aspro73 said:The more I see of this game the less I want it (it looks so damn generic). It better have awesome controls or there will not be a reason for me to get it.
Well that is at least guranteed. The controls are completely customisable.
Another preview: G4TV compared it to Goldeneye:
Actually, the game did start to vaguely remind me of multiplayer Goldeneye on the N64 with modern online amenities, and that's a pretty good place to be. Here's hoping that other Wii developers take notice and follow suit.
Another day, another positive preview. This one compares it to Perfect Dark. I got to accept that this looks like its going to be good now.
EXTRACTS
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/the-conduit-hands-on
The single player is confident and speedy. The numbers suggest a fairly contained experience - nine levels, eighteen weapons and fourteen different types of enemy - but High Voltage appears fairly adept at varying the pace, with encounters switching quickly between tight corridor shooting galleries with nowhere to hide, and wider arenas, with enemies attacking from all sides. It's a game that fiddles with elevation to great effect, too, aliens blasting from above while you crawl out of a subway tunnel one moment, before the level swaps things around and perches you at the top of a rubble-strewn staircase the next, where you snipe distant enemies sneaking about below you.
With its complex, snaking level layouts and the breathless manner in which it flings up-close attackers at you, it's not a million miles away from the likes of the original Perfect Dark, but High Voltage is hoping to stamp its own identity on proceedings by creating varied combinations of the carefully calibrated cast of enemies
The multiplayer game retains the fast pace and complex levels of the single-player campaign and revels in the bizarre potential of the weaponry.
It's a surprisingly generous package, but it may ultimately be High Voltage's commitment to customisation that carries the day
And it's true: graphically, The Conduit looks like little else on the Wii, with shiny reflective surfaces, textures that stay sharp up close, and a range of unexpected lighting effects. It may be a magic trick rather than a miracle - bloom, depth-of-field and excellent reload animations help to draw your eyes away from some fairly simple geometry - yet, far from a criticism, such calculated manipulation suggests High Voltage has the design intelligence to match the technical cleverness of its proprietary Quantum3 engine, hiding you from the elements the console can't handle with some unexpected treats that it can.
While it remains to be seen whether the team's as good at stringing separate encounters into a coherent campaign as it is as papering over the occasional crack in the visuals, so far this is a smart, shapely shooter, with multiplayer that moves at a frantic clip, and a campaign that hits the ground running.
At this point, we had streamlined the pipeline but were not doing anything new with it. So we re-examined the existing engine architecture and all of the literature we could find for advanced rendering, material, and lighting techniques both for the Wii and in general and started to come up with a new unified rendering pipeline. It needed to be able to handle lighting properly for large numbers of light sources of a variety of types that would apply to an extremely flexible material system for skinned and nonskinned objects. We had an overall idea of what we wanted to implement but had no idea if the Wii would get bogged down when the advanced techniques were combined. What we found really surprised us. We kept adding features to the pipeline and the Wii kept up. It really excelled in the area of texture fill and we focused a lot of our efforts on refactoring graphics techniques onto the flexible interface we provided ourselves to the Wii hardware. We were able to get beautiful radiosity lighting effects combined with many dynamic lights, projected texture lights, applied to materials featuring normal mapped lighting, reflection, refraction, detail maps, and much more. I don’t want to be misleading, obviously we couldn’t “turn everything on” for every surface. But there was enough performance and flexibility for our artists and designers to create the dramatic settings and explosive conflicts in The Conduit and support twelve player multiplayer gameplay. Throughout this process, we worked hand-in-hand with the art staff iterating on technology and techniques. Some conventional approaches were either impossible or too expensive to use. We had to invent some new ones unique to our engine and this game, including dynametric light tightening, reframbriance, and approxiflexion to name some of the more interesting.
Even though we are done creating technology for The Conduit, we are far from finished. We have many items in the pipeline that promise to bring even more stunning visuals and better performance to the Wii, and make it easier for our content creators to make awesome games.
Ugh, doesn't look good in pics.
IGN: Is Wii really capable of true normal-mapping? Is that feasible in-game?
