Nintendo Answers Burning Wii U Questions

[Mr Khan]

DarthVolod said:

 

 

System-Level Achievements

Some of Nintendo's top game designers don't want to put Achievements in their games, but Nintendo has put an Achievement-like system in the 3DS, mostly to reward people for feats involving the system's Street Pass networking system. In other words, the system itself has Achievements. "We will have that," Fils-Aime said. "Once you start getting into game-specific [Achievements] that's developer driven." Microsoft may require every game to have Achievements, but, Fils-Aime said, "That is not our philosophy."

Those Notorious Friend Codes

First the bad news… maybe. Nintendo has not chucked the idea of requiring people to have friend codes, which, on the Wii, were 16-digit codes that people had to exchange before being linked as friends on the system.

And now the better news… "There are friend codes, but it's not the existing friend code system," Fils-Aime said. "What do I mean by that? Here's what I mean: you will be able to identify people as friends and have a certain level of interaction vs. a different level of interaction for the more general population. The method by which you identify someone as a friend is a lot simpler than what's happening today with Friend Codes." (He declined to lay out the new Wii U friend code program just yet.)

The problem I believe people had with the Wii version, I told Fils-Aime, is that adults who owned the system felt like, hey, if I'm an adult, treat me like an adult and let me friend people I've met online without having to call a person and exchange a code or something like that. "Agreed," Fils-Aime said.

"You feel like those people will be happier?" I asked.

"Yes, they will be."

So no achievements and the return of friend codes. If this is true then me and many others will be saving a lot of money this holiday by passing on this "next gen" system that can't even get basic last gen features right.

Why bring friend codes back at all? They served no purpose aside from making it much harder to connect to friends. Achievments are also a big part of games now with their own communities built around them, and it seems Nintendo doesn't care about that at all. 3DS achievments and game specific achievements are lame because there is no tracking of all the progress one has made in terms of game playing ... this kills the meta game feel of achievements.

These two things alone are enough to make me not buy a Wii U. I really have no idea how they could screw this up so bad.

The Miiverse demo from the Nintendo Direct seemed to indicate that some form of achievements will be there, at least partially integrated with the Miiverse system which will, in turn, be unified across games.

Not making it mandatory is the smart thing.