There have been rumors, but most of them are disappointing.
85% of the rumors have been positive and have ended up accurate with the detective work more or less.
5% of the rumors were fake (by the hater fanboys, and the one we're in this thread speaking about)
5% of the rumors were stupid developers with early kits - or old impression getting out late
5% of the rumors were pure bullcrap (no sources, april fools)
The media mostly reported balanced of rumors, half bad half good - fuckers. That's because it makes the most drama and pageviews = ads revenue = profit.
There have been rumors, but most of them are disappointing. Basically Nintendo is shooting for a Fall (Q3/4 2012) release, and did everything imaginable to keep the price around $300. You can only use 1 tablet controller at a time, and rumors have said they are very prone to disconnect, stop working, and have massive amounts of delay (according to various Developers). The Wii U is basically going to wirelessly stream the information to these controllers, which results in massive amounts of data flowing too and from the device at any given time, and since the Tablets have no integrated Processor, the Wii U itself has to process everything on the controller as well as the game itself.
The system selling for $300 may sound tempting, but Nintendo really had to skimp on quality to get there, and were forced to cut cost as much as possible to please investors according to rumors. Microsoft did that with the Xbox 360's cooling setup, and we know how that worked out. I imagine massive amounts of Hardware Problems with the initial batch of Wii U's due to shoddy manufacturing.
Most of these assumptions are poor speculation.
Nintendo has always produced quality, high-yield, low-fail products regardless of their raw power difference from the competition. Wii's failure rate it
No offence but it's rather ridicolous to say that WiiU would have the similar RROD problems just because it's as powerful or more (which will be) than X360. The fact that why was there RRODs and Disc Scratching is because Microsoft's "engineers" totally missed the point of making the system, they lowered the cost of wrong materials by using inappropriate disk spinner locker or what the heck it was. But the RROD came from the last minute change that they though would be okay so didn't tested it or not enough.
The 300$ price was long speculated before that rumor came out. 300price is a very valid assumption. Why, that's because the console is better in much ways than Wii was which was sold for 250$ at launch, the hardware buff would make the console cost 350$, that's expected. But nintendo said in winter last year, they don't want to make the same mistake with WiiU as with 3DS (overpriced). 3DS exploded after the huge price drop. They don't want make WiiU to be too costly to adopt while they have no competition and games will aslo be ready for WiiU - expect much better line up than 3DS had in first 6 months. That makes 50 off and we expect 300$ to be the price - that completely doesn't indicate or mean anything about the quality or the specs of the console, purely wrong thinking there, this is just price balancing and they will get that loss compensated by software sales as they did confirmed they are willing to launch the console with a loss.
Everything else you said is old news.
-WiiU will be able of screen 2 controllers - not sure if the total amount is locked at 5 with WiiMotes.
-The "various" developers are anonymous, and 1 year old news talking about the early kits which we all knew had no wireless working, and had overheating GPU (underclocked).
-The tablets work like a terminal - there is no reason to put "processor" inside them. The only processor they will have is the IO/LCD/Sensor/Wireless controller chips which are nothing surprising, with probably a central ARM processor that will work with all the sub controllers to make it all smooth since the data flow will be substantial. Your statement seems to present this as an negativity - while this is actually a huge postive thing, this is not been designed to be a portable device (quote from iwata at E3) - if the controller would rely on it self it would cost extremely more (50-60$, cost of controller will drop significantly in future as technologies such as NFC are projected to be 400% cheaper in future due to mass production in mobile space) and it would eat the batteries really fast - not only that, it would have been totally impractical, and technically useless to try to help the main screen, not only that, but having crap portable-grade graphics as well. That argument just defies the whole idea like trying challenge the laws of physics.
The investor thing is just a funny way to say - that rumor was probably written by a journalist-type or even an investor - the wording of the rumor is so ridicolously obvious it's a assumtion-laden by a few info points that are the actual importance, other is just the cake decoration to make it more appealing to who's reading it, you have full explanation of that rumor
here (and yes, I wrote that)
Oh please, that tablet will be a map or inventory in 99% of the launch titles. I am with him, it seems like a silly idea. Their logic is it frees up screen space "wasted" by the HUD, Map, and other elements, but any game that has those is largely action-based, and in a game where split second decisions matter, having to look down at your controller, away from the action, seems like a terrible "solution".
Nothing has been announced, Nothing Has been confirmed, pure none-sense. The first party games would definitely be designed well that you won't have BOTH SCREENS with action going on while you need to focus on the main screen or vice versa.
If many games follow the same control style:
- it's probably 3rd party developers being lazy and following suits
- probably publishers following suits cause that's all they know
- untalented designers ( definitely not nintendo)
If that happens it's the toxin of the 3rd Parties so it's pretty criminal to blame Nintendo or the Console or the Controller for it
No offense but this quoted post above seems more on the troll side or poorly based speculation to me - think before you say such things.
E3 will surprise many of people - especially these kinds of opinions - It definitely won't surprise me that much as we can see what we can expect, but the surprises surely will be there, in a good way of course, , we won't know everything before E3 that's for sure, most of the surprises would be in the new IPs that'll be shown but im always open to a surprise, i hope it's F-Zero or Starfox, i'll be impressed if it's a new IP from Retro too, but it'll feel much better about the hardware fact that will finally be reported properly by the media, since nintendo will blow those haters away.
