Personally, I’m very excited for the Wii U. I think the tablet controller has enormous potential and certain games already illustrate that well. I’ll go over that below:

Immersion:

I think the Wii U will greatly help increase immersion in games for a number of reasons. For one, using the controller will allow devs to move certain UI elements such as the map to the touch-screen. While this may seem frivolous to some, a screen with a minimalist HUD makes for a much more immersive experience to me.





Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D for the 3DS illustrates this point perfectly. Stamina, camo-index, equipped weapons are all on the bottom-screen. This frees the top screen of all the distracting elements creating for a more cinematic experience.

It isn’t just about freeing the HUD, though. In the Wii U version of Aliens: Colonial Marines, the tablet controller will feature a motion tracker which fans of the reason will instantly recognize. The simple inclusion of this will help immerse the player even further into the Aliens universe.

Convenience:

Building up on my previous point, with the Wii U you can have all the gameplay elements available for quick access on the touch screen instead of navigating through menus like on other consoles. Fifa 13 Wii U already illustrates this point.

With Fifa 13 Wii U, you have a tactics-manager always available on the touch-screen. This allows for you to easily adjust tactics in the middle of a match (preferably while your opponent is shooting a goal) without having to navigate clunky menus and pausing your game.

In games such as Mass Effect 3, you can have weapons available for easy access on the touch-screen that simply require a touch to activate. Rather than having a limited amount of buttons to map your weapons to, you can easily touch an area of the screen and switch.

Asymmetric Gameplay:

This is a buzzword that’s used a lot by the videogame press. There’s an excellent article on 1UP that helps clarify what it is, essentially two players having separate experiences as they play together. I’m excited in the potential asymmetric gameplay has with multiplayer games on the Wii U. In FPS-style games, one player can play “God Mode” deploying troops using the touch-screen while other players have to fight said troops.

Nintendo Land features asymmetric gameplay in several of the minigames. One of them is Animal Crossing: Sweet Day where four regular players with the Wii U Pro Controller collect candies together while the GamePad user controls guards that make them drop candies.

I’m excited to see how devs utilize this potential for multiplayer games on the Wii U.

So what do you think? Are you excited for the possibilities by the Wii U controller or do you disagree with me?