The GamePad also allowed the development team to bring existing features to the surface. "I'm not going to be sitting there making faces so that I can get the game to recognize the play I want." So what you'll see with the Wii U title is we only did what we thought would be an extension of what our customers were already experiencing because it makes sense that way."įeatures that the Wii U offered NBA 2K13 include biometric scanning, which allows players to raise the GamePad to the television to see the energy levels of all the players on the court. We tried to make a game that could be played simply with the peripheral, but the peripheral just didn't match our core customer. "PlayStation Move probably had the same kind of effect. "For example," Jones continues, "With the Wii you could use the remote as a pointer, but people don't experience basketball games that way, so trying to change the game just to get the Wii pointer to work didn't make a lot of sense. doesn't necessarily mean your customer is going to enjoy the new experience." you've been successful for a reason, so to go and try and reinvent everything. Jones says that whenever new hardware is introduced, there are always growing pains, and as much as developers might want to utilize all the features of a new console, it's not always appropriate to do so. "Because you've been successful for a reason, so to go and try and reinvent everything just because you want to use this feature doesn't necessarily mean your customer is going to enjoy the new experience." "One of the main things, and it's a philosophy I wish more people would take, is not trying to build your game around what the feature set of the hardware is, but analyze how your customer has interacted with the game up to that point and see if the hardware's feature set can further enhance that," Jones says. Speaking to Polygon, Jones says that when the development team at Visual Concepts first received Wii U development kits, they asked themselves what they would want on the console's GamePad if they could play NBA 2K13 on the Wii U. A producer on NBA 2K13 for Wii U, Rob Jones, says it's important for developers to analyze their games to see how they can be enhanced by new hardware, rather than building their games around the hardware's feature set.