam big picture mode.