When it comes to third party game development, Nintendo — particularly with the Wii — hasn't had the best of luck. Surprisingly, despite the uncertainty of its success, the Wii U has received a decent amount of third party support from developers and publishers, at least when you look at their past systems.
Ubisoft, EA, Activision are just a few of the companies committed to bringing their games to the Wii U. Maybe they see some potential in the Wii U's hardware? Or maybe it's just a convenient system to develop for. Vigil Games, a developer who is currently porting Darksiders 2 to the Wii U, described the process of bringing their game to the new system as "surprisingly easy".
"Technically, it’s one of the easier platforms to develop for," Vigil Games Lead Designer Haydn Dalton told us. "We had our core game up and running on it in a very short amount of time."
"There were no major problems for us developing the Wii U version," he said when asked if the process of porting Darksiders 2 to the Wii U was a difficult one, "other than making sure we had a dedicated team to do it justice. For a new platform, it was surprisingly easy to port it to the Wii U."
"Initially, the base code port was tackled by our internal tech team, but as Darksiders 2 started to ramp up heavily, we handed ownership over to a separate team at THQ Montreal," Dalton explained. "The Montreal team sent us regular updates and documentation about how they were going to implement the unique elements of the Wii U’s hardware."
As far as Darksiders 2's gameplay and graphics on the Wii U, Dalton wouldn't commit to saying they were a step up, but rather a "step in a different direction." Owners on the Wii U can enjoy numerous bonuses including extra content, the option to play solely on the GamePad's screen, and the ability to easily navigate within the inventory directly from the GamePad screen.
Darksiders 2 is set to release for the Wii U on November 18, 2012, alongside the launch of the console. As far as other third party developers and publishers working on the Wii U, if the process is as easy as Vigil describes, we'll hopefully see more support in the future.
