So Michel Ancel's making the rounds with the gaming press to promote the long delayed Rayman Legends. Yesterday, we revealed that the game would come with 40 levels from Rayman Origins. Today, Ancel shares some interesting tidbits about developing the game for consoles.
The game was originally going to be a Wii U exclusive, and as Ancel says, the console itself provided inspiration for development. Ancel has said before he was surprised at the Gamepad's latency, able to do 60 FPS and occasionally even faster than the TV screen. However, Ancel is not a proponent of resistive touchscreens. He believes a stylus is not as natural an input device as a finger. With this in mind, he designed around the Gamepad's touchscreen in such a way that it will better read finger inputs than most Wii U games.
Ancel has even harsher words for Smartglass, Microsoft's platform jumping technology meant to provide extra functionality for the Xbox. Rayman Legends is not using Smartglass at all. He thinks the technology is not responsive enough, and simply not popular.
Bear in mind that outside of Ancel, Ubisoft has another upcoming next-gen franchise, Watch Dogs, that will be making use of smartphones and tablets in a way similar to SmartGlass. It is possible that the company really has looked into SmartGlass, and is interested in what the tech does, but not so warm on Microsoft's execution.
Smartglass was initially pegged as a technology meant to match Sony and Nintendo's touchscreen offerings on their consoles, but is it really going to be as good when we get to using it in actual games? You can contrast Ancel's statement with Capcom Vancouver's Josh Bridge, on using Smartglass for Dead Rising 3.