A portion of an IGN interview with Shigeru Miyamoto...
IGN: We've known that Pikmin 3 has been in development for several years, first starting on Wii, and so I was curious. When Pikmin 3 was on Wii, what was the original concept, before it moved to Wii U?
Shigeru Miyamoto: Fundamentally I would say that the game didn't change all that much. Rather, we saw the CPU power and HD resolution offered by the Wii U and simply thought that was the best platform possible for that game, allowing you to see the whole map at one time and things like that. Going back a little bit, I would have to say that we really debated what kind of game we should make Pikmin 3.
Having played them, you must know that Pikmin and Pikmin 2 themselves are very different games from each other. We had a bit of a discussion internally about which direction we should go for Pikmin 3. And at the same time we were also trying out different experiments on the DS and the 3DS and the Wii to see which platform the game would work best on. We had decided on Wii when the possibility of putting it on the Wii U became available, as we began to see what that framework was going to look like. At that time we definitely decided, okay, this is going to be much better on Wii U. Nothing huge changed in terms of the fundamental concept.
IGN: One of the things I think Pikmin 2 really drove home was the element of cooperative gameplay, and just multiplayer in general, allowing more than one player to play together. Can people expect the same from Pikmin 3? Perhaps even online Pikmin?
Miyamoto: Everyone asks that question! [laughter]
So in the case of Mario Kart, we did have online multiplayer, and that's something that... You have to be very careful that you don't drop frames as you're trying to sync up with other players over what could be a very great physical distance, over the internet. But in the situation of Pikmin, for example, since you would have lots of individual, small creatures, the Pikmin, whose every movement and location is going to be really important in the game, it would be very difficult to sync up over an internet connection.
So I think what we've decided to do is focus on the single-player and local multiplayer aspects, which are really fun. But unfortunately, no online multiplayer for Pikmin 3. But the co-op local multiplayer is really fun.
Full interview here
IGN: We've known that Pikmin 3 has been in development for several years, first starting on Wii, and so I was curious. When Pikmin 3 was on Wii, what was the original concept, before it moved to Wii U?
Shigeru Miyamoto: Fundamentally I would say that the game didn't change all that much. Rather, we saw the CPU power and HD resolution offered by the Wii U and simply thought that was the best platform possible for that game, allowing you to see the whole map at one time and things like that. Going back a little bit, I would have to say that we really debated what kind of game we should make Pikmin 3.
Having played them, you must know that Pikmin and Pikmin 2 themselves are very different games from each other. We had a bit of a discussion internally about which direction we should go for Pikmin 3. And at the same time we were also trying out different experiments on the DS and the 3DS and the Wii to see which platform the game would work best on. We had decided on Wii when the possibility of putting it on the Wii U became available, as we began to see what that framework was going to look like. At that time we definitely decided, okay, this is going to be much better on Wii U. Nothing huge changed in terms of the fundamental concept.
IGN: One of the things I think Pikmin 2 really drove home was the element of cooperative gameplay, and just multiplayer in general, allowing more than one player to play together. Can people expect the same from Pikmin 3? Perhaps even online Pikmin?
Miyamoto: Everyone asks that question! [laughter]
So in the case of Mario Kart, we did have online multiplayer, and that's something that... You have to be very careful that you don't drop frames as you're trying to sync up with other players over what could be a very great physical distance, over the internet. But in the situation of Pikmin, for example, since you would have lots of individual, small creatures, the Pikmin, whose every movement and location is going to be really important in the game, it would be very difficult to sync up over an internet connection.
So I think what we've decided to do is focus on the single-player and local multiplayer aspects, which are really fun. But unfortunately, no online multiplayer for Pikmin 3. But the co-op local multiplayer is really fun.
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I am not interested in online Pikmin, but this excuse is as valid as the issue of animating a dress.
I have just lost quite a bit of my interest in this game.
I dont have my friends at my house all the time Ninty, and when they are here we rarely ever game.
Bad move numero uno.
The sad part is that lame and ridiculous excuses from Nintendo for not putting an on-line mode on games is not a surprise anymore.
Nintendo's still stuck in 1996??
WHAT THE HELL!? NO there is NO excuse! What the hell Miyamoto?! This is bullsh*t!
Nintendo is really slipping this year.
Sounds like a cop-out answer and being lazy. Or showing that it's not as powerful as they lead on.
It's an HD console and it's supposedly more powerful than current gen. If it's like the last two games, you can probably only have about 100 Pikmin maybe 200 at once (for each person if it were only two-player). There's no feasible reason they can't do it unless they have a half-ass online or it's not a good enough console.
To be honest, I think it's because at its core, it's still a Wii game, and they just didn't want to add anything other than support of the controller.
Annoying, but not going to stop my purchase. The confirmation of co-op (which wasn't on the E3 site before) is good news, so at least there is that.
@LegendofSantiago
Not sure what world you live in, but pretty sure they were.
Likewise, people complained to Ubisoft for online multiplayer in Scott Pilgrim and they didn't add it.
@PaperLink64
People don't play it FOR the multiplayer, but it's something to do when you complete it.
