Skylanders Giants dev on Wii U NFC functionality
Skylanders Giants is coming to the Wii U this year, though it won’t be taking advantage of the console’s NFC functionality.
Toys for Bob studio head Paul Reiche has indicated that the team is interested in the feature. At the same time, he feels that the Skylanders portal will continue to act as a “fundamental” aspect for Activision’s IP.
“The problem is, if you look at the NFC, it’s in the GamePad, which is really convenient if you want to do the traditional ‘swipe your card’, but trying to set a toy on there, it slides off. At first, we looked at the NFC feature before we got the hardware specs and we were, like, ‘Uh-oh, now everybody can do this’. Then we saw the Raving Rabbids and the video that showed them putting the toy on the GamePad. Unfortunately, [Ubisoft] dropped that feature, and I think for potentially the same reasons, which is – for an ongoing game mechanic, it didn’t seem well-suited, as you are holding the GamePad.”
Reiche went on to further discuss the relationship between the LightCore toys – which light up when close to a portal and do not require batteries – and NFC:
“If you take any of our new LightCore toys – any of our toys that have lights – and if you take them up to any NFC field, they’ll start to glow. There’s definitely a relationship between them in the future that we could use. The ability to take your toy into your mobile and play with them somehow seems really compelling, but we don’t have that yet.”
