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June 20, 2015   Wii U   21 Comments

Shin’en says they have Personally Pushed Wii U to its Limit with FAST Racing Neo

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Shin’en studio boss Manfred Linzer says they have pushed the Wii U to its limits with Fast Racing Neo. In an interview with PE Network’s ZyroXZ2, Shin’en explained how they maximized the Wii U from a technical perspective. 

“When starting with the game we had a vision. We wanted to develop the most exciting futuristic racing game on the market. We decided from the beginning it will be 60fps, anything else was not an option for a game that fast. So we knew all GPU and CPU stuff must fit into 16 milliseconds, which isn’t a lot, especially when most games you get compared with are running on consoles with higher specs and with 30fps. We knew from the beginning we can’t develop this vision with techniques everyone else does use. We would need to find different ways to achieve our vision. This was a big motivation because we like working on limits and pushing boundaries.”

“We started experimenting for a year. After a short time we had a working prototype but it ran only at around 15 fps when we enabled all the cool stuff and effects you now see in the game. We had 8k Softshadows, a complete HDR pipeline, physical based rendering, SSAO, more than 10,000 drawcalls, High Quality Motionblur, High Quality Godrays, Cinematic Color Grading, Volumetric lighting and so on. It looked really pretty but was near unplayable.”

“We then needed the rest of the year to find fast enough solutions to handle all these effects or to find new solutions that give the same results. Often we used tricks from the past that are pretty complicated to implement but that deliver the same effect with a fraction of the costs. To make long story short: In the end we were pretty happy seeing finally the game reaching 60fps. When finally playing at 60fps with all bells and whistles for the first time we knew we did the best work in our career. I don’t say anyone else can’t go even further on Wii U, but personally we reached our limits.”

You can read the full interview on PlayerEssence here.

Author: Francis@PE (18682 Posts)


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  • dacomentr

    Wait, maybe I’m wearing the wrong pair of goggles. This games looks solid but the praise is a little (a lot) overrated.

    The best looking Wii U games at E3 were Yoshi’s Wooly World and Skylanders. Art direction does make a difference.

  • ActivesiN

    visually this game makes Star Fox look like garbage, no wonder Nintendo didn’t show it at the digital event lol

  • 7thlevel JR

    damn this looks a hell of a lot better then star fox

    • uPadWatcher

      It’s not wise to compare two different genres. It’s double standards.

  • JaxonH

    Heck ya this was hands down one of the absolute BEST games at E3!

    And to all my fellow F-Zero fans- THIS IS IT. THIS IS OUR NEW F-Zero! Don’t believe me? Go watch the game play clip of the four different tracks. Some of them look identical to F-Zero tracks in GX. Only x1000 in awesomeness! I’m talking high-tech cities in the sky with tracks that you fly off of and sail through the air for a full kilometer, underwater glass tunnels, Half pipes, you can even do a 360 spin attack just like in F-Zero!

    I remember when the GameCube launched- I was so excited to see what the new F-Zero would look like! And I remember being blown away and played that game for years. YEARS. We have all been begging for a return of the franchise- well this is it right here. This game really is F-Zero of the future, and even has some new mechanics of it’s own like the color matching boost pads that either speed you up or slow you down depending on the color of your ship (you can toggle between blue and yellow with the press of a button- got to have fast reflexes to match the color- Ikaruga style- going as fast as you do).

    Every single Nintendo fan should buy this game. Not just to support a great developer, not just to send a signal that we want F-Zero (because let’s face it this right here is as good as a new F-Zero ever would’ve been anyways), but to support a genuinely fantastic game it will probably go down in history as the best futuristic racer of all time right alongside GX

  • Matthew Wesley

    Definitely a day 1 purchase. A good developer making good games.

  • Bob

    Sounds like they over came Slightly Mad’s hardships with hard work.

  • Max Patterson

    It’s a sad day when an indie dev with a much smaller team can make a better looking game than a triple A studio with thousands of people.

  • darkgamer001

    I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. These are the kind of studios Nintendo should be buying.
    Clear desire to work on Nintendo platforms? - Check
    Working around limitations rather than complaining about them? - Check
    Incredible talent - Yep, check…in a big way

    Buying studios like this is a great way of countering the whole third party situation. People bang on and on about the architecture being the cause of that…I for one, highly doubt that it’s the biggest reason.
    However, expanding the number of IPs, as well as the studios working on games, is one way of countering the drought periods that occur as a result of the third party absence.

