Update 2: Polygon has modified its story to indicate that it received confirmation from GameStop as opposed to Ubisoft.
Update: As it turns out, we do not have an official statement from Ubisoft. Polygon sources a Reuters article which does not specifically mention the Wii U version’s status.
Original: Despite Ubisoft’s relative silence on the matter, Watch Dogs is indeed still slated for Wii U.
The publisher first reconfirmed its plans to release on Wii U following talk of pre-orders being cancelled at some GameStop locations in Italy and the US. And after the title wasn’t included in Nintendo’s third quarter financial report, Ubisoft said for a second time that the game was set to launch in the first quarter of Ubisoft and Nintendo’s fiscal year. This period kicks off in April.
And as for Ubisoft’s plans to abandon one of Watch Dogs’ trademarks in the US? It doesn’t sound like it’ll be a big deal, especially with Ubisoft confirming that the game is still being polished.
Jed Wakefield, intellectual property litigation specialist at firm Fenwick and West, told Polygon of the trademark situation:
It’s weird to watch Amazon and Nintendo interact. The two companies have been at odds in the past with 3DS and Wii U sales, but occasionally something crops up that might hint at the two working together once again, only to have those hopes dashed by news of Amazon ceasing the selling of Wii Us or some other catastrophic bit of mishap. Today, however, Amazon seems to be on the positive side of the big N. Here’s what they had to say about the company’s future:
“Contrary to a lot of people’s opinion, Nintendo is here to stay and Nintendo will do very well this year. They’re not going to meet their expectations, absolutely, but they’ve still got strong franchises and strong hardware and if you look at the back end of last year when they had a fairly good release slate, it certainly drove their hardware. 3DS has done very well for us so that format is here to stay.
“I think Nintendo have this [negative view] imposed on them and it’s driven by a lot of the media, and the media drives perception,” he said. “Nintendo are getting a lot of bad press and PR and as soon as anything negative is out there it’s a media frenzy. It diminishes what they’ve actually done. If you look at 3DS as a format, it has done very well last year – had that sort of performance been with Microsoft or Sony, my personal opinion is that everybody would be thinking ‘wow, what a fantastic job’. Because it’s Nintendo and they’ve been embroiled in this negative PR frenzy, everyone thinks it’s a dying format. It’s absolutely not.”
– Amazon.co.uk’s category leader of videogames and software Ketu Patel
So at least in the UK, and at least within the game’s division of the company, Amazon appears to be feeling more or less positively about Nintendo. That’s sort of nice, right?
Ubisoft may have filed an application for the abandonment of its main Watch Dogs trademark in the US, but the game is very much in development.
On Twitter, Ubisoft Montreal confirmed that the project “is still being polished as we speak.”
The tweet reads:
@griffmeister69 @gooner4life_uk I can assure you that Watch_Dogs is still being polished as we speak. cc. @Ubisoft
— Ubisoft Montréal (@UbisoftMTL) February 3, 2014
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Disney is working on Marvel and Star Wars figurines for Disney Infinity. A timeframe for their release was not provided.
The Wall Street Journal also claims that Disney’s interactive-media unit will be laying off “several hundred people”. You can find more in The Wall Street Journal’s article here.
Over on its blog, Nicalis provided an update on the Wii U version of The ’90s Arcade Racer.
Bringing the game over “from PC/windows environment to Wii U has been a straight forward process since the project is being built on top of Unity and the team porting Unity to Wii U have obviously been doing a great job,” it was explained.
And regarding the game’s technical aspects:
Without getting into minutia that we’re probably not allowed to share in great detail, some things that worked on PC couldn’t be ported exactly Wii U without having affecting how the game performs on the Nintendo console–and probably other consoles, too. However, we’re very happy with the results. Fidelity, image quality and a smooth framerate are our priorities. Detractors note, Wii U is proving very capable of running the game at 60fps at 720p with 4xMSAA and FXAA resulting in a crystal clear image. It’s simply beautiful.
The lead programmer on ’90s Arcade Racer has been busy working on the game’s AI, among other elements. Ultimately, the goal is to support 30 cars in each race.
The ’90s Arcade Racer doesn’t have a release date at this time, though mid-2014 is currently targeted.
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata shared an interesting nugget of information about the Pokemon franchise last week.
Initially, the company was given an indication that the creatures shouldn’t adopt the “cute” aesthetic fans have come to know of today. “This cute yellow thing is not a monster, everyone told us,” Iwata said.
Hiroshi Yamauchi, however, stuck to his guns. Yamauchi was shown mock-ups of a muscular Pikachu, but it didn’t sit well with the former Nintendo president.
“When you adapt too much, you lose what’s unique about you,” Iwata concluded.
Unsung Story designer Yasumi Matsuno shared another round of information about the game in a new Kickstarter update.
Matsuno wrote the following about how many hours players can expect from the game:
“The game will be composed of several episodes, each of which is like a short story. Each episode will include about four to six stages, and at launch we plan to have about five episodes in total. So based on this, there should be somewhere around twenty-five playable stages.”
Matsuno also confirmed that Unsung Story won’t feature a single main character:
“There is no main character such as Ramza (Final Fantasy Tactics) or Denam (Tactics Ogre). Players will assume control of a group of common warriors and take part in battles from episodes spanning the course of the war.”
You can find even more news from Matsuno here.
