The Wii U’s Gamepad is a hell of a controller, featuring literally every single form of input ever in the history of gaming, but owing to a public perception problem, as well as a general lack of proper implementation in games, it has come to be seen as the albatross around the Wii U’s neck- think of it as Nintendo’s Kinect.
Nonetheless, it remains a core part of the Wii U experience, and this E3, Nintendo announced several games that it indicated would use the Wii U Gamepad properly. One of those was Splatoon, a new shooter IP by Nintendo that benefits greatly from the Pad; as a matter of fact, Nintendo claims that it made the Wii U Gamepad partly keeping shooters in mind.
“We’ve been thinking very deeply about how to leverage the GamePad and games that we’ve designed,” said Nintendo’s famed legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto. “Maybe there are some people who criticized us and said that we struggled with how to do that but really, what we do is we think deeply about how the GamePad can be used. And so it’s not just about designing game play around the GamePad, but really it’s about designing the complete game play experience and finding the best way that the GamePad fits into that overall experience. We’ve found that we’ve been able to naturally over time come to a point where we’re able to find the best and most natural way for the GamePad to fit into the game play.
“And actually, when we first developed the GamePad itself, the reason that we put the gyro controls in there was because, very specifically, we wanted it to be easy to use those types of controls for aiming in those FPS or shooter-styles of games. So that was one of the first things we implemented when we began designing Splatoon,” he said.
Splatoon certainly seems to benefit greatly from the Gamepad- not just by the gyro controls, but also because the Gamepad’s screen gives the player an instant overview of the state of the match, leading to dynamic on the fly strategies that simply would not be possible without it.
Splatoon releases exclusively for the Wii U next year. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more coverage.
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