But that's not what LucasArts and developer Krome are going for. They're specifically making a Wii lightsaber game because of the ability to read Wiimote motions as sword motions. And they're doing so without the assistance of the thing Nintendo just revealed for the express purpose (as seen in Wii Sports Resort) of making motion controls for things like swordplay better.
From a gameplay perspective, it means that they're stuck somewhere in the middle: they can't boast the 1:1 motions that everybody always clamors for, and which predicated the development of the MotionPlus. But they can't just make a fighting game with occasional gestures in the vein of No More Heroes, because motion controls are kind of the whole gimmick. They're expected of a game like this. And so they'll end up having to make a game that approximates swordplay in a broad manner -- swing to the right and your character swings to the right. Producer Ken Fox, in an interview with IGN, inadvertently summed up the game's control dilemma: he said "This is not a lightsaber simulator," but just a couple of sentences later, he said that the game's focus is "really on putting the Wii remote in the players hand and saying 'This is your Lightsaber!'"
Of course, if we want to define the game's success in terms of sales, poor controls won't really apply. People buy all kinds of licensed games despite terribleness. But Clone Wars will carry the stigma of being a game that simulates an activity that even Nintendo has implicitly said doesn't work well on the Wii. If it did, they wouldn't have gone to the extreme, and kind of embarrassing, step of releasing a peripheral that just makes what the controller already does work better.
The game will also carry the stigma of association with the disastrous Clone Wars franchise, but the Wii controls have no bearing on that. Although now that the movie has tanked, LucasArts should feel free to delay the game and implement MotionPlus, since there's no momentum to take advantage of.
