Is Nintendo too scared to enter the true online world?

Since launch, the Wii has been great and has had a tremendous success. With amazing titles coming from both 1^st party and 3^rd party publishers, the Wii is outselling every console there is. Nintendo is rich, and Miyamoto and his gang are jumping for joy.

But is this overwhelming success keeping them from seeing that the Wii needs some quick improvements? Or are they worried that if they change, their precious casual crowd will turn their backs on them. No one really knows what going on over there but we do know that Nintendo needs to change their clunky online community.

The first thing Nintendo has to do, is take some small risks, for example, instead of using those annoying friend-codes, let us make our own Wii-code, similar to the ones that Xbox-live and PSN use. We all know that the friend-codes get extremely annoying, especially when you have individual friend-codes for every single online game on the console. Nintendo is trying to keep us safe, but there aren’t any stories of children getting molested by playing with a random person on Xbox-Live. Parents can very easily enforce the rule of, “no playing online.” If parents really didn’t want their kid playing with random people, they should be the ones to enforce it, not Nintendo.

The Wii does have great online games for the console, Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 being one of them. But here’s the second problem, no voice chat. When you don’t have voice chat, it really takes away from the multiplayer portion of the game. Not being able to tell your team where and enemy team is coming from really hurts you and your team. EA wanted to include voice chat in the game, but Nintendo would not allow them to do so. Battalion Wars 2 also included online multiplayer and they even included an online co-op mode, but trying to play the campaign with some random person around the world is hard and clunky if you can’t tell them what your going to do.

In a recent interview, Masahiro Sakurai stated why Super Smash Bros: Brawl did not feature voice chat. Here is a direct quote-

“Well, when I first started making Smash Bros. Brawl, I thought it would be wonderful if online battles between friends had voice chat and potentially keyboard based chat as well. But there are all sorts of rules and regulations regarding communication on the Wii platform and so it was apparent to me that it just wouldn’t come together, we weren’t going to be able to do it, so we decided to cancel that feature”.

The fact that Nintendo would not even let one of their greatest franchises use voice chat is very concerning. It brings up the question, “will we every get voice chat?”

We may be in luck though. Reggie Fils-Aime, the president over at Nintendo of America, said that he would, “not be surprised at all” if a headset came to the Wii. Here is a direct quote-

“Since Nintendo found this tech and peripheral on the Nintendo DS, I wouldn’t be surprised at al if the feature appeared on Wii. It’s something we value and constantly look at”

The Wii is doing really good, and I feel that it could do better if it fixed these things. I don’t know if Nintendo knows this, but casual gamers like to have a good online experience as well. With VC games already here, and Wii-Ware games coming soon, the future of Wii’s online is looking better. But does Nintendo have the guts to make these necessary changes? I guess we just have to wait and see!