I’ve had some interest in The Conduit for awhile now as I’m a giant first-person shooter junkie. I finally got a chance to play the game this past week at Sega’s offices in San Francisco, and left with mixed feelings.
We actually went to go play the multiplayer a few weeks ago, but due to networking issues, the plans fell through. But hey, Ben did get this interview with Eric Nofsinger on The Conduit.
Go check out that interview, and then hit the break for a look at The Conduit’s multiplayer.
The Conduit (Wii)
Developer: High Voltage
Publisher: Sega
To be released: June 23, 2009
Before jumping online, players can choose their character model and modify the characters colors. There are only four characters to choose from with no differences other than how they look. Players can also modify the look of their HUD, and everything can be rearranged to wherever the players desires. It’s a pretty neat feature, one I wish was available in more games.
Once ready, it’s time to jump online. One thing that really impressed me was what High Voltage has done with the online matchmaking. You have three choices when it comes to matchmaking: Friends, Regional, and Worldwide. Friends will obviously let you play with your friends, regional lets you play with people within your country, and worldwide lets you play with people in other countries. The whole process of getting online to play with others is smooth and simple, as it should be in this day and age.
When a room starts to get populated, the player’s names and ranks will appear in the lobby. All the players in the lobby (a max of 12) will either play whatever the host sets up, or everyone can vote on what weapon set, map, and what type of game they play. Once the timer has reached zero, the game will tally the votes and the winner of each category will be selected for the match.
The first match of the day was Team Objective. The mode was basically Capture the Flag but instead of a flag, it was a glowing orb that each team needed to steal from the enemy and plant back at their own base. I was more concerned with my controls rather than the objective, so I ignored the goal to get acquainted with the controller.
Players move with the analog stick on the nunchuk and aim with the Wii Remote. You’ll shoot with B, jump with A, crouch with C, and auto-lock on with Z. Up on the D-pad performs a quick turn, right cycles between your two weapons, left cycles between the three grenade types and down D zooms. Swinging the Wiimote performs a melee and swinging the Nunchuk throws a grenade.
The controls felt very natural and responsive ... when they would work that is. (There were 12 Wii stations all in the same room competing for Bluetooth supremacy, so a lot of times I lost control of my character for a few seconds.) It's also possible to remap the buttons however you like, so if you would rather have the melee attack associated with the down D-pad button, you can. It’s especially a good idea to remap the melee, as swinging with the Wiimote to melee isn’t such a great idea, since it's also used to look/aim.
There are seven maps total -- all on a small to medium scale -- with multiple levels for most of the maps. Each time I played a round, I had to question all the hype surrounding The Conduit in regards to the graphics. It looks great, but it’s not mind-blowingly awesome as people keep making it out to be. There was a lot of rough edges and some of the environments looked very flat. Compared to other Wii games, yeah, The Conduit is one of the best games I've seen in terms of graphics on the Wii. Its just that I was expecting something more because of all the hype.
After Team Objective, we tried out Free For All and Bounty Hunter. Bounty Hunter is basically Halo 3’s VIP mode. Only the marked player can be killed to gain a point, and they’ll lose a point for killing the wrong guy. Players will have different marks and you won’t know if you can fight back against an attack until you start getting fired upon.
We saw a good mix of weapons in each match from alien to human weapons. There are fifteen weapons in all, some as simple as an automatic and some that allows you to charge up the gun for a stronger impact. You can also turn your Wiimote to the side and fire gangsta style. It was very fitting firing like a gangsta, as all of the players were named after Presidents of the United States; I was President Hoover.
I really liked the controls of the game. You’ll definitely need to remap some of the commands, but otherwise no major issue there. Visually, the game (at least multiplayer-wise) wasn’t really impressive. A couple of other annoyances I came across while playing was re-spawning in rooms with enemies right next to the spawn point multiple times and the fact that players can walk through each other.
Overall, I'm really glad what the The Conduit is doing for third-party games on the Wii. Hopefully, we see more support like this on the Wii from other companies. God knows we don't need another casual baby game on the Wii.
Contest:
4:40 PM on 05.07.2009
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Slightly disappointing news for sure but nothing that will ruin the experience for me at least. All I really care about are having well designed maps. That's whats going to keep me coming back.
What are you, ten kinds of stupid? That is precisely WHY this is anticipated so much. This game is sub-par for X360/PS3 but it is an ACCOMPLISHMENT for the Wii. Now that might be a sad fact, but it is still fact. The shovelware on Wii is reaching maximum level what with Ubisoft and EA churning out garbage on a constant basis.
I for one applaud High Voltage Software for what they have done with the hardware limitations that beset them. They are also a true gaming underdog story (small dev makes cool project, lacks publisher, major pub comes to the rescue).
I'd rather support innovation and creativity than give my money to another major dev/pub making sub-par sequels. The Wii needs more quality content, thus, HVS has my $50 on day one. Speak with your wallets!
*(Nothing against PS3, I just haven't seen anything to justify dropping $600)
I do however respect that someone is doing it, and that people will have some fun with it.
