Hands-On Preview: The Conduit

« Prev Post: Gamer 2 Player: Week One

» Next Post:Preview: Personal Trainer: Cooking Gives DS Owners a Taste For Non-Gaming

Hands-On Preview: The Conduit

Tue, Oct 7, 2008

Graphics are great. I rarely game without them... and in all seriousness, when I'm treated to a particularly compelling graphical experience, like those available in Crysis or Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, I tend to revel in the little details. But as a gamer who can still go back today to the likes of Bushido Blade, Commander Keen and even Planetfall, I believe that in the grand scheme of things graphics mean little.

Therefore, you might think that I'd be rather disappointed with The Conduit, a first-person shooter that has been recognized primarily for its attempt to set a new graphical bar for Wii titles. Well, I was -- until I stood up and played the game for myself.

At the 2008 Nintendo Media Summit, High Voltage Software designer Micah Skaritka showed off The Conduit's third level: a Cold War bunker in Washington, D.C. into which our hero had been pursuing a terrorist hell-bent on unleashing alien spores into the D.C. water supply. (Apparently your human foes aren't exactly alien supporters by choice.) Plowing through a stream of infected soldiers in search of the alien entity force-feeding them that particular kool-aid, Skaritka had us observe a variety of new graphical improvements to the game.

The Conduit now has depth of field when you reload:

Specularity for that shiny new enemy feeling:

And tone mapping, a technique that apparently keeps textures from looking blurry up close. These in combination with the team's dizzying array of other graphical improvements add up to what is surely the best-looking realistic game on Wii.

But it's no Call of Duty 4. You're simply not going to mistake it for an Xbox 360 title. Every utterance of the phrase "it looks great" must still be qualified by the words "for a Wii game."

So what, exactly, impressed me so much that I called The Conduit "a title with the potential to revolutionize console shooters"?

Immersion -- primarily thanks to the game's incredible controls.

For many years now, I have been a fervent believer that the only proper way to play a first-person game is with mouse and keyboard. Despite what my misguided and incredibly lucky colleague Jesse would have you believe, nothing else had the precision and smooth action necessary to realistically simulate turning your head while simultaneously interacting with the environment.

I had held out hope for Wii titles to offer light gun controls as an alternative to mouselook, but once developers separated the movement of the character's gun from the movement of their head, few were able to offer a control scheme that didn't require players to forcefully adapt themselves to obtain any level of proficiency.

The Conduit is different, because you create its control scheme yourself, adjusting most every variable. You can map every button on the controller. You can tweak the sensitivity. You can change the characters' run speed. You can set the exact dead zone visually on the screen in front of you using the D-pad (setting up, in effect, your light gun shooting gallery), and then decide how fast you want your character to turn after you stray past that dead zone's edges.

You can choose one of three modes for the camera, decide whether you want to turn with the Wiimote pointer or Nunchuk analog stick, and lock your pointer look to the dead zone if you so prefer.

Even better, you can tweak all these on the fly, and try out your new sensitivity adjustment by actually aiming at an incoming alien. Within five minutes of hopping on the demo station, I had adjusted my controls and camera settings to the point that I could hit what I aimed at and turn to face threats as easily as on any console shooter I've ever played -- but with the added satisfaction and immeasurable boost to immersion of being able to engage enemies just by pointing at them.

I was told that this incredible control customization was a direct result of fan feedback; and that the team now intends to do the same with the game's HUD, allowing players to drag, drop, turn on and off HUD elements as they wish. Hello, added immersion!

The third thing that High Voltage has done to insure immersion is implement some fairly impressive AI that actually reacts to your input. When I ran into the bunker control room guns blazing, soldiers took cover and fired back. If I walked in instead, they ran up and attempted to beat me into submission with their rifles. When I speedily dispatched foes with a quick burst of fire, the last man standing turned tail and ran... but meeting up with a few of his friends down the hall, rejoined the fight at their side. They flank if there are multiple paths, camp if there are good hiding spots, and peek out from doorways to send a few choice rounds your direction. We're looking forward to seeing if the game's other 14 enemy types have similar intelligence.

Though High Voltage had only two demo stations and no multiplayer available at the event -- and thereby no chance to check out what could potentially be some very exciting, confirmed 16-player deathmatch, team deathmatch and capture the flag using these Wii controls -- the single-player game was great fun, and the only thing that pulled me away was an announcement that Nintendo was (politely) kicking everyone out.

The final game, which will reportedly take players to the Library of Congress, the Jefferson Memorial, the Pentagon and even the Oval Office, is slated for a Q1 2009 release exclusively on the Nintendo Wii.

Making a hardcore title for the Nintendo Wii might be a huge risk -- but High Voltage CCO Eric Nofsinger says a sequel is already planned. Check out our full in-depth interview here.