The Conduit to support MotionPlus + WiiSpeak

High Voltage, the fellows behind the Wii shooter The Conduit, have received dev kits for MotionPlus and WiiSpeak. The former makes for better motion sensing while the latter, of course, provides voice chat capabilities.

“We’re hooking [MotionPlus] up,” said [High Voltage COO Eric] Nofsinger. “We want to support it. Probably for this version of the game there’s not going to be a whole ton of really extensive use of the Wii MotionPlus. For the sequel to the game, we definitely do want to incorporate more melee and things like that. We want to support it.”

While other developers feel it could overcomplicate or contrive their control scheme, inclining them to introduce things simply because they are able to, Nofsinger says they're aware of that and don't want the game to be 'gimmicky':

“I think it is something to be cognizant of. I think one of our early mandates in design and with the control in general is we didn’t want to be gimmicky. We do have a lot of Wii-specific controls with some of the weaponry, but we didn’t want to be a waggle Wiimote kind of game. There’s nothing in the game like that. I don’t know if we had done that even if we had Wii MotionPlus and been too reliant on it.”

“Right now it’s probably too early to really say. We’re pretty recent in having our hardware and actually integrating it. There may be a competitive advantage to that kind of thing. We want to make sure anything we do incorporate doesn’t just break the whole experience and a lot of that just comes through a lot of testing. We play the game constantly, and in these upcoming months we’ll have an army of testers working on it.”

Being the smart developer he seems to be, he adds he wants the game to still be fun for the gamer who doesn't care for peripherals:

“It would be a mistake for a developer to require too many peripherals or things like that. The game has to be fun with just the Wiimote and nunchuck. Even if you don’t have connectivity online, even if you don’t have WiiSpeak, even if you don’t have Wii MotionPlus…if you don’t have anything but your Wii and the game, it’s got to be fun.”

Interestingly, they've been working on the game since April, but no publisher has yet been secured for the game, though Nofsinger said news on that would be soon-coming. If it was an adventure game or platformer, would they have one by now, I wonder? Hmm..