Comments on Wii Controller / Latency

Had a couple of thoughts on the Wii controller to share.

The first is around rumors of unannounced functionality for the Wii remote. Although much of this article from IGN (supposedly based on leaked specs) is either unsurprising or highly speculative (I call BS on the camera theory in particular), there was one interesting tidbit in that the controller will have 6KB of non-volatile memory. (Non-volatile simply means that the memory can retain information even if the power is turned off.)

Don’t get your hopes up, though, since I don’t think the NVRAM is going to be used for anything else than controller personalization. My guess is that Nintendo is going to allow you to customize how the controller “feels” in games to your own preferences. It makes sense, then, to store that information in the wand itself so you can take it to a friend’s house and have it ready to go. In some ways, it’s almost like a hardware-based solution to what we do with global preferences and your Xbox Live gamertag/account when you roam.

The second comment is around the Wii controller’s latency. Saw some comments and disbelief around the ~1/4 second latency I experienced at E3 on some of IGN’s message boards, so I thought I’d try to clarify what I experienced.

Specifically, there’s about a ~1/4 second lag on motions with the wand. This translates into it being difficult to aim quickly in an FPS situation where you are trying to snap from target to target. I want to be clear here – you can aim precisely – but due to the lag you cannot just snap to a new target like you might with a laser pointer. You tend to overshoot if you do it too quickly, as I did many a time playing the Duck Hunt demo.

I’m not the only one saying this, either. Even back at E3 some writers had the same challenges I described, but may not have been able to precisely define the problem as latency. To quote this IGN preview of Red Steel from Ubisoft (with my bolded emphasis):

“As Nintendo has said over and over, however, playing is believing. The presentation could take a backseat of the gameplay was on, but unfortunately it didn’t give the feeling we were hoping for at all. The gun control is amazingly jittery, having extremely high sensitivity when not zoomed in, and the overall feel is still very clunky. If you look back to the Nintendo conference, you can actually see the high sensitivity in action, as the main Ubisoft representative that was playing even overcompensated a ton, hitting enemies at a very low rate. The idea for Wii FPS games is to eliminate the need for dual analog sticks, but Red Steel isn’t solving any problems, as analog control is being mapped directly to the Wii-mote. Since the sensor bar is placed above or below the television, players point at the bar itself, not at the screen. For this reason, the game doesn’t allow pinpoint accuracy with the Wii-mote, as players have to steer a cursor rather than aiming at a point on-screen, which is a far more natural approach.”

“We aren’t saying the game needs to work like a light gun, it just needs to have an accurate one-to-one representation of where your hands are in relation to the game. If a character pops out of a hiding place, players need to be able to swing their hand over and point at him as they would the barrel of a gun, and that is definitely not the case right now. The ability to calibrate your own controller and sensitivity will be added in later, so hopefully that will solve a lot of the problems we are seeing. Again, we played this demo over and over with multiple set-ups, and each time we had the same conclusion: Red Steer is harder to control than dual analog or a PC mouse.”

Please don’t feel I’m totally down on the Wii controller. All I’m saying is that I am not convinced that using the wand as a replacement for aiming in a FPS is going to fly. There’s a chance that final APIs and hardware will help, but at the end of the day this sort of latency is just inherent to the system and there’s not much you can do about it. That said, other games genres that are better suited to masking latency (such as Mario Tennis) worked better, and I think overall there will be plenty of games well-worth playing on the Wii with its new controller scheme.

Edit: [digg this article if you found it interesting!]

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