There's a lot of speculation out there on how Nintendo's NX will take form. A lot of people are hoping for a combination portable/home console, but is that practical? There are many factors worth considering, and we'll focus on a few reasons why it may or may not be possible. Read on after the break.
A system's battery life often dictates its portability, so when designing the original Game Boy, Nintendo aimed for a 20 hour battery life. This would ensure that the system would last on long car or plane trips, or when you had to visit grandma's and couldn't bring your console with you.
If the NX is meant to be used as a portable system, it might not be significantly more powerful than the Wii U. The system can't be too powerful or complex, as a faster processor and more complex graphics chip would quickly whittle down those batteries. Even newer tablets can't power processor intensive games for much longer than a couple of hours, and they just don't reach the graphical fidelity of Wii U games.
We also have to consider the gaming experience and how it suits the mode of play. Portable games don't necessarily translate to a couch experience or vice versa. Frame rate issues aside, Borderlands 2 on the Vita was difficult to play since distant characters were minuscule on the small screen, making it difficult to pick off a sniper, or discern faraway characters from background objects. The game didn't lend itself to short play sessions either. In another example, Picross is a great portable game that uses Nintendo's touch screen well, and sitting there on the couch pointing a Wii remote at the screen just isn't ideal. It's also a boring game for others to sit there and watch, it's more of a solitary experience that's good as a distraction from other things.
Text size is also an issue. Games like Diablo 3 that display a lot of statistics on the screen, and still want to keep the UI out of the way, would be difficult to view comfortably on a smaller screen. If the text were made larger, it would take up too much space on the TV. Perhaps game developers would account for different play methods, designing a different interface for a portable or TV experience, but this adds to development work and there are situations where it just isn't viable. Some games might be compromised for one setup or the other.
Pricing is a difficult issue, since system cost will either be too low to support powerful hardware, or too expensive to sell to parents who want a system for their kids. If Nintendo wants us to upgrade to a new system, it will have to offer a much better gameplay experience, and that requires more powerful hardware.
Making a device that's possible to take with you means an optical disc format is not viable, but load times from slow flash to faster internal memory have to be accounted for. GameCube and 3DS were able to deal well with load times, so perhaps this won't be an issue, but with more powerful hardware there are larger textures and maps to stream in, and having quick access for large amounts of data means a lot of RAM, which will again decrease battery performace. The 3DS has a lower resolution screen and doesn't need as much RAM, but when you're building a system that can also display the same games on your TV, you'll have to account for the TV experience and still power that same hardware on the go.
There are a few things that support the theory that Nintendo will make a system suitable for both, however. In their home territory of Japan, mobile is the favored platform, with home consoles dropping significantly in sales compared to prior generations. The trend may continue, and Nintendo will want to be sure that their games are playable by the widest player base. If they design a game only meant for a home console, not as many people may buy it, so designing it for both at once means the game will be able to reach the biggest possible audience.
Familiarity with a single chipset will enhance game production, no longer forcing a developer to learn multiple hardware configurations and split work across each of them, allowing a unified engine and codebase, since there is only one platform to target.
What do you think Nintendo will do? Do you see any other pros and cons that we haven't thought of? Please let us know in the comments.
