Stop me if if you’ve heard this one before: a developer reveals a motion-controlled, realistic first-person shooter for the Wii, proceeding to generate tremendous hype. That was Red Steel, two years ago — and today, it also describes The Conduit, High Voltage Software’s first major attempt to escape a resume filled with mediocrity.
IGN has an exclusive first look at The Conduit, in which they paint a picture of a incredibly innovative developer pulling potential out of the Nintendo Wii like so much dental floss. And in terms of tech, it seems they’re onto something:
The game-maker’s “Quantum3″ game engine brings polish to The Conduit by way of a “full 16-TEV stage material pipeline using up to eight texture sources and a host of innovative blend operations.”
In short, it allows the developer to create graphic effects normally seen on other consoles with vertex and pixel shaders – specifically, dynamic bump-mapping (via tangent space normals or embossing), reflection and refraction (via real-time cube or spherical environmental maps), light / shadow maps, projected texture lights, specular and Fresnel effects, emissive and iridescent materials, advanced alpha blends, light beams / shafts, gloss and detail mapping, seamless resource streaming, projected shadows, heat distortion and motion blur, interactive water with dual-wave channels and complex surface effects, animated textures, and more. Readers may not know what all this technical jargon means – that’s not the problem. The problem is that too many Wii developers don’t know what it means, either.
But all the tech jargon and promises to make a Wii game “that looks like a 360 title” are just distractions from the simple fact that this is a “straightforward” first-person shooter whose plot revolves around “government conspiracies and alien cover-ups.” Have we learned nothing from the great shooters of 2007? First-person shooters need either a compelling story or incredible multiplayer, and those that have both reign supreme. Tech demos just don’t cut it.
Only time will tell if this High Voltage Conduit will electrify an audience cold to Ubisoft’s Steel, but we’re not holding out hope only to get burnt when the game arrives.
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