The Conduit 2: The long road back
High Voltage on finding an audience for a Wii FPS.
The install base is large – we all know that. Though we also talk about the demographics of that install base. It is difficult to know for sure, but certainly by all the feedback we see – on many sites we're in the top five "games you're excited about" lists - we can only hope that the audience is out there and they're excited about it.
It's that 10 to 18 age range, for sure. But because there's so much customisation and so many gameplay elements familiar to folks on the HD consoles, I expect the demographic is a little wider this time.
Are we looking to pull in gamers from HD consoles? If we can, absolutely. If anyone wants to have crazy sci-fi weapons and a fun online experience with a control scheme where you actually have precise control over where you're shooting, rather than trying to get there with the thumbstick, then I think you might be pretty excited about it.
There's a bunch of different reasons. One of those is we have this foundation we put together on the Wii, so to just go, "Well, this is secondary, so let's just go and work on these other platforms," I think is an insult to Wii gamers. We have generated that fan base and they are excited about it. They're clamouring for something like this, so it's awesome to be able to provide that.
When we started making the first one, the competition on the Wii for these sorts of games was nil. Whereas on Xbox 360 you've got the Call of Duties, Halo – the competition is fierce. So we were striking while the iron was hot.
And obviously we're not the only guys who believe the Wii is worth doing something like this for. There are the GoldenEye guys too, for example.
We would have loved to do DLC maps. That's one of the things fans call about all the time. They always talk about a party system – that's one thing we've looked at but couldn't physically do.
Going sky-high crazy, it would be awesome to do the full campaign in multiplayer. That's quite the undertaking. That's a whole new way to look at things.
Online co-op!
Yeah right!
Of the exploits that people found and did YouTube clips of, we fixed those. As for the hacking stuff, I obviously can't divulge exactly what we've done but our network guys have spent hours making sure it's fairly hack-proof. Fighting hackers is always a losing battle – every game suffers from that – but we're doing our best to thwart them.
And then there will be downloadable patches, which we couldn't do in the first game. Now we can see what people are doing, make modifications and if you want to play online you'll have to download the patch.
Yeah, we probably can't talk a heck of a lot about that right now. I wouldn't feel comfortable.
Absolutely. Oh yeah, lots of things.