Miyamoto on the Wii U controller, looking at different ideas, how HD will affect development, more
Miyamoto on the Wii U controller and how he doesn’t believe it’s changing what worked in the past…
“Well, we still have the Wii Remotes compatible with our new system, so I think in terms of play styles I think you still have the options you had in the past. I think one of the benefits of having the new controller with the screen is that you could play an entire game on it while someone else is doing something on the television. Of course, you could use the touch screen for simple things like drawing pictures or using it for something like an FPS, leveraging the screen as well as the buttons in a new way. You could also use it in a Zelda game, with a map and items on the bottom screen.”
Miyamoto on whether there was any specific idea or experience that convinced Nintendo the Wii U controller was worth pursuing…
“There isn’t one definitive idea… but the question we were really asking ourselves, and what we were really trying to solve, is that until now, you’ve always been confined to one television screen. If that screen wasn’t available to you, for whatever reason, you weren’t able to interact with your gaming system.”
“We’ve been thinking for some time that having a second screen as a way to always interact with your system, separate from what’s happening on the television, was something that would be important for us to do. I think the end result of that is going to be a wealth of ideas out there. We have a lot of different ideas that we are looking at. I wouldn’t say that any of them would be a ‘definitive’ idea, but as you can see at the show, we have a number of prototypes we’ve been experimenting with.”
“If you were to talk about a specific play style, I think one thing you could look towards would be a first-person shooter. You could, using both the analog sticks as well as the built-in gyroscope, turn and do the aiming yourself. You could then connect to a network and then, on the big screen, see what all the other players on the network are doing, while you’re playing on your personal screen in front of you. There are obviously a lot of possibilities. That’s just one example. Of course there are examples like the ones we’re showing at the show, where one player has a personalized, private screen, and that person has more information than the other players, who are playing up on the big screen.”
Miyamoto on what moving into an HD era means to him as a designer and whether it will affect his approach for game development…
“One element it affects is that the time it takes to develop those assets and the resources required to do so obviously increase. So [game development] then becomes understanding the appropriate balance and how you leverage that HD capability for that particular game.”
Miyamoto on what Nintendo has taken away from the Wii era…
“One of the things we tried to do with Wii was the idea of WiiConnect 24. We wanted Wii to be a system that was always on, always receiving information so people could always interact with it easily. I think what happened, though, was if you didn’t have access to your television, because someone else was doing something, then suddenly the system might as well have been turned off. That played a role into how we developed Wii U.”
“Something else that Iwata-san often talks about is the difference between one-foot communication and ten-feet communication. And what that means is that the way you interact with a device that’s in your hands is different than the way you interact with something like your television. So, for example, you’d never be able to go up and draw on your TV screen. But with a device in your hands, you can do that and interact with it, and then maybe send that up to the TV screen. So the notion of taking into account the way people will interact with the TV, by having this input in the palm of their hands, we think that will create some great opportunities.”