- Quite frankly, The Conduit is the first big, original exclusive FPS on the Wii and it's coming from a small-time third-party developer whose shown a lot of passion but still needs to prove itself.
- For a lot of people, the Wii controls are the game's biggest attraction as they've shown in past games how impressive they can be in an FPS.
- It's good to see more developers showing interest in wanting to push the Wii's graphics whether its done in a stylish way or a realistic way. It's about time that more developers take the platform seriously. Pushing the console's graphics, implementing controls properly and finding creative ways to make use of them. In addition, offering the same amount of content as on other platforms and the releasing the types of games that many of the core Wii gamers want. With the Conduit, High Voltage plans on delivering on all of that.
- Unlike MadWorld, The Conduit has every reason to succeed and no excuse not to. The genre is among the most popular and given how rare it is to see an FPS of this the quality with a amount of features including online play, it should be more than enough to appeal to Wii gamers.Besides, its not like it has much in the way of competition when it comes to other FPS titles coming out this year on the Wii.
It's basically an important game to see how well a rather mature third-party original IPs can sell on the platform. It will help determine if it will be worth the time for third-parties to support and invest more on the Wii. Of course, it will also determine if High Voltage will make a sequel to The Conduit. Thankfully, 2009 has a lot of potentially great third-party games so Conduit isn't the only one but it has built up quite a lot of up. Hopefully, it will deliver on that but I don't expect the game to be perfect. It will have its share of technical flaws and limitation issues and most likely some silly design choices as well.
Ultimately, if High Voltage can offer a fun and solid FPs with impressive controls and graphics that are above average, then I think that will be enough to satisfy most people. Heck, the story may turn out to be fairly interesting for all we know.
Do you actually point the wiimote at an enemy to shoot them. Or does you move the wiimote so the enemy is in the crosshair in the middle of the screen?
Graphics will always be a limitation with the Wii, but the greatest designs (of anything, software, websites, cars, buildings) come when the designers work with constraints. The Wii hardware is a major constraint for all developers looking to create AAA software. Working with these limitations allowed HVS to focus their energy on maximizing the core of the game which should revolve around control, story and gameplay. That they did as much with the graphics as they have says a lot about their level of ingenuity. I applaud their efforts and also the fact that they might pull me back into the FPS world with this title.
I've played some FPS on Wii and I can't even understand the hype, let alone begin to agree with it. Sure it might give you a greater degree of accuracy (assuming you put in the time to be proficient) than a dual analog setup, but is it more fun? Maybe there's some chance of it in the future, but I don't see that ever happening on Wii. The online experience is just too clunky and the graphics power is too low.
The problem with the power of Wii isn't that you can't make models detailed enough, textures big enough, or things shiny enough. It's that you can't provide scale, or at least no one has yet been willing to sacrifice visual quality enough to do it as they've (rightly) concluded that people aren't going to buy something that looks like a PSX game in 2009, no matter how large or complex the environments.
That's the real mistake High Voltage has made with this game. They don't understand why the lacking power of Wii makes it less appealing to the target audience for games of this sort. They think it's about doing amazing technology, not about providing compelling content. Whether or not they have that content most of us will never know, because it doesn't LOOK compelling and no one is looking to play something because the rendering technology is cool. It looks small, it looks ugly, and it's on the Wii where playing an online FPS is like playing against an AI without any of the interesting features of AI and all of the bad features of human opponents.
Not that I would have ever bought the game, but Nintendo should really make them stop showing it. The mediocre (if that) look of the game (not just the graphics, but the whole package) and the hype train that keeps trying to leave the station it's single-handedly making me want to sell my Wii. An amazing feat that two years of party game bullshit and hideously lazy PS2 and GameCube ports have so far failed to do.
I was gonna write a long winded explenation but watch a few videos, read about bounding boxes and you will probably get an idea of how it works.
@Kyousuke
It'll sell enough. High Voltage and Sega both know that this isn't the genre that people generally buy Wiis for, yet they're both still doing it, and I applaud their confidence. Are you going to pick it up?
Let's see if I can explain this correctly...
With most Wii FPS games, there's an invisible box in the middle of the screen. As long as you aim within that box, the screen doesn't move, meaning you can aim up, down, left and right without rotating your character. Once you aim outside of that box, however, your character rotates, slow to begin with, but faster once you aim more towards and edge of the screen. That's how you can aim without making the enemies stand in the middle of the screen, like a PC FPS.
What's there to figure out? Its not on any other system, its on the Wii and that's what makes it so special. You can't get those controls on any other system. If this game was on the 360, then it wouldn't be the same game as it is on the Wii.
Oh god damn it. Those are both part of what turned me off of MOH:H2 multiplayer (that and hit detection seemed finicky).
It shouldn't be impossible to make the characters actually tangible. It may not sound like a big deal, but it can make things disorienting as hell in close-quarters.
Disclaimer: The only game system I currently own is the Wii. I will be buying this game in June, barring horrendous reviews.
...huh?