A far cry from the Mushroom Kingdom

While a number of developers and high-profile games have tentatively stated that they'll arrive on Wii U, one that has clearly promised an appearance is Darksiders II from Vigil Games. Although anticipated as a release in the new console's launch period, the developer has gone one step further and stated that its title will be there on day one.

Speaking to Digital Spy, Lead designer Hayden Dalton confirmed the launch day release and promised that a team are working hard to make use of the Wii U's tablet controller.

That's been very interesting to see what those guys are doing, and they're making efforts to make sure we do use it in more than a slapdash way. It's basically the core game, but then with added abilities to do certain things that you can't do on the other consoles.

One of the things that we did, when we were originally going to show it off, was that you could equip stuff directly. So, for instance, I could be running along and I could click on another piece and I could put it on as I'm running through the game. That's huge, it's not breaking up the game in a way, I'm not going into a menu and assigning it, I'm literally just tapping as I'm playing.

We're not basically heavily changing the core game to support the control system, but the control system will be an enhancement of the core game.

Using the controller's screen for inventory management is likely to become common, and won't necessarily make use of the device's varied capabilities. It's early days and much can be done yet, however, and it's encouraging that a developer is showing such enthusiasm ahead of Wii U's launch this year.

[source digitalspy.co.uk]