Why Civilization Revolution Won't Come to the Wii

06.06.08
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Why Civilization Revolution Won't Come to the Wii

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WiiHD is a huge fan of Civilization and Sid Meier's in general. So when we heard about Civilization Revolution, a consoles only re-imagining of his long-lived Civilization franchise, we were excited about the possibilities. Briefly, it appeared that the Wii would receive an in-house port of Civ Rev, albeit several months after the PS3, 360, and DS versions. After a couple of months of letting us think that, Firaxis/2K made the decision to cancel forever shelf development of the Wii version indefinitely.

Because of the vastly different requirements for the 360/PS3 platforms and the Wii platform, development for Wii had to be from the ground up, whereas PS3 development could share the 360's assets. With manpower and resources limited, the Wii really was the most logical choice to be cut. WiiHD hates that this is true, but sadly it is. They would have us hold out hope that if the game does well, a Wii version might still be developed, so consider purchasing it on the DS or 360. Hit us after the break for quotes and links.

Jason2K from Firaxis/2K wrote:

Unlike many other Wii versions of games, the plan for CivRev Wii was to do it in-house
at Firaxis, just like the DS, 360 and PS3 versions of the game. Unfortunately we came
to the conclusion that Firaxis didn't have the manpower to do four versions of the game
simultaneously and we didn't want the quality loss that comes from licensing out a port,
so it was put on hold.
That doesn't mean we won't revisit it in the future, just that right now, CivRev for Wii is
on indefinite hiatus.
I know you were looking forward to the Wii version, and I'm sorry, but we'd rather not do
it than do it and have it not stand up to the other versions of the game (or worse, have
all four versions be lower quality because of it).


I pointed this out over at CivFanatics, so I might as well post it here as well…
It's not as simple as us supporting PS3 instead of Wii.
The lead platform for CivRev is 360. The PS3 version, while not a snap by any means,
can at least use the same engine and assets as the 360 version. It is a comparatively
small team working on the PS3 version of CivRev.
For the Wii, we can't just do that. We have to use a lower-end graphics engine and scale
all the assets down to meet the platform's lower requirements. It's not impossible, but it
is time consuming, and Firaxis doesn't have the manpower to do it to anyone's satisfaction
while developing the other three versions of the game, plus other unannounced projects in
various states of development.

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