If you thought the Wii was lacking of first-person shooters, don’t fret yet because IGN got the exclusive announcement of The Conduit, a game of very dark proportions. High Voltage Software is in the developer’s seat and is creating a game which revolves around government conspiracies and alien coverups. Also (as evident in the tech demo showed in the article), they are using a powerful 3D engine to utilize the hardware of the Wii system.

It’s called The Conduit and it takes place during present day. Washington D.C. finds itself the epicenter of an extraterrestrial attack and it’s up to gamers, as the secret service’s Agent Ford, to discover the truth hidden behind the invasion. To do that, he’ll need a variety of guns and the skills to use them. High Voltage calls The Conduit a straightforward first-person shooter in the style of Halo, Medal of Honor Heroes 2 or Resistance: Fall of Man – basically, fast, run-and-gun battles and stylized weapons. The Conduit also features advanced enemy artificial intelligence enabling “human-like behavior” and a special device called the All Seeing Eye (or ASE), which, according to the studio, allows players to “reveal concealed objects and enemies, providing a deeper level of puzzle-solving.”

The engine, by the way, is called Quantum3, and it was designed to push the Wii’s graphics capabilities and brings polish to The Conduit in the way of “full 16-TEV stage material pipeline using up to eight texture sources and a host of innovative blend operations.”

In short, it allows the developer to create graphic effects normally seen on other consoles with vertex and pixel shaders – specifically, dynamic bump-mapping (via tangent space normals or embossing), reflection and refraction (via real-time cube or spherical environmental maps), light / shadow maps, projected texture lights, specular and Fresnel effects, emissive and iridescent materials, advanced alpha blends, light beams / shafts, gloss and detail mapping, seamless resource streaming, projected shadows, heat distortion and motion blur, interactive water with dual-wave channels and complex surface effects, animated textures, and more. Readers may not know what all this technical jargon means – that’s not the problem. The problem is that too many Wii developers don’t know what it means, either. (Zing?)

Kerry Ganofsky, CEO and founder of High Voltage Software, would later explain that its a shame that many publishers and developers aren’t taking advantage of the Wii hardware and that third party seriously needs to step up. From the screenshots and tech demo, The Conduit looks amazing and hopefully High Voltage Software can achieve the levels of some Xbox 360 games. Hmmm…

Source: IGN