Here's the basic summary of the comments from various staff of Vigil Games +THQ Montreal Team on porting Darksiders 2 to Wii U dating back to E3 2011:
- June 2011 (Wii U port was already announced at this point) from Vigil technical director Colin Bonstead:
- July 2011 (now in position of 2nd gen dev kits) from Game Director Marvin Donald:
November 2011 - General Manager David Adams & Technical Director Colin Bonstead:
March 2012 - from Games Game Director Marvin Donald:
May 2012 - Associate Producer Jay Fitzloff:
- July 2012 - from Vigil Games Lead designer Haydn Dalton:
- August 2012 from Ex- Vigil Games UI Designer Xander Davis:
note: Vigil Games accused him of being "let go off for poor performance." Davis was angry at Vigil for not having his name mentioned in the staff credits of Darksiders 2. He did not specifically work on the Wii U port.
Read more on his complaints and details of his involvement while employeed at Vigil Games here:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/new...s-II-Studio-Denies-Missing-Credit-Allegations
- October 2012 from Lead Designer Haydn Dalton:
- June 2011 (Wii U port was already announced at this point) from Vigil technical director Colin Bonstead:
Yeah, just because the hardware is more powerful and it will have some extra features that I think will actually be useful to people playing the game. With it’s controller, [the Wii U version of Darksiders II] might be the best version of the game.
- July 2011 (now in position of 2nd gen dev kits) from Game Director Marvin Donald:
There’s plenty of horsepower there, so we’re not going to have to make any visual concessions at all for Darksiders 2. At a minimum on par (with 360/PS3), for sure. Whether or not we can go one step further, that might be driven by what’s available on the PC and whether or not that is easy to translate to the Wii U hardware, because there are most likely going to be resolution choices for the PC version of the game. We know some gamers are just going to have more horsepower at their disposal. It’s probably going to be the same graphically, regardless of any minor or major horsepower improvements on the Wii U. But, in all honesty, if the Wii U turns out to be this ridiculously powerful machine, we will probably make changes to our budget and scope to take advantage of that. But that’s currently not the plan. It’s going to be a direct port. That’s what we’re planning on. But that’s based off of what we believe the hardware’s going to be like.
We’re definitely going to do the obvious stuff, like making the inventory available and showing maps. But as far as more game oriented elements, more reactionary things or things happening while you’re in combat or while you’re traversing and getting the controller involved in that, I don’t really know. We just haven’t taken that step yet. The first thing we needed to do was get what we had already working and make sure it was solid. There are still some issues we have to work out. The game doesn’t run perfectly on the Wii U as it is now. There are some things we have to deal with. But it’s to be expected because the hardware’s been changing and, also, there’s really no precedent for it.
The last version of the controller [GamePad] we had was literally a giant Game Boy. It was very clunky. The shoulder buttons were really high, so they were out of reach, so you had to shift your hand to use a shoulder button. In the middle of combat that’s just not an option. The controller we saw at E3 was not what we had.
It just worked out so when we thought we’d be done should roughly coincide with the Wii U launch. I’m sure there are going to have to be some adjustments, but it’s a great opportunity to have something like this available on day one for a new console. We like to think a lot of people will pick it up for the Wii U whenever they buy one. I’m sure the Wii U will be very popular. But I’m sure that will be driven by the pricing, too. But Nintendo’s usually relatively inexpensive. We’re excited about that. But because we don’t know exactly when the Wii U is coming out, it’s definitely affecting our release as well.
November 2011 - General Manager David Adams & Technical Director Colin Bonstead:
We got the word from corporate, ‘Can you guys pull this off in time for E3?’ And we were like … sure. We weren’t really sure we could do it [create Darksiders 2 Wii U tech demo]. But once the team got a handle on the Wii U’s foibles, they found it quite accessible.You can tell [by] the way the software’s organised, the way the APIs are written, very shortly it’ll become an easy platform to developer for. From a pure programmer point of view, it’s definitely a lot easier than, say, the PS3 was. It’s probably on par with 360 as far as ease of API, simplicity of how you interact with the hardware.
It probably took us a week to get our base libraries to where we could actually run the game on the console, without any graphics or anything, that’s just getting it booting up. And then there was probably another week and a half of just getting the graphics to a state where you could see something on the screen and we could actually play the game.Start to finish it took us about five weeks, from when we found about it to the last day before the show.
When you work on something on Xbox or PlayStation 3, every problem has been solved, you just need to go search on the newsgroups, or email support. [On Wii U] we were literally finding things and telling Nintendo about them. ‘Hey how does this work?’ ‘Well, I don’t know.’ So we were finding the solutions ourselves sometimes. It was kind of like a new frontier.
