News of the game Okami being ported over to the Wii got quite a lot of reactions…both good and bad. The good was that Wii gamers could finally experience this highly acclaimed title.
The bad news is there won’t be any new content for this game, that that’s what has some gamers riled up.
But the grumblings by the gaming community hasn’t been ignored. Christian Svensson, Capcom’s senior director of strategic planning, gave a detailed response and basically said that the port will be done with the highest quality and that alone, should be enough.
He argued that Capcom has taken the higher ground by making sure the port is done by a qualified developer and not just anyone off the street.
"We selected Ready at Dawn to do the port. These guys are all ex-Naughty Dog and ex-Blizzard," he said. "If we wanted a cheap and dirty port, I could have turned around and picked any one of 50 houses and gotten it done for less and perhaps more quickly. Clearly, that wasn’t the approach we sought for a variety of reasons (for the fans, for the reputation of our company, for the potential of the product, etc.)."
Svensson then took issue with the accusations that Capcom was taking the easy route by not upgrading the graphics for the Wii port.
"Given that the only port we’ve done to date was RE4, which has a 90+ gamerankings score and provided AMAZING value for the platform, has this really been Capcom’s modus operendi such that this allegation should be leveled at us?
"Okami is graphically one of the most impressive games on any platform today, and it’s fair to say, we’re not creating new higher res textures or higher poly models on anything. It doesn’t need it."
In conclusion, he said that there could have been a lot of other games that Capcom could have sunk their money into for a port, but went with the Okami port anyway, despite its poor sales numbers for the PS2 Okami edition.
"Lastly, if this were a quick cash in, let’s face it, there’s TONS of other products that had higher sales on other platforms we could have chosen to port, quickly and cheaply. Okami, as great as it was, wasn’t a huge seller on PS2 such that its quick and dirty port would be assured "sales success" on a new platform. We picked a huge game (read: expensive, especially on testing costs), with a ton of moving parts."
For those who played the original Okami on the PS2, it was a stunning example of going outside the box in both the artistic and game play avenues. The Wii version will be fun, but will the addition of the Wiimote drag the game down instead of helping it?
The Wii version of Dragonball Z Budokai Tenkaichi comes to mind.
[via cvg]
