Nintendo on Xenoblade Chronicles 3D – dev length, challenges, why New 3DS only, more
Nintendo Life recently caught up with Hiro Yamada, general coordinator of Xenoblade Chronicles 3D. Yamada addressed several topics about the project, including when it began, challenges in porting to New 3DS, why it couldn’t be done on the regular 3DS, use of the two screens for information, and amiibo.
We’ve rounded up the various comments from Yamada below. For those who are interested, the original interview is located here.
On when the project began…
Development started around Autumn/Winter 2013.
On how familiar the team was with the game…
The team responsible for porting the game on Nintendo’s side had huge fans and people who knew the game well, but there weren’t any on MGI’s side. However, once they played the Wii version, they all become fans too.
On the challenges re-releasing a Wii game on New 3DS…
The basic specs of the Wii are higher than those of the New Nintendo 3DS, so a simple port turned out to be a huge challenge. On top of this, implementing the 3D effect, which requires double the image processing, made it even harder. However, we used a lot of tricks technically, as well as in our working methods. We achieved the 3D effect while retaining an almost equal graphical quality, except for the resolution. Along with the stable 3D effect of the New Nintendo 3DS, we hope the players will be satisfied with the outcome.
On why it’s a New 3DS exclusive…
Without the higher performance of the CPU on New Nintendo 3DS compared to Nintendo 3DS, we simply wouldn’t have been able to port the game. The New Nintendo 3DS also comes with the C-Stick and ZL & ZR buttons, which was really helpful as we could just use the Wii Classic Controller control scheme without any changes. As stated above, simply porting the game itself was difficult. We couldn’t use touch controls either, so if the C-Stick and these buttons weren’t available, I’m not sure we’d even have been able to port it at all.
On the design decisions, such as the use of the touch screen to de-clutter the top screen…
In the Wii version, there was a lot of information shown on a single screen (the TV screen). We found though that showing all this information on a smaller handheld screen (the 3D screen) makes it much less clear. Instead, we put a lot of this on the Touch screen (although we have not used touch controls here), making the 3D screen much clearer. However, we still wanted to maintain the same feel as with the Wii version so we put a lot of work into the layout, deciding what to put where.
On the difficulties in delivering the sizable world and landscape draw distance on New 3DS…
In porting the game to the New Nintendo 3DS we had to use a lot of technical tricks to get the immense landscapes to show both seamlessly and without performance drops. Dealing with the 3D effect was an incredibly difficult challenge, but something we deemed necessary to provide players with a sense of immersion in these huge landscapes. We really gave it our all to achieve this.
On whether there were any plans to tie in amiibo to the gameplay directly…
The Collection Mode was a feature proposed by some of the staff from the porting team on Nintendo’s side who were huge fans of the game, so I believe that other fans will also like it. As I have mentioned, simply porting the game itself was hugely difficult, so we never intended to make any changes to the main game itself.
On the benefits playing on New 3DS as opposed to Wii…
As this game takes about 100 hours to complete, there are going to be a lot of people who are too busy in their daily lives to sit down at a console for hours and wouldn’t have been able to play Xenoblade Chronicles. Since with the New Nintendo 3DS you can play wherever you may be, I believe that our port will make this game much more accessible to these kinds of people.
