Dear Reader:
Ubisoft employee comments on Red Steel
If you have been reading GoNintendo for a while now, you are familiar with PRINCE_NineOne1. Prince is an employee of Ubisoft that posts over at IGN’s forums. His status as a Ubisoft employee has been 100% confirmed, even by IGN. Having said that, Prince has posted on the subject of Red Steel, and the build that was shown/playable at E3. Some people were a little disappointed with Red Steel’s showing, so Prince has taken the time to comment on the situation. The following are two seperate posts from an IGN forum thread.
The game had exactly two weeks to port it’s gamecube dev kit version onto a revolution dev kit prior to E3. It was not exactly the winning method to show off a game in the best light.
I played the control scheme of MP3 and Red Steel (and Zelda for that matter) and there is defintitely not much different. Read Matt’s blog about FPS controls on the Wii. This revolutionary system requires a bit of extra thought to the coding but I’m fully confident that we will meet the challenge. There is a reason why Red Steel was the only 3rd Party game demo’d during the press conference.
We are planning on doing something special with IGN to keep you guys up to speed on the progression of the game. I think you deserve to know the development process for something brand new. REALLY BRAND NEW. It should be good stuff.
We have plenty of time to create the best possible game for the Wii.
-P911
p.s.
This is why publishers don’t show early games at E3 or only behind closed doors sometimes.
Second post
Anything can happen control scheme wise. We want to make this an awesome experience and it may require that we tweak some things, therefore, I cannot provide a defnitive answer at this point.
Also, aside from the tweaking controls, gamers are going to have to tweak there habits. One thing I found (and you can quote me on this) is that casual gamers had 10x more fun with the Wii FPS games than did Hardcore gamers. My theory is that pointing and shooting is so natural, easy, and fun for people who “don’t know” what to expect from an FPS whereas FPS gamers were looking for specific things from past experiences. I dunno? Maybe it was just me that noticed this but it defintely happened during my presentations.
With that said, there IS going to be a learning curve because the concept is sooooo trippy. Real time 3D space movements? You better believe that it will take some game time to get accustomed to it. But once you do (and you will), you’ll notice how the game flows much better. A lot of people who played the game had less than 5 minutes to play (if that.) The lines were so long and it was hardly enough time to really, REALLY get the controls down pat.
I have confidence that things will work out in the end.
You know what’s funny is that one of our gameplay mechanics (as you read in the GI article) is that we know people will start out blasting left and right creating complete mayhem with bullets and sword swings because they are not accustomed to these new controls. However, as you progress, you will learn to master the controls and be efficient in how you eliminate your enemies. Our goal is that by the end of the game - you will have “mastered” not just the “Red Steel” controls - but the Wii controller itself.
Should be a fun ride.
-p911
p.s.
Sorry for spelling errors - I just type free.
Looks like we should be keeping a very close eye on IGN for some exclusive Red Steel updates in the future. Hopefully some of these words assuage the fears that some experienced while playing Red Steel at E3. Thanks to Vaati for the heads up.