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Zelda on the Wii To Include Sword Swinging
IGN has the news that the Wii version of Twilight Princess has been retooled to allow you to swing Link's sword. The bow and arrow has been moved to the 'B' button, alleviating one of the big complaints hands-on users had at E3. From the article: "Miyamoto felt that that shooting the arrow with the D-pad was too difficult, and the B button allows for quicker and easier shooting. It's unclear if the game will require the new control scheme or if players will be able to chose between different methods of control. Nintendo Dream closed off by asking Miyamoto to name the version of Zelda he personally prefers. The master game maker said that he'd play the Wii version, but added that both versions will be fun."
Does Red Steel not have something pretty weak too - i.e. you swing the wiimote, but the sword on screen swings in a standard way, regardless of how you actually swung the remote?
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I haven't played Red Steel, but from my understanding it was initially designed so that your swing would be translated to a "canned" sword swing (horizontal, vertical, diagonal, or what not) where speed and direction were controlled. I have heard that Ubisoft is reworking the system to be more free form but the exact details are not known; I would still expect to see a limited number (possibly 10-100+) of attacks but that a greater variation would allow for a much more intuitive feel. For example Quick, Average, Power attacks in each of 8 directions for a possible 24 attacks; flicking your wrist is a quick attack, a minor swing is an Average attack and a Big swing is a power attack (having 24 varieties of attacks is a lot considering what is possible on a standard controller).
As for Zelda
I expect that every detail of controll is being tried in several ways; everyone who has worked on Zelda in the past has focused on making it one of the easiest games to controll, I wouldn't be surprised if they have tried an insane number of controll schemes with TP.
I dunno, man, I just started a brand new game of WW last night, and went through the whole sword-fighting tutorial. I'm starting to see why Nintendo would want to move away from that, the whole button combos thing is starting to feel almost as confusing as a Metal Gear Solid control setup. Now thankfully WW is a fairly easy game, at least on the action end of things, so you're really not required to memorize all the different sword slashes, but if you really wanted to play with them while fighting enemies, it's a real pain in the ass. I mean, even simple things like whether to do a simple sword slash, a jab, an overhead slash, or a jumping slash gets hard to remember, and usually the button scheme has little to do with the actual movement, so you pretty much have to memorize it, which means it'll take a half a second or so to recall how to do it, and in the middle of a nice sword battle, you don't have time for that. I think swordplay with the Wiimote should be much more tactile, the gestures will be much more representative of the actual sword motions than simply hitting a combination of buttons, so sword dueling should be much more fun and involved this time around.
Fatigue shouldn't be a problem. Zelda games tend to only have intense sword battles in short spurts, most of the series is about problem solving, anyway. I could imagine fatigue being an issue in, say, a Wii-based Ninja Giaden, but even then, the controller is very lightweight, and as other people have pointed out, even real-life sword technique requires very little wrist motion. A few degrees of wrist motion translates to a few feet at the other end of the sword. I did about a semester of fencing... I was pretty bad at it, but it's really not a very tiring sport, in the least. The most tiring thing about it is probably the weight of the protective gear.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
They originally wanted all swinging to be done through the Wiimote, but then found that it tires you too quickly, so they just constrained it to "special" sorts of attacks, or something like that.
Well, real swords do that. They're heavy. Your wrist and your arm and your shoulder get tired.
Personally, I rather look forward to more realistic swordplay. I've had it with teeny young girls swinging giant two-handed swords in glowing arcs as they attack, or throwing halberds (those things are heavy) as if they were toothpicks.
I would hope you can choose to have "realistic effects" if you want, quite frankly. Sure, turn them off if you can't handle it, but leave them for the purists like me who just don't want all the scars you get from that kind of thing.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The real difficult part is feedback. You swing a sword from right to left. Halfway through the swing, on screen, your opponent puts out his sword and blocks the attack. Your hand keeps going. Now your hand is all the way on the left, but on the screen, your sword is in the middle of the screen, confusing the heck out of the player.
Regardless, the reason the Wii version of Zelda didn't have real-time sword tracking is because it was an up-port of the GameCube version. Nintendo simply mapped all the GameCube buttons onto the Wii-mote, and then let you use the pointer for aiming arrows (which worked spectacularly well when I tried it at E3, I was pulling off headshots within ten seconds of pulling out the bow and arrow).