The Wii U is still months away from release and Nintendo is already talking about how it needs to be improved down the road.
Well, it may not need to, but the company is at least admitting that the Wii U’s touchscreen controller will face a problem from day one.
That problem was discovered by Kotaku, which found that after a prolonged period of gameplay, the controller’s sensors will fall out of calibration with the TV to which it’s connected.
This means that for motion-sensitive games, users will need to recalibrate the system over and over again. This is not, however, a problem for games that don’t rely on motion-sensing controls.
A lot of multiplayer Wii U games are designed such that the player using the controller basically just plays the game without looking at the TV, as though the Wii U controller was an ordinary tablet.
But single-player games will involve users needing to tilt the controller and move it around to create a sort of augmented reality experience. That, admits Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, is a problem.
He was quoted as saying that the calibration problem is a known issue. “Of course, in terms of the cost of goods, if there comes a time further down the road where you’re able to get much more precise sensors and you’re able to bring those in at a cost that is not too expensive, there might be an opportunity to improve that,” he said.
So it will be up to developers to use caution when incorporating motion controls into their games. At least for now. It’s not the way a company wants to start when you’re talking about a brand new console.
