Vooks: The online Wii fans around the world have been mostly behind The Conduit giving massive amounts of support, how high are your hopes for this support to carry onto the less Hardcore/Online fans, particularly after what has happened with Madworld?

JO: It’s a shame about MadWorld. That being said, however, we’re a very different game – when people see The Conduit, I think that they instantly “get it.” I’m not sure if that was the case with Madworld, unfortunately. We made an intentional decision on our side to give a Hollywood blockbuster-style of feel and look to the game – and we hope that this translates into a greater level of accessibility with the title. We’ve taken some heat for it, but I think it was the right decision – we offer a great core gamer experience but I think there’s a familiarity to it that people can understand.

Another important point as well is that it will hopefully draw in Wii owners who before were too intimidated by the mouse-and-keyboard or dual analog controls. That’s been very gratifying for us – when we demo the game for folks who may not have played a shooter before, or 360/PS3 gamers who haven’t played an FPS on the Wii, we’ve discovered that the learning curve is very fast and that people pick up how to play very quickly. There’s a direct connection between aiming a weapon and using the pointer that you don’t get with other input devices. In that regard, we may be a good gateway game to introduce more folks to the wonderful world of FPSes. (smile)

Vooks: What other multiplayer games did High Voltage draw from to make sure that The Conduit’s online was a great experience?

JO: We get a lot of comparisons to the feel of Perfect Dark and Goldeneye on the N64. I think that we share the same spirit of these games – I’m not sure exactly how to define it – but I think it’s a fair comparison. We also looked very closely at Halo – it sets the standard for console FPSes and we’d be foolish to not take a look. Finally, we looked at the other Wii FPSes titles out there and tried to learn what works and what doesn’t work on the Wii. The big take-away from the Wii titles is to avoid gimmicky implementation of motion-controls. Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should – and we worked really hard with our motion controls to make sure that it felt like an intuitive and natural extension of the controls. If it felt contrived or if we felt it would get annoying after repeated play, we cut it. Buttons have worked great for 30+ years now – no need to get rid of them in favour of a motion if they just make sense in a particular instance.

Full interview here