04-17-2008, 10:01 PM
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.
Thoughts, opinions, concerns? For me personally I'm going to be keeping a close eye on this one because it sounds pretty intriguing.
- 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."
...
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.
...
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?)
...
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.
...
"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.
...
High Voltage wants to be the first to prove that Wii owners are ready and waiting for a high-quality first-person shooter, too."
Thoughts, opinions, concerns? For me personally I'm going to be keeping a close eye on this one because it sounds pretty intriguing.