StevieWonderMk2 said:
I swear I'm the only Wii owner who's wrists aren't made out of rubber bands and who actually has fine motor control. Metroid Prime 3 does the shooting controls perfectly, you don't have to move the cursor to the edge, just in the vague direction of the edge to make it turn. But there's also a slight buffer in the middle that keeps the screen stationary. So you can aim-precisely in one area, and then shift the view easily to move and explore. Or there's the Resident Evil 4 over-the-shoulder tank controls where you use the thumbstick to pivot and move your view, it's wonderfully precise and easy to use. Yes, there's an ever so slight about of wobble, no more than I get with a mouse. Especially with the speed that you move and aim you aren't going to get any higher precision.
I actually forgot, I did play a bit of Metroid Prime 3. I didn't even get to an enemy before I stopped, but the controls seemed okay. They didn't blow me away, but they were adequate.
As many people in this thread have already said, MP already showed that a FPS can be made well on the Wii. That's just one though. The problem isn't that Wii FPSs can't be good. It's that most of them aren't.
What I listed above were inherent problems with the control scheme. None of those are insurmountable problems, though. Hell, if studios were to truly put time and effort into it, I'm sure they could make any number of good FPSs on the system.
I guess I should amend what I said above. In short, the controls are one factor of a larger one: the lack of development. Because of the controls, the more casual audience of the Wii, and lower sales of third party hardcore titles as compared to other systems, there's just very little call by developers to actually MAKE a control scheme that works with the Wii.
The control problem lies in the fact that the Wii's control scheme is not readily compatible with the standards of FPSs. It makes it difficult to justify a studio making a game that has to OVERCOME the controls, as opposed to using another control scheme that already has a proven formula for the genre. That's part of why FPSs didn't appear en mass on the consoles until Halo.
In other words, it's just easier for studios to develop for the 360, PS3 and PC. Why bother to design a control scheme for the Wii when they can easily develop games for existing schemes that will sell better anyway?
Nintendo isn't helping the situation. When the NES first came out, they established a quality assurance department to try and offset the belief that their games would be so much crap just like all of the Atari shovelware at the time. Now, they have no such quality assurance. Shovelware comes out on the Wii by the truckloads, and while Nintendo makes a fortune off of licensing fees and royalties, the hardcore gamer is turned off of the system, instead turning to other systems. This not only has the detrimental effect of having them ignore really great games like Dead Space: Extraction, it turns developers off. If the hardcore userbase prefers other systems, why develop for the Wii?
As you and others have stated, Metroid Prime 3 has already proved that these problems with the Wii controls can easily be subverted. But without further studios developing games for it, the system will not see many FPSs come out, and getting good ones will be even harder.
If I were to propose a way that Nintendo were to lure hardcore FPS fans to the Wii, I would suggest two things. First, they need to court the hardcore fanbase to make them amicable to playing more games on the Wii. Second, they need to get several big name developers to make FPSs games on the Wii that have good controls. Essentially, they need a Halo; a big budget, third party game that draws in huge crowds of hardcore gamers and revolutionizes how that particular crowd views the system.
However, I don't see Nintendo doing either. They'd have to invest a huge amount of time and money into a project that would put them butting heads directly against their competitors who are already well entrenched in that market. Why should they bother when they're already sitting on top of a pile of money that would put Scrooge McDuck to shame?
On top of all that, both Microsoft and Sony have their own motion sensor controllers coming out, so if FPS developers really want to make games using that technology, they'll be able to do so on systems that they already have a ravenous FPS fanbase.
It's really sad. The Wii is a good system, and I've seen many great games on it. However, the hurdles set before many of the developers mean that FPSs of Metroid Prime quality are few and far between, and will likely remain so for some time.