Scott: Yes, absolutely. Our artists create tangent space normal maps and apply them to models just as you would for any other platform. Our tools compress them into Wii specific formats and the renderer uses them for advanced per-pixel lighting, reflection, and refraction. At first we in ATG were concerned about the performance of these techniques on the Wii but found that it was capable of far more than we initially expected. Not only were we able to do normal mapping but we implemented a full unified lighting model that allowed for true per pixel lighting calculation from many dynamic lights, combined with radiosity light maps, and a projected texture light (more to come), on complex multitexture materials with detail mapping, UV animation, specularity, color gloss maps, HDR and much more, all in a unified configurable pipeline. The key was our engineers experience and understanding of the underlying mathematics and physical principals of light and rendering. We were able to remap standard rendering techniques to the unique hardware in the Wii in a way that allowed maximum flexibility, but we didn't stop there.
Scott: The Wii may not have a programmable shader unit but it does have very flexible and powerful multitexturing abilities. A solid understanding of the Wii texturing hardware is prerequisite for just about any advanced graphics technique you will implement on the platform.
"dynametric light tightening, reframbriance, and approxiflexion"
WTF. Is this Star Trek? You can't do any of that anyway until you've depolarised the magnetic constrictors in the field intermatrix relays.
Ugh, doesn't look good in pics.
angrymonkey said:Ugh, doesn't look good in pics.Looks ok to me. I'm not very discerning though. What big problems are you seeing?This happens to me for movies too though. People pick out problems with the fancy comp graphics and I never notice. Maybe I don't mind lower quality graphics considering that I grew up with a colecovision."what are those tiny ants?" my sister asked"those are FOOTBALL PLAYERS" - I said all indignantbut she was more right than I was.
Jaggies, jaggies, jaggies and more jaggies. In the last two pics the enviroments look really low res to me, too.
Low detail in the textures and jaggies. The pics are compressed though. It looks so much better in good quality video.
"We kept adding features to the pipeline and the Wii kept up. It really excelled in the area of texture fill "
This is what Factor 5 said, with the increased CPU and memory they said that you could get "insane fill rates on wii". Rogue Squadron last gen pushed more on screen polys than any other game.
Just read the whole thing.
No destructable environments, weak story and AI.
But it has seamless controls, great graphics and well designed single player levels as well as a platform defining online mode.
They says its the best FPS on the system? So its better than World at War?
It sounds pretty good.
gamingeek said:Just read the whole thing.
No destructable environments, weak story and AI.
But it has seamless controls, great graphics and well designed single player levels as well as a platform defining online mode.
They says its the best FPS on the system? So its better than World at War?
It sounds pretty good.
My problem with the reviews is that it doesn't seem to have an X-Factor beyond the controls and the graphics. I dunno, though, I suppose if the level is really great...
Yeah, no X-factor. I do think its pointless comparing it to games and franchises not even on the system though.
If you read the whole review there are some positive points.
"This is a quality adventure"
"The interface between you and the hero is so seamless"
"An unprecendented level of customization"
"There's nothing to get between you and the timeless joy of blasting aliens"
"Unique and intruiging battlefields"
"Some of the sharpest texture work ever seen on Wii"
"Each area has been thoughtfull built to facilitate a firefight"
"Platform defining online play"
"The best pure FPS on wii"
So if its better than World at War, it has to be pretty fun to play. It has great visuals and solid gameplay as well as a peerless online mode (for the system). But weak story and AI. It lacks a hook.
"Wouldn't make an impact on another console" kinda sums it up for me, though. They've got a blot of generic shooters without a hook, and the wii has a few.
So for me, if I'm not gonna be interested in them on antoher console, then I probably won't be interested in it on this one.
I suppose if it gets a good online community i might check it out, though. I really loved Halo 2 online, and it'd be even better with wii-remote controls.
gamingeek said:The hook for me is IR controls. But the genericness of Conduit seems so off putting.
At any rate, I hope it gets enough support. Unless we all want to give devs the idea that the only kind of shooters that sell on the Wii are of the on rails variety.
I'm not buying it, BTW. 
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I'm still struggling with the "best Pure FPS on Wii" comment. I want to know what they mean by pure. I guess they are trying to exclusde prime 3 from the equation?
I want to know if they mean its better than World at War, because that's an 8.5 game easily, so if Conduit is better than its a buy.
The review says it has finely tuned levels, excellent controls and great graphics, plus a great online mode. So what brings the whole thing down is the poor story firstly. I can't even remember the story details of any first person shooters I've played. And the AI which is no great shakes. But then they say that blasting the aliens is a timeless joy and that the levels are finely tuned etc.
Hmmmmmmm. It has to get some 8.5s or 8/10s to be purchase worthy IMO.
The more I see of this game the less I want it (it looks so damn generic). It better have awesome controls or there will not be a reason for me to get it.