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The Conduit used Wii MotionPlus at one point, but the results felt 'gimmicky'
A portion of a Dtoid interview with High Voltage’s Eric Nofsinger…
D: Before you reached out and start getting suggestions, was there anything that you thought, “Oh, this is going to work great.” But then, ultimately, found that it just didn’t work?
NOFSINGER: Oh yeah, there’s a lot of examples of that stuff. The proof is kind of in the pudding, and once you try it, it’s kind of proved or disproved. One of the things was melee attacks. We had to play a lot with the sensitivity on that. I mean, you could map the melee to the D-pad but it defaults right now to a quick thrust forward on the Wii Remote. It’s really easy to get disoriented, so we had to play a lot with that. “Oh yeah, you’ll just thrust forward and it’s going to work great.” But really, the first implementations of it were terrible; it just didn’t work at all. We had to do a lot of work with that to see what would work.
The biggest example of that that I could give was Wii MotionPlus. We were really excited about Wii MotionPlus; we got the kits when everyone else got them — actually a little bit before. We were really excited, going back and forth with Nintendo on how to integrate this and what the best use for it was. But when we actually implemented it, it really didn’t bring that much to the table. It really felt like a bit of a gimmick. The other things in the game had been built from the ground up to take advantage of the Wii Remote. This just felt way too tacked on. We didn’t have a lot of melee weapons to take advantage of it; actually, we had no melee weapons. So we tried to scramble a little bit: “Oh, are we going to try to tack on a melee weapon?” We played around with that. To be real honest, it just felt like a cop-out. From day one, our mantra has always been, “If we’re not doing it right, don’t do it.”
So when we looked at that we said, “Hey, this doesn’t feel right. It feels like a tack on. There’s really not a lot of gameplay that supports it. Let’s not lie to our fan base and say, ‘Hey Wii MotionPlus,’ just to use it as a bullet point on a box.” Unlike Wii Speak, we plug that it and it works great. It’s really cool to be able to trash talk with your buddies online. But maybe for a future version we’ll revisit [Wii MotionPlus], and if we can build something around it that makes sense. We’re not going to just tack it on to tack it on.