Dear Reader:
Overlord: Dark Legend interview - the success of this game will help determine Codemasters' future approach to Wii
A portion of a RevoGamers interview with Dean Scott of Codemasters…
RG: Is it completely new, everything we’ve seen in the game?
DS: Yeah, it’s entire. Everything in the game has been built form scratch for the Wii system. We didn’t want to do what other publishers do and just try and port an existing game to the Wii platform, so we’ve built an entirely new Overlord game for Wii. There are a number of reasons why we needed to do that, I mean, the way that the Wii game plays, you know the levels in the PS3 and the 360 just wouldn’t go with how the pointer kind of interacts with the game, we had to do that stuff anyway. And obviously, you can’t just save a 360 game and turn it into a Wii game, because the 360 is so much more powerful that you couldn’t build that stuff for the Wii. And also, we wanted to build a strong kind of new game. We want Overlord to be a really big franchise to Codemasters and the only way we can do that, the only way we can kind of make sure that we’re still making a Wii Overlord game is like we’re doing for the first time: we need to take the time to make a cool kind of unique product. So that’s what we’ve done. So, as you say, in the timeline of the Overlord games, the Wii version is a prequel to what’s on the 360 version, so a lot of the events in the gameplay, in the 360 version, are explained in the Wii game, like how the war between the elves and the dwarves started… [He goes on explaining some story details that we won’t spoil] If you haven’t played an Overlord game before, it’s not important you don’t pick upon these references, but for our hardcore fans, -they’re into Overlord gameplay- this is an incredible kind of an Overlord product.
RG: Ok so I guess we can expect more games from Codemasters. At this time, there is only a little amount of games from Codemasters. Starting with Overlord, can we expect more of these types of games from Codemasters? You have, for example, two racing games: you have F1 and you have the new Colin McRae, and these two are coming to Wii…
DS: Codemasters, as a company, we have to take Wii seriously and make Wii games in the right way. To be honest, something like Overlord is going to utterly determine how much more of this kind of content Codemasters pretends. This is a risk for us: we’re assuming that come next summer, there’s going to be a big market for this game to make it work for a while. We’re sure that’s going to work out, and I hope that we’re right. If we are proved really, really wrong and all Wii games that you want to play is Wii Fit, then it comes the problem. But, at this moment in time, I don’t work in the racing group of Codemasters or anywhere with action games, but as you said, the likes of McRae, the likes of F1, those will also come to Wii.