Wii U "surprisingly powerful", says Rayman creator

Ubisoft's Michel Ancel is quite impressed with how easy it is to develop for the "quite powerful" Wii U - even when compared to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Speaking with Nintendo Power, as reported by Nintendo Everything, Ancel said building Rayman Legends for Wii U has been easier than he expected.

“What surprises me with Wii U is that we don’t have many technical problems. It’s really running very well, in fact. We’re not obliged to constantly optimize things," the Rayman and Beyond Good & Evil creator said.

"Even on the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions [of Rayman Origins], we had some fill-rate issues and things like that. It’s partly us – we improved the engine – but I think the console is quite powerful. Surprisingly powerful."

Ancel said the console has "a lot of memory", really allowing the Rayman team's artistic grunt to shine through.

"You can really have huge textures, and it’s crazy because sometimes the graphic artist – we built our textures in very high-dentition. They could be used in a movie," he said.

"Then we compress them, but sometimes they forget to do the compression and it still works. So yeah, it’s quite powerful."

Ancel noted that being one of the first teams to work on a new piece of hardware can be difficult as there aren't any preconceived solutions to various problems, but that "the core elements of the console are surprisingly powerful" despite that.

“And because we’re developing for Wii U, we don’t have to worry about cross-platform optimization," he added.

"We can push what the console can do; push it to its limits. And of course, we have a new lighting engine. In fact, the game engine for Origins was mostly just classic sprites in HD, but now we can light them and add shadows and all these things."

Rayman Legends is expected in early 2013; it is currently slated for Wii U launch only, and is a follow up to last year's Rayman Origins.

Thanks, GoNintendo.