IGN got the first look at a new IP designed specifically for Wii from High Voltage Software called The Conduit. It's obviously too early to really draw any conclusions or to even speculate but things are looking good so far.

IGN: "High Voltage Software, making games for 15 years, is one company well underway with a title built from the ground up for Wii. It's a first-person shooter that revolves around government conspiracies and alien cover-ups. It's using an advanced 3D engine that really makes the most of Nintendo's hardware. And it features a control scheme that fully utilizes the Wii remote. And right now, the game needs a publisher.

It's called The Conduit and it takes place during present day. Washington D.C. finds itself the epicenter of an extraterrestrial attack and it's up to gamers, as the secret service's Agent Ford, to discover the truth hidden behind the invasion. To do that, he'll need a variety of guns and the skills to use them. High Voltage calls The Conduit a straightforward first-person shooter in the style of Halo, Medal of Honor Heroes 2 or Resistance: Fall of Man – basically, fast, run-and-gun battles and stylized weapons. The Conduit also features advanced enemy artificial intelligence enabling "human-like behavior" and a special device called the All Seeing Eye (or ASE), which, according to the studio, allows players to "reveal concealed objects and enemies, providing a deeper level of puzzle-solving."
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The Conduit will include a very customizable control scheme very similar to the one in EA's Heroes 2, which offered a fully tweakable bounding box in addition to Wii remote sensitivity settings. High Voltage's Eric Nofsinger, chief creative officer, says that the developer turned not only to Heroes 2, but Metroid Prime 3 for inspiration.
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What is perhaps more intriguing is that High Voltage has built a custom engine designed to really push the Wii hardware's graphic capabilities. The game-maker's "Quantum3" game engine brings polish to The Conduit by way of a "full 16-TEV stage material pipeline using up to eight texture sources and a host of innovative blend operations."

In short, it allows the developer to create graphic effects normally seen on other consoles with vertex and pixel shaders – specifically, dynamic bump-mapping (via tangent space normals or embossing), reflection and refraction (via real-time cube or spherical environmental maps), light / shadow maps, projected texture lights, specular and Fresnel effects, emissive and iridescent materials, advanced alpha blends, light beams / shafts, gloss and detail mapping, seamless resource streaming, projected shadows, heat distortion and motion blur, interactive water with dual-wave channels and complex surface effects, animated textures, and more. Readers may not know what all this technical jargon means – that's not the problem. The problem is that too many Wii developers don't know what it means, either.(Zing?)
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All The Conduit screens you seen included in this article (and in our media section) are running in real-time on the Wii hardware. Currently, the game runs at a steady 30 frames per second, but High Voltage is aiming for the Holy Grail: 60 frames.
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"There is this pervasive and cyclical argument that Wii consumers don't want mature titles, when there aren't those types of products available to them. And even more frustrating is the claim that Wii consumers only care about great gameplay. Of course they care about gameplay, but we believe if given the choice, they would want great graphics as well. It's just a cop out," says Nofsinger.
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High Voltage wants to be the first to prove that Wii owners are ready and waiting for a high-quality first-person shooter, too."

This post was last modified: 04-18-2008 12:03 AM by Kindrik.

The first paragraph makes it sound like "Beyond Good and Evil" xD

I'm interested in their game engine, hopefully it does as it says and ups the ante on the Wii's graphical capabilities. Of course, if they don't reach 60FPS they're too early for their time.

This post was last modified: 04-17-2008 10:10 PM by Rawrmander.

I didn't follow...

And all they have right now seems to just be a tech demo so they're really early in development. If this game can get a publisher I wouldn't think it would release any sooner than late 2009.

60 frames per second (FPS) is required for a game to run smoothly. 30 FPS is like the bare minimum before you get into total lag zone.
And they say 30FPS on average, so at times when lots of things are going on (the most important times in games)it'll be laggy.
Its always better to sacrifice graphical power to increase FPS. In my opinion anyway. But they say they're going for 60 its all good, if they get to 45 I'll be happy.

Actualy, I guess console games don't need as much FPS as PC games... An example would be Halo 3 (30FPS) and CoD4 (60FPS) A lot more can be going on in a CoD4 game then a Halo3 game. And on PCs I typically play FPSs (First Person Shooters V_V) with 24-48 players at once, so frame rates have to be a lot higher to compensate. I'm guesing console games rarely go above 16 players so 30FPS shouldn't be too bad. Then again, it also depends on how much they want going on in the single player mode too.. I like to have lots of things going on, and the average FPS better be higher then 30 to do that.

This post was last modified: 04-17-2008 10:31 PM by Rawrmander.

I know all that, I was just not understanding the "they're too early for their time" line.

I just watched the video of the tech demo at IGN and the engine does actually look pretty impressive. Mainly the water and the little details the were able to accomplish.

I meant the time to bring high graphics to the wii.

Edit: I hate looking at graphics for games via the internet. Never know what you're really getting. From the tech demo, it looks like the engine could use some severe anti-aliasing.

This post was last modified: 04-17-2008 10:48 PM by Rawrmander.

Oh, well I wouldn't say that. I'd just say that everyone but Nintendo is late and these guys have finally shown up. There's no reason why a Wii game should look any worse than at least a GC game and yet thats what some devs are throwing out there.

That's cause they know it'll sell either way.
I'm still rather impressed that they took the time to make a game engine from scratch for the Wii. Hopefully it'll go the same path as the Unreal Engine, and they'll allow other companies to use it...

This post was last modified: 04-17-2008 10:54 PM by Rawrmander.

It seems like they will. That's the impression I got from the video because it looked like they wanted to get it out to other companies. The water and lighting really got my attention in the tech demo and while the fire the lighting was good the fire itself looked unfinished. But I get the the sense that the whole thing is still being worked on.

Finally someone has decided that it's a good idea to release a good shooter on the Wii. Hopefully it has good online play and good gameplay. Definitely will keep an eye on this game! I just hope that it plays as good as it looks.

And i don't think the 60FPS is required to make a game run smoothly. Look at Super Mario Galaxy. It runs smoothly and it's only 30FPS.

The game engine looks good. I'm surprised that they actually built an engine for the game before they developed a game. It shows their commitment. Hopefully they get a good publisher. I'm sure Ubisoft would do it. They should ask them.

This post was last modified: 04-18-2008 12:24 AM by nakedRooster.

Hopefully they get a publisher soon! The Wii dosen't have a huge FPS line up and this one sounds like a winner.

What i want is a good online FPS game for the wii but doubt it. And i agree with Rawr on graphics on the internet.

Have you tried Medal of Honor: Heroes 2? The game doesn't even use friend codes.

This is interesting, but it needs online as well. Shooters without online are well... yeah... I just don't usually find them worth buying. More renting.

Since we're no longer in year 1 of the Wii's life we've gotten to a point where online is no longer an after thought for developers. I believe there will (and there had better) be online multiplayer of some kind.

I love aliens.
I hope its like Area 51 and all scary and what not.

Perfect Dark? Lol.

Perfect Dark 64 right?

Yeah, Perfect Dark Zero is trash.

Amen lmx.

All I hope is that they achieve the perfect FPS controls. I know that isn't very hard, all they have to do is blatantly rip off MOHH2 and they'll have nailed it. Wii really does need a mature shooter title. I for one will probably be purchasing this game the day it is released so that developers see we need more of this kind of title.