Developer on Wii Ports: “You can’t retrofit a load of shit and expect it to work with this controller”

Overlord producer, Dean Scott, has had a few choice words to offer to developers porting their games over to the Wii. Talking at last month’s GDC, Scott discussed some of the issues surrounding porting a game to the Wii.

He himself is in charge of putting the highly successful Overlord game franchise onto everyone’s favourite waggle machine, so is no stranger to the problems faced with creating a Wii game. His main criticism comes with companies trying to ride on the huge success of the console, and creating crap games in the process.

At this moment in time, because the installed userbase on Wii is so high, it’s the Wii gold rush, [s]o publishers are like ‘˜shit, what can we get out on Wii really quickly? What that means is people end up porting games from other platforms, and they don’t fit the console because [the Wii remote] has to be the absolute starting point. The controller is point one. You can’t retrofit a load of shit and expect it to work with this controller.

It may be painfully obvious he is correct to most gamers out there, but to hear these words from somebody who is actually making a game for the Wii is very comforting. When talking about how Overlord: Dark Legend fits into the equation, Scott said that Codemasters was ‘œconscious that we had to build something that played to the strengths of that platform.”

As a fan of the original game, I’m just hoping Scott can stick to his words. If not, I have a feeling this quote might be re-surfacing.

Via: Dtoid