Mass Effect 3 Wii U Port Interview

VG247 has interviewed the folks at Straight Right, who are currently hard at work porting Mass Effect 3 to the Wii U, and asked them about the challenges involved and the improvements they’re attempting to bring to this new version of BioWare’s title.

Here’s a snip:

Do you have any really big Mass Effect fans on the team? What would they change about it if they could?

We have a lot of fans of the series here at our studio. And they’ve been able to contribute to all the new stuff we’ve implemented. We never really approached it thinking ‘˜what would we change about the original game.’ Our attitude was always ‘˜what can we do to improve it and to leverage what’s unique about the Wii U.’ That’s what we’ve endeavoured to do, and I hope with some success.

How does the Wii U stack up against other hardware in terms of ease of porting/development?

The Tantalus limb of the organisation did Unreal II on Xbox, which was about as complex as conversions get. We also ported the Wipeout games from PlayStation to Saturn, and Manx TT Superbike and Area 51, among others, from coin-up to console. So we’ve had a lot of experience with very challenging ports. From a pure technology perspective, and maybe this speaks volumes to the power of the Wii U, working on ME3 has been very manageable. It’s been a good experience for us, although of course it’s challenging right now as we get close to completion. It always is with new hardware.