I can't say for certain that The Conduit is going to be awesome -- just like I can't say that MadWorld or Untitled Zelda Team Project or anything else I haven't played or seen beyond video presentations is going to be good or bad. Of course, we don't know beforehand if any game's going to be good or well-made; all we have to go on, in most cases, are the pedigree of the developer, screens, and videos. We make educated guesses based on the information we're given. And the information we have, at the moment, is fairly promising.
Developer High Voltage is using their Quantum3 engine, custom-designed for Wii games. We've recently seen proof of this engine's worth, in a WiiWare title, no less. Gyrostarr, while not a first-person shooter, was quite nice-looking, very fast, and very smooth. Admittedly, the environments in The Conduit will (and should!) be more complex than the space tubes in Gyrostarr, but the engine seemed more than solid in Gyrostarr. They also released VIP Casino: Blackjack on WiiWare, but we don't think we can make any decisions about technological sophistication from the card game.
In fact, we've seen the Quantum3 engine at work in Gyrostarr as well, though under ideal circumstances. The video footage we've seen of The Conduit so far shows smooth, consistent framerates, detailed environments, complex lighting, and high-detail enemy character models. The atmosphere of a wartorn future is conveyed more than adequately. Basically, to reduce what I'm saying down to one obvious statement, it looks really good.
We know that a first-person shooter can be good on the Wii. We have solid proof of that in the form of Metroid Prime 3, which, yes, is a first-person adventure and not a first-person shooter. But as a proof of concept, it works, showing that the weird Wii controller is well-suited to controlling an FPS, and may even be preferable. All it takes is a developer who is motivated to create a great Wii game rather than a Wii version of a multiplatform game or a quick port of a PS2 game. Like Retro, who is heavily motivated to create great Wii games by their desire to receive paychecks from Nintendo. The more developers making Wii FPS games from the ground up, the more refined and interesting the motion controls will be.
Given that they're making an original game for the Wii, completely on their own, that isn't a part of any established series, we think that High Voltage is about as motivated to create a great Wii game as anyone. In fact, the developers seem to have been brought to the Wii by a desire to implement great motion controls in an FPS. That's about as far from the waggle-as-afterthought found in many established franchises as one can get.
More than the graphical prowess, it's this absolute faith in the Wii as a platform for an FPS -- so absolute that a developer who normally creates licensed games has gone out on their own and made a very risky game -- that gives me reason to think that The Conduit may be more than a generic shooter.