And if it's got multiplayer, there's no reason to not have online multiplayer.
There's no reason to not have options, and most people who grew up with Nintendo (and Pikmin) are at the point where a lot can't do local co-op as much as Nintendo wants to pretend.
So there's no online play because it would be hard to do? I thought Nintendo was all about not cutting corners.
I hope Platinum confirms online play for their game.
What happened with the whole Nintendo and EA working together for online?
And I wonder what the excuse will be if there is no online for NSMBU? The local multiplayer is enough? Lame.
That excuse is complete bull... you don't control each individual pikmin in the game, you control Olimar - the pikmin's movements are then calculated by the console depending on his actions, so that's completely ridiculous that they would have trouble syncing them up.
Sometimes, I don't really get all this "I want online in all of my games", and when games have online, people don't play them or play them for a very short period of time.
Second. I'm not really much of an online whore to actually be angry about this.
Lol, online whore??.. Is that a real thing?
Does NSMB-U have online multiplayer at least?
Eat a dick in hell.@NeroSuferoth
My bad. It should have said online-demanding whore, think of it as the online-demanding version of a graphic whore.
so far A.C 3 sounds like the best bet for online in the near Wii U future. Im still getting Pikmin 3 (and a bunch of others) at launch. This whole online thing isnt that important to me, it looks AWESOME!
Well some people in the world have family in other countries. Many of us have been in and out of the US armed forces, and when we have the spare time, play online with family and friends. Besides the rare time off for holidays or whenever, we're almost never face to face without something like Skype, an ONLINE video service.
Still, not everyone in my family uses Skype, but will play Mario Kart online.
I guess I'm one of those online-demanding whores.
This is another missed opportunity for sure. This game is perfect for online play. I can't say I'm really surprised anymore.
@wiired
They haven't said one way or the other yet, but I'm almost positive it won't have online. They need to get over this mentality that multiplayer is only fun when everyone is in the same room.
I did some math!
100 Pikmins, each with x-y-z coordinates, coded in 24 bit = 3 byte per Pikmin per frame.
Bandwidth = 100 Pikmin * 3 byte * 60 fps = 18 kB/s
Huge! 18 kB/s with 1-2 MB/s bandwidth (cable/dsl), Pikmin would use 1-2 % of the bandwidth.
Pikmin should really evolve to MMO, because it would be great to team up with friends and fight some cute monsters and collect some cool stuff.
Not possible in such a fast played game like Super Mario! But Pikmin isn't one on one, only one player controls the Pikmins he has, there is no sync problem at all, even with a refreshrate of 60 fps and 32 bit precision of each Pikmin, the bandwidth wouldn't rise as high as 25 kB/s!
We don't have wood modems anymore Nintendo !!!
i thought starcraft would be a good example as well, then i realized, in sc2 theres actually 1 plane . Height has NO meaning whatsoever, so its way easier to sync than pikmin, in fact ,PHYSICAL interactions are way more complex , as the physics in SC2 are more decorative than core elements. In fact SC2 and SC1 feel similar since sc1 lacks physics engine, and SC2 is just for looks. Pikmins climb, interact , get on top of each other, requiring a bigger netcode sync than SC2 by default. I dont say its impossible, just understandable. Pikmin is a very unique game. COD has 32 players moving online, interacting, but imagine 100?teleporting galore and sync issues pop up, and is obvious the experience is not very coherent for all players.
While having no online for Pikmin 3 sucks, Mr. Miyamoto's reasons here is... understandable. Oh well.
If there's really no online, then I hope Pikmin 3 at least supports leaderboards and Miiverse.
Can't say I know anything about the AC series, but dontcha think that S&SASRT and CoD are the more likely first Wii U online featured titles?
Actually the smallest adressable amount of memory is 4 bytes; so for the x,y,z coordinates you are looking at at least 4 bytes per pikmin per frame. But there is way more then only the position that needs to be sent: think of rotation, the state of the pikmin (climbing, dieing etc). Same thing for the leaders, environmental objects, enemies; So it would hog up more bandwidth then you might expect.
As much as I would love Pikmin 3 to have some form of online play, I can see what Miyamoto is getting at.
Though the problem that Miyamoto is talking about is not necessarily a bandwidth issue, it is a latency issue.
Most games generally don't send this data every frame since, due to inherent latency problems with the internet in general, it is impossible to guarantee that the data will arrive on time. If the data does not arrive on time it would either, ignore the data that has been sent (UDP) or would handle the data packets that come in sequentially (TCP). In both of those appproaches you would see skipping or teleporting if the data would arrive too late at the other client, since it would either skip the data or handle all the recieved data at once; resulting in a character that might be at position A in one frame and the next frame he is at position B.
Instead of sending the data every frame, you sent it every so often (defined by the programmer). The rest of the time the clients approximate their respective positions through prediction.
Creating these prediction algorithms is not trivial, especially if you have something like enemy AI that also needs to have prediction.
So I'm guessing it is a mix of needing far more computational power because both clients need to calculate/and or predict the new state (position, rotation, states, etc) of the other client and the fact that dealing with the synchronization of so many complex entities is a bit difficult.
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