Unfortunately, one seemingly obvious feature will not make the cut. Pikmin 3 doesn’t feature any kind of online multiplayer component. Instead, Nintendo hopes players will be content with local co-op play.
Nintendo has a lot to prove with Wii U, and one area where the company has clearly fallen behind competitors Microsoft and Sony is online play. At the beginning of the year, Satoru Iwata announced the Nintendo Network, an online service set to rival both Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. So why won’t Pikmin 3 – one of the Wii U’s flagship games – support online multiplayer over Nintendo’s new network? According to Pikmin creator Shigeru Miyamoto, speaking to IGN, providing online play for the game would be “very difficult.”
Personally, I don’t doubt that co-op multiplayer in Pikmin 3 will be “really fun” – it was a lot of fun in 2004’s Pikmin 2, which has just been reissued in a new Wii edition. But online multiplayer is hardly a cutting-edge feature, and Nintendo’s apparent inability to make Pikmin 3 play properly online is not encouraging – for either the Nintendo Network or the Wii U.
“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.”
The disappointment is all the greater because Pikmin 3 appears to be such a good fit for online multiplayer. Marshaling an army of Pikmin against another player’s army seems like such an obvious – and obviously fun – extension of the game’s mechanics that its exclusion is almost baffling. The hope, of course, is that Pikmin 3 proves to be the exception, and not the rule. If, as Reggie Fils-Aime stated during E3, the Wii U really is for the “hardest of the hardcore,” then future first-party Wii U games need to appropriately support online multiplayer. Anything less simply won’t be enough.
Ranters, what do you think about the lack of online multiplayer in Pikmin 3? Do you take Miyamoto at his word, or is this just another example of Nintendo being well behind the established curve?
Pikmin 3 is set to release during the Wii U’s launch window.
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Source: IGN
