Today on Headline
RePLAY: The Wii U’s design almost didn’t make it, Nintendo’s new console will
support free-to-play and the ASA rules on Mass
Effect 3 ending complaints.
Speaking to The
Telegraph, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata admits that they almost “gave up” on
the idea of having a second screen for the Wii U; one of the console’s main selling
points.
According to The
Telegraph, the original idea for the second screen was so a player can continue
playing so it can free up the television for something else—it almost didn’t
make it.
“Sometime during that
final discussion we almost gave up on the idea of the additional screen,” Iwata
told The Telegraph. “This was due to our concern over the expected high cost,
it may not have been feasible to create this and sell it a reasonable price
point for the consumers.”
Nintendo, however, never
gave up on the second screen idea and once costs were noodled out, decided to
tie the additional screen to the TV. “From that we discussed how we could use
that additional screen. Like asymmetric gameplay and using it as a touchscreen
device to change how people interact with a TV set.
“The touchscreen is
just one foot away from you, so you can read small letters easier and input
letters more easily,” he explained. “And then you have the big TV screen ten
feet away, which has its own advantages, in that it can be viewed by many people
simultaneously.”
|Source: The Telegraph
Nintendo is going
all-out to reach out to many developers as they can for the Wii U, case in
point: in a Q&A today the publisher announced that the console’s architecture will support free-to-play gaming; another first along with
supporting digital distribution and DLC.
“With respect to the
Wii U system, when we began working on it, one of our goals was to have a
variety of purchase options and additional e-commerce options available at its
launch,” said Nintendo President Satoru Iwata. “And because of that, we have
prepared a Digital Rights Management system. We have designed the system from a
technical standpoint to allow developers to freely take advantage of things
like free to play and micro transactions.”
Does this mean that
Nintendo will also be making F2P games? Iwata demurred, saying, “We would like
those who highly recognize the value of the products we have created to play
them. What I am trying to say is that we are not considering introducing a
free-to-play game if the game itself is not suitable in that fashion. I have no
intention to deny every possibility of free-to-play.”
|Source: Nintendo Life
In contrast to the
unofficial stance of the U.S-based Better Business Bureau, the UK’s Advertising
Standards Authority (ASA) declared that EA did not mislead gamers on claims
that the player could affect the outcome of the story.
Although the ASA understands
that consumers may feel differently, it ruled that Mass Effect 3’s story were “thematically quite different,” and the
three ending choices in addition to the extent of how much the endings were
influenced by the player’s “Effective Military Strength” score is enough to
rule that EA’s advertising did not mislead the public.
|Source: Gamasutra
