The Wii U has had trouble communicating its value to consumers at large, as Nintendo president Satoru Iwata admitted. Xavier Poix, who is managing director of Ubisoft's Annecy, Montpellier, and Paris studios, told GameSpot that's because it's just not as easy to show it to people as was the friendly-looking Wii.
"The depth of what you can do with that console is really hard to get across unless you play with it," Poix said. "It's different from the Wii, where seeing was believing. With the Wii U, people really need to experience it."
The Wii U's troubles with messaging extended to ZombiU, which perplexed some players with its heavy use of the GamePad paired with action on the TV screen. Poix oversaw its development and said, like the console itself, there was no easy way to relate the experience.
Some games broaden their appeal with multiplayer modes. But ZombiU's Dark-Souls-esque connectivity and unique zombie-overlord-versus-survivors mode was just as abstract as the GamePad to most consumers.
"The whole idea of the asymmetrical gameplay and using two screens to do two very different things is not simple to explain to people. ZombiU was designed to be a game for core players launching with a new Nintendo console. We should have communicated better in this respect to let people know what kind of experience to expect. It wasn't obvious enough that there would be a new controller and new gameplay and a new skill set to develop."
10 years later, in a post-Baldur's Gate 3 and Avowed world, Obsidian is giving its own throwback CRPG Pillars of Eternity a turn-based combat mode
When Destiny 2 "weekly active users dropped lower and faster than we'd seen since 2018," Bungie assembled an A-Team to put out some fires: "We needed to do something"
