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RUMOR - Wii U dev talks achievement points, cloud storage, social elements and ports

by rawmeatcowboy
02 June 2012
GN Version 4.0
Another round of rumored info, coming from a supposed European development house with several Wii U projects in the pipeline...

- achievement system also allows you to gain points
- a certain amount of points nets you access to additional features

“We have a lot of freedom with the Wii U points system, we can add “brackets” for players, e.g. if you amass X points you get promoted into a new bracket with awards such as new MP [multiplayer] skins. It’s basically what we’ve been asking Microsoft to do for years. Players who earn points by completing the game should be awarded. We can do that now.”

- cloud storage will be “a few hundred MB”
- this will be free to all players
- once again, due out 2013
- social networking features like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook in Wii U
- upload screenshots to Facebook accounts, auto-Tweet game progress and record/upload game videos to YouTube

"They’re working on a UI overlay for the OS to add Twitter and FB notifications, but so far we haven’t seen it. They’ve reserved a lot of system memory for stuff like that. There isn’t much documentation about it in the new SKD, but they’ve told us it’ll be available in the future.”

- Nintendo Network on Wii U includes new avatars with a lot more features than the original Miis
- use the Wii U controller’s built-in camera to take pictures of yourself
- use these pics to create digital avatars that resemble high-definition Miis
- Miis can then be imported into games

“There’s an API for the camera to scan faces and turn them into low-res 3D versions for games. But it’s still buggy as hell and it depends a lot on the kind of engine you’re running.”

- porting current gen games to the Wii U isn’t as easy as originally thought

“(Games made on 360 will be) much easier to port to Wii U than PS3 versions. A lot less headache involved because their architecture is similar. Technically, you can just recompile X360 to the Wii U and it’ll pretty much run, but PS3 to Wii U is much much trickier.”

- latest SDK hardware is final, but the software keeps updating

“We’ve spent a lot of time creating our own tools for the X360 this generation, and we’ve already tweaked a lot of the tools to work on the Wii U. But if you code on the Wii U from ground up and have to use middleware, it’s probably gonna be tougher than doing an X360 game from ground up.”

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