Polygon's Take

It’s difficult to figure out exactly what Nintendo is trying to do with the the Wii U. Granted, the enthusiast press has demonstrated an inability to grasp ideas from the company that later turn out to be brilliant in retrospect, such as the Nintendo DS’s dual screens or the Wii’s motion control. But that doesn’t change the fact that few games on the system use the GamePad to do something new with console gaming.

Some users are sure to appreciate the ability to play some games on the couch without using the television. But the Wii U is a poor substitute for a tablet and the games that both the gaming audience and the wider public at large has come to expect since the launch of the iPad in 2010. More damningly, the need for the Wii U GamePad to be wirelessly tethered to the main hardware makes for an experience that negates much of the convenience of tablet gaming.

While Ubisoft has a great game for the Wii U’s launch in ZombiU, third-party developers have yet to demonstrate solid support for the system moving forward. Even Ubisoft’s Far Cry 3, set to release days after the Wii U, isn’t set to appear on the Wii U. EA has a number of ports on the Wii U, but half of them are demonstrably inferior compared to their Xbox and PlayStation counterparts.

Nintendo has promised that it understands the need for third-party support for the Wii U, but it beat a similar drum prior to the launch of the Wii and even the 3DS. The Wii’s third-party efforts were largely ignored and generally substandard, and outside of the Monster Hunter series, the 3DS’s third-party footprint has dwindled significantly. Put simply, Nintendo has more to prove in this regard than any other platform holder, and it isn’t filling us with confidence that we can expect third-party titles will consistently appear on the Wii U. We’re even more skeptical that third-party titles will make good use of the Wii U’s unique capabilities.

But Nintendo’s greatest hurdle is demonstrating that it understands online, and how to use that to offer a good experience to players. As of this writing, the Wii U that customers will buy on November 18th doesn’t have an online component — that has to be downloaded in a day one firmware update for the system. While firmware updates are nothing new, no one outside of Nintendo and some third-party developers have any idea how the Wii U’s online infrastructure will function. We don’t know what the shop experience is. We don’t know how you reach out to friends, whether you can join games via invites a la Xbox Live, how voice communication works. In fact, at the time of publish, Nintendo hasn’t even enabled backwards compatibility for Wii titles.

A month ago, there was still time to build the Wii U’s online message, but time is up. There’s an unprecedented number of features in the Wii U that Nintendo has simply refused to talk about. There are a number of possible explanations as to why the situation is what it is, and none of them are good. Some of them are downright dire.