Perhaps Activision is trying to correct a wrong for the Wii.

[mike_intellivision]

snowdog said:

LordTheNightKnight said:

If Infinity Ward really didn't like the Wii, they wouldn't have made the engine scaleable. They would have forced Treyarch to make another engine for WaW on the Wii or use the same engine for 3.

The fact is that if Call Of Duty 4 could have been on the Wii in 2007, it would have been. But the engine wasn't ready for it yet. It wasn't out of malice or dismissal of the Wii (unlike say , Resident Evil 5). It was that they just couldn't do it until now. IW didn't have the engine ready, and Treyarch needed to get used to the engine with WaW.

What about MW2? I don't know. Perhaps that will come next year as a dual release with the next Treyarch game. Or it could come as a dual release with the next IW game.

But Activision is not just throwing the Wii a great game later on. They are giving this game to the Wii when the finally can do so.

Modern Warfare and Resident Evil 5 were not originally on the Wii because in 2005/2006 when these projects were being planned everyone in the industry (including my good self) just assumed that the PS3 would emulate the success of the PS2 and the Wii would end up being another Gamecube. Nobody saw the mental success that the Wii has had over the last two and a half years, and developers and publishers only started to take Wii development seriously when it continued to fly off shelves after Christmas 2007. That's why the Wii ended up with a load of cheap and crappy party games and ports early on.

We're now starting to see the results of the work done after the industry started to catch up - House of The Dead Overkill, Madworld, Deadly Creatures, The Conduit, Dead Space Extraction, Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles, Cursed Mountain, Muramasa Demon Blade, Silent Hill Shattered Memories, Monster Hunter 3, Red Steel 2, Gladiator AD and The Grinder. All titles with higher production values, with great looking visuals and most of them Wii exclusive.

I've played the demo of Resident Evil 5 on the PS3 and didn't see anything apart from the quality of the visuals that couldn't be done on the Wii with a small downgrade in eye candy. High Voltage Software has shown that the Wii is capable of visual effects and techniques you'd normally expect from the PS360 consoles - just about everything bump, gloss or diffuse mapped, 4 layered high res textures, real-time reflection and refraction for both water, weapons and scopes, depth of field, HDR lighting, focus blur and advanced particle effects - and there's more impressive stuff to come from the Quantum3 engine too. There's a lot more power 'under the hood' with the Wii's TEV Unit that people don't give credit for. The ridiculous marketshare of the Wii is too big to be ignored, and I'm expecting some sort of announcement from Capcom in the next year or so of a Wii SKU of Resident Evil 5.

 

I was listening to a four-year-old Wii (then Revolution)-themed podcast and they discussed the RE5 annoucement. Their take on it was that it might have had to do with the unknown specs of the Wii (then-Revolution) compared to what was known about the X360 and PS3.

I have no doubt that many publishers are trying to play catch-up on the Wii. And in some ways, that could be said that is why the Wii is finally getting CoD:MW(1). But since it is coming out at the same time as CoD:MW2 on the X360 and PS3, the reasons seem more mercinary than any thing else -- especially considering what Activision's philosophy is (make money off of franchises) and its Wii efforts (Big League Sports).

 

Mike from Morgantown