Criterion heaps more praise on Wii U, Nintendo
Amid some of the recent negative news surrounding the Wii U, it’s encouraging to see a developer such as Criterion Games going all out with Need for Speed: Most Wanted. We’ve already seen a few lazy efforts when it comes to third-party ports on the console, but Criterion has gone out of its way to make Most Wanted play better and look better on Wii U.
And despite what a few may say about the Wii U’s power, Criterion’s Alex Ward told Kotaku that the system does contain a fair amount of memory. He also spoke about the importance of coming out in a big way in terms of features as this is the team’s first release on the console.
“There’s more memory in the hardware… The draw distance is a little better. It’s not as mip-mapped out. …Well this is our first game on the hardware. We wanted to go back to like we used to be. If you know we’re doing the game, you know we’ve looked at the hardware and said, ‘What’s the best damned thing we can do on that?’ We’re going to support everything we can. We support MiiVerse fully, online play.”
Ward went on to talk about Nintendo in a very positive light, appreciating the “excellent gameplay” the company provides:
“Everyone wants to talk about this and that on the hardware, and it’s not as interesting to me. What’s really important is what we’re doing with the player experience. The games I’m playing on Wii U—Nintendo Land and New Super Mario Bros. U—what Nintendo [does], they just deliver excellent gameplay. It’s probably one of the big problems in the industry at the moment. Everyone—you guys—like to talk about specs and this and that. We’ve got to get back to just playing the game. And that’s what this game is about. It’s about a simple, fun experience. It’s not about 10,000,000 polygons and who does this and who does that.”
