Vigil on Wii U power, "minimum on par" with 360/PS3, Game Boy-like dev controller, 2nd-gen dev kits and more

Vigil, the dev team behind Darksiders II has revealed a lot about the Wii U, and also confirmed that they are working on second generation dev kits.

“There’s plenty of horsepower there, so we’re not going to have to make any visual concessions at all for Darksiders 2. At a minimum on par (with 360/PS3), for sure. Whether or not we can go one step further, that might be driven by what’s available on the PC and whether or not that is easy to translate to the Wii U hardware, because there are most likely going to be resolution choices for the PC version of the game. We know some gamers are just going to have more horsepower at their disposal. It’s probably going to be the same graphically, regardless of any minor or major horsepower improvements on the Wii U. But, in all honesty, if the Wii U turns out to be this ridiculously powerful machine, we will probably make changes to our budget and scope to take advantage of that. But that’s currently not the plan. It’s going to be a direct port. That’s what we’re planning on. But that’s based off of what we believe the hardware’s going to be like.” - game director Marvin Donald

Vigil also talked about their plans to fine-tune the game and how they were going to implement controller screen use…

“We’re definitely going to do the obvious stuff, like making the inventory available and showing maps. But as far as more game oriented elements, more reactionary things or things happening while you’re in combat or while you’re traversing and getting the controller involved in that, I don’t really know. We just haven’t taken that step yet. The first thing we needed to do was get what we had already working and make sure it was solid. There are still some issues we have to work out. The game doesn’t run perfectly on the Wii U as it is now. There are some things we have to deal with. But it’s to be expected because the hardware’s been changing and, also, there’s really no precedent for it.”

We also learn that the Wii U dev controller was much different from what we saw at E3 2011…

“The last version of the controller we had was literally a giant Game Boy. It was very clunky. The shoulder buttons were really high, so they were out of reach, so you had to shift your hand to use a shoulder button. In the middle of combat that’s just not an option. The controller we saw at E3 was not what we had.”

Finally, Vigil admits that DarkSiders II’s release date is definitely impacted by the Wii U launch, which hasn’t been confirmed yet. As of right now, it looks like somewhere between August and December 2012.

“It just worked out so when we thought we’d be done should roughly coincide with the Wii U launch. I’m sure there are going to have to be some adjustments, but it’s a great opportunity to have something like this available on day one for a new console. We like to think a lot of people will pick it up for the Wii U whenever they buy one. I’m sure the Wii U will be very popular. But I’m sure that will be driven by the pricing, too. But Nintendo’s usually relatively inexpensive. We’re excited about that. But because we don’t know exactly when the Wii U is coming out, it’s definitely affecting our release as well.”

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