2K Speaks on Civilization Revolution Cancellation

Civilization Revolution was recently put on hold for Nintendo's Wii, and now Firaxis programmer Scott Lewis discusses why...

CivRev was originally a 360/PS3 project and was in development for over a year before the Wii/DS platforms were added, largely because we saw the success of those platforms and a lot of people (including myself) were very excited about them. All of our assets were originally created with the 360/PS3 in mind. In order to bring them to the Wii, a great deal of work would have to go into making those assets look appropriate on Nintendo's system. If we had started the project with all four platforms in mind, it is far more likely that we would not have put the Wii version of CivRev on hold. We're using every button on the 360/PS3 controllers and are working very hard to make the player's experience as accessible and usable as possible with those controllers. The Wii version came online very late and we think that the audience would not be happy with a simple mapping of the 360/PS3 controls. (It is particularly tough because the Wii has fewer buttons.). I think the Wii would be perfect for a game like Civ, but we'd have to throw out all of our interface work (and some of our game design decisions) to make it feel like it truly fits on the platform. The simple truth is that we had too many projects going on and not enough people. When we were stretched for resources and time, of the platforms [we were working on], the Wii version had the most question marks, so it got put on hold. If the 360/PS3/DS versions do well, obviously a Wii version will be more likely.

Firaxis programmer Scott Lewis

Thanks to GoNintendo for the tip.