Straight Right on Wii U development, unannounced projects, more
Straight Right founder Tom Crago tackled a few questions about making Mass Effect 3 for Wii U, developing for the console, among other topics.
Crago also mentioned that another Wii U project from the studio is bound to be announced soon. Surely this is the mystery Square Enix game, right?
All of Crago’s commentary is below.
Crago on whether or not it’s frustrating working on Mass Effect without being able to contribute to its narrative, or is porting it to such a unique system creatively satisfying enough in and of itself…
“It’s true that we’re not contributing to the story, but really it’s the gameplay, in a moment to moment sense, that I think is the most important element. On Wii U you get the same narrative, but we’re able to exploit Nintendo’s GamePad, and as a result try to deliver an experience that exceeds the original versions of the game. That may be a tough ask, but it’s what we’re trying to do. Even though we’ve been handling the game very gently, there has still been a lot of satisfaction creatively with the changes we’ve been able to implement.”
Crago on whether or not the team has any really big Mass Effect fans and if they would change anything about it…
“We have a lot of fans of the series here at our studio. And they’ve been able to contribute to all the new stuff we’ve implemented. We never really approached it thinking ‘what would we change about the original game.’ Our attitude was always ‘what can we do to improve it and to leverage what’s unique about the Wii U.’ That’s what we’ve endeavoured to do, and I hope with some success.”
Crago on how Wii U stacks up against other hardware in terms of ease of porting/development…
“The Tantalus limb of the organisation did Unreal II on Xbox, which was about as complex as conversions get. We also ported the Wipeout games from PlayStation to Saturn, and Manx TT Superbike and Area 51, among others, from coin-up to console. So we’ve had a lot of experience with very challenging ports. From a pure technology perspective, and maybe this speaks volumes to the power of the Wii U, working on ME3 has been very manageable. It’s been a good experience for us, although of course it’s challenging right now as we get close to completion. It always is with new hardware.”
Crago on upcoming projects…
“So many secrets, each more secret than the next. Yeah look we do have a couple more games in development on Wii U, one of which will be announced shortly. We’ve made a big commitment to the platform and we’re really hoping it’s a great success. We’re also doing iOS right now, with a view to doing a lot more in the mobile space. That’s it at present.”
Crago on how Straight Right is related to Tantalus…
“I founded Straight Right, and I own and run Tantalus. The two are sister companies, and share the same studio and technology. Tantalus has been around since 1994, which makes it one of the oldest game development studios in Australia. We started the Straight Right label as a way of differentiating from the kids and family stuff for which Tantalus was growing synonymous. Tantalus is going to continue to work on those kinds of games, across a range of platforms. In fact we released a 3DS title with Ubisoft very recently.
“Straight Right is focussed on games for more of a core audience, maybe with an emerging nod to digitally distributed titles. Part of the reason we started it was to make a genuine attempt at actually connecting with the people who play our games. We were never able to do that particularly well as Tantalus. The name is from boxing, it’s a kind of punch, although I guess you can also say that in video games there are situations when you go ‘straight, right.’ I spent many hundreds of hours playing multiplayer Goldeneye on N64 and that’s exactly the kind of commands we used to yell at one another in the living room.”