    If buying them isn’t an option, involving them in big internal projects would certainly help too. Or even funding their next game. Imagine what they can do with a proper development budget.

    • Liquid-Sunrise

      That sounds like a excellent idea!

    • CapableTie

      They could lend them the F-Zero IP 😀

    • Guymelef

      A very good idea indeed.

    • Mythosa

      Why buy them when it’s not necessary? They already fully support Nintendo. Nothing would change if Nintendo were to buy them in that regard. If Nintendo were to buy them they would loose creative control of their games and people might leave.

      • darkgamer001

        “Nothing would change if Nintendo were to buy them in that regard.”
        Perhaps, but ensuring that their excellent games remain exclusive would already be an enticing point. And we all know exclusives are a big reason why people look at Nintendo consoles. Further strengthening in that regard is always welcome.

        “If Nintendo were to buy them they would lose creative control of their games and people might leave.”
        That is highly situational. One would assume that such a buyout would be amicable for starters. And Nintendo have clearly given most of their studios a lot of creative control, so personally, I highly doubt it would be that big of an issue.

        • Mythosa

          Well, that’s hard to say really. I mean, there is the part where if Nintendo sees a fit they will strongly encourage it. Like with IP’s. If an IP fits the new game that they are making it will likely become that IP, or they will be told what kind of game to make. Fast Racing Neo might not be a thing if Nintendo owned them. I’m not saying it wouldn’t happen, but there is the chance. I’m not saying it would be F-Zero either. They might have said, no we don’t need any more racers on the Wii U right now, please make another puzzle game, or something like that. That’s where the creative control goes out the window, because if your boss/owner says this, you have no choice but to follow it. Nintendo asked Retro to make another DK, so they did, whether they wanted to or not.

          Why would we assume that the buyout would be amicable? Unless Shin-en went to Nintendo and gave an offer it likely wouldn’t be amicable. Since Nintendo is the big part in this scenario them approaching Shin-en could easily be looked at as hostile by them. If they wanted to work for Nintendo, they probably would already. These guys have created Shin-en on their own, they likely take lots of pride in that and are very content, if they weren’t they would be approaching big companies.

          Since the majority of Shin-en games are already exclusive, that point is moot.

          It seems that it’s not the exclusives that Nintendo are missing, it’s the multiplats, or lack thereof, as to why people are looking in other places than Nintendo. Because of that, multiplats should probably take a higher priority. It’s undeniable that missing games like Arkham Knight, Battlefront, Fallout 4, FFXV and inumerable others doesn’t hurt Nintendo, but that’s slightly off topic.

          • darkgamer001

            But how do you target multiplats when you have the whole “Nintendo fans don’t buy third party games” mentality? I honestly believe it’s not an option. Third parties won’t be coming back, period. There are other, more shady reasons, but I won’t be going into those here as I’d end up with a very long winded-post that goes way off topic.

            As for a potential buyout. I’d say hostile would be barging in and tossing money to get a majority stake. An amicable one can be simply to involve them in more internal projects and maybe mentioning how important they would be as an internal developer. Sure Shin’en can refuse, but I’m pretty sure they’d be flattered anyway. Monolith Soft is a relatively recent example of this, although circumstances where a little different considering the fact that they weren’t independent prior to the Nintendo acquisition….so I’ll admit that it might not be the best comparison.

            As for creative control….eh, yes this is kind of difficult to anticipate. I was thinking that they might have more freedom with bigger budgets perhaps, but yes, some restrictions that you pointed out might come into play.

            The Retro example is an interesting one though. Of course, one might dismiss this as PR talk, but if the CEO was not lying, then it’s the company themselves that chose Donkey Kong over Metroid:
            http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2013/06/retro_chose_donkey_kong_over_metroid_as_its_first_wii_u_title

          • Mythosa

            Then Nintendo is likely destined to be third.

            Possibly. Hard to say either way. If they wanted DO, then that’s cool. With so much PR and all that it’s very hard to say what is legit and what isn’t.

  • CapableTie

    I don’t normally buy indie games, but this developer will get my money day one

  • getagrip

    great looking for small developer,but a big developer-publisher using the same tech but bigger budgets would blow it away

    shin’in again make ea ubisoft etc look like the total lying sack of shits they are…

    this kind of coding with huge amounts of textures etc would look insane

  • Ray01X

    The game does look gorgeous.

    • ChariotMan7

      OMG, yes it does man.