Wait, the gyro for the controls isn't optional?
I think it is, but the alternative is using dual sticks for separate aiming and piloting, which
fucking sucks. At least, in comparison to either the remote+nunchuk or the analog stick+gyro. I tried the CCPro scheme on S&P2 just to see how it worked and it really required heavy lock on/ aim assist to be anywhere near as effective as the default remote scheme.
Something about performing two completely separate kinds of movement on two analogs at once just doesn't work. It's like rubbing your stomach and patting your head. I don't know why using one analog and one IR camera is so much simpler and more natural, but it is. Gyro aiming is somewhere in between, but much closer to IR aiming.
It looks like Nintendo created a problem where there was none before. Star Fox's issues in the past have been one content and level design. Controls were never a problem. Yet instead of addressing what should have been addressed going by the footage they have released they decided to possibly screw up the one thing they did well with the series.
There's a huge amount of room for improvement in the controls in that separate aiming and flying can really open up the gameplay and allow for different level designs/ enemy placements. In classic Starfox, you can only shoot in the direction you're piloting, which means that you're unable to engage enemies while flying through a difficult gauntlet of obstacles (or vice versa).
Again, Sin and Punishment 2 is the holy grail for what can be done with Starfox's controls. It offered separate aiming and movement in a way that felt natural and genuinely fun to use. Nintendo wasn't wrong to try to change Starfox's controls, they were wrong for prioritizing gamepad usage over the actual quality of the controls themselves.
Personally, I'd have nixed the cockpit view altogether, or at the very least eliminated it as an always-on feature of the GamePad, so people realize "oh, it's something that's useful in certain situations, but I'm not being pressured to use it."
The cockpit view was never really useful in SF64. Here, it's slightly different as the free aim makes it more problematic to target things at different depths without occasionally hitting obstacles without understanding that they're in the way. A first person view can clarify the exact trajectory you're firing on to help you avoid that issue. I think simply toggling it on with a button could have been a nice addition to the game, and presumably that wouldn't have required the hit of rendering two game views at once. It would have even been possible to to this on the remote+nunchuk, thereby rendering the gamepad
completely obsolete. But that wouldn't utilize the second screen in any way, and considering that's Wii U's big feature...
I seriously doubt the GamePad has anything to do with the graphics. That'll be a result of this game being a resurrection of a back-burner-ed Wii game.
The game has to render two views at once, one at 720p 60fps, one at 480p 60fps- and that's not the same 480p as the Wii since it's in a 16:9 ratio. That's a huge strain on the system. Usually, the gamepad only displays 2D interfaces like a map or inventory screen. Wonderful 101 is the only other game I can think of that actually had realtime 3D visuals on both screens at once. I'm pretty sure the impact is at least comparable to rendering one screen at 1080p/60fps.