March 2012 - from Games Game Director Marvin Donald:
We have limitations based on Nintendo's progress. But, the only problem that's been for us is not having an actual release date. But once we know when Nintendo has committed to a firm date, we will be able to commit to a date for Darksiders 2, but we're planning on it being a launch title, and so far everything's been smooth sailing.We got the game running on their hardware pretty quickly, and the controller's been great to work with. Now it's just down to deciding what we really want to do to make it a unique experience on the Wii U; taking advantage of the extra screen and the touch capability and all that. So, we'll have a few new features for sure, but I think visually, for the most part, it'll be pretty much the same.
So far the hardware's been on par with what we have with the current generations. Based on what I understand, the resolution and textures and polycounts and all that stuff, we're not going to being doing anything to up-rez the game, but we'll take advantage of the controller for sure.
May 2012 - Associate Producer Jay Fitzloff:
The visuals will be the same [as PS3 & Xbox 360]. It's still a work in progress. But I know, at least as good is the way to say it.[Getting Darksiders 2 working on Wii U] is not as challenging as you might think. Getting it working was not any issue on the Wii U. It's just the control scheme. It's new territory. It's a new frontier. It's not getting the game working on the system. It's getting a cool control system that feels correct. And that's where we're at now.
When we first got it up and running, you can have the game download to and run on the GamePad, and everybody was like, that could take a while, little worried. It took a programmer [spent 5 weeks up to E3 to get working version of Darksiders 2] two lines of code in five minutes. Working with it is not difficult. Any game would have their inventory on the controller screen. But even that little simple thing is a big difference because you never have to stop the game on the main screen. That will change people's perceptions because you've never had a game where you didn't have to.
- July 2012 - from Vigil Games Lead designer Haydn Dalton:
It’s going well. Obviously we see builds pretty regularly, and from what they’re doing with the game [THQ Montreal], we’re pretty happy with it, yeah. Oh yeah! It’s the same game, but then obviously we’ll be taking advantage of the unique power that the Wii U has to offer us.
- August 2012 from Ex- Vigil Games UI Designer Xander Davis:
note: Vigil Games accused him of being "let go off for poor performance." Davis was angry at Vigil for not having his name mentioned in the staff credits of Darksiders 2. He did not specifically work on the Wii U port.
Read more on his complaints and details of his involvement while employeed at Vigil Games here:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/new...s-II-Studio-Denies-Missing-Credit-Allegations
I’ve not worked on any Wii U version of anything (luckily). But, y’know, I very early on raised my major concern about this. Anybody buying any Wii U game that’s a port is probably buying it almost exclusively and specifically for how it can play differently through the Wii U’s alleged innovated UI. I’m already a known skeptic on whether the interface paradigm is at all anything but idiotic. But if you’re gonna do it? Fine. Then, you HAVE to do it right. You HAVE to innovate on the UI. You HAVE to enhance game mechanics and gameplay in a MATERIAL way that justifies all the hassle and a $400 Xbox 360 seven years late.
I can’t comment on THQ / Vigil specifically. However, just in general, I doubt any studio or publisher is truly giving it the kind of proper UI design and thinking it deserves. Hell, apparently this is a huge leap for regular triple-A console releases. From what I’m hearing from people who have actually played a Wii U as recently as a month ago, the games pretty much suck and the tablet is pretty much a complete gimmick. Still tethered, not wireless. Maybe publishers can pull off something clever. But won’t it just kind of be clever for a little bit, then not really worth your $60 dollars and just annoying afterwards? Kinect comes to mind. PlayStation Move comes to mind. Motherfucking Wii comes to mind. But, sure, we’ll have to wait and see… I can’t comment on specifics. I can only speculate, but as a UI Designer applying experienced critical thinking to game mechanics UI and the Wii U tablet, none of it makes sense to me to truly add value to gamers, even if you try.
- October 2012 from Lead Designer Haydn Dalton:
Technically, it's [Wii U] one of the easier platforms to develop for. We had our core game up and running on it in a very short amount of time. There were no major problems for us developing the Wii U version, other than making sure we had a dedicated team to do it justice. For a new platform, it was surprisingly easy to port it to the Wii U.
Initially, the base code port was tackled by our internal tech team, but as Darksiders II started to ramp up heavily, we handed ownership over to a separate team at THQ Montreal. The Montreal team sent us regular updates and documentation about how they were going to implement the unique elements of the Wii U's hardware.