There seems to be quite a number of “blockworld” or “Minecraft-like” games heading towards the Wii U of late, from games like Stone Shire, Cube Life: Island Survival, UCraft and now we can add another of these type of games to the list. Noowanda have confirmed their blockworld game Discovery is heading to the Wii U eShop.
Many similarities can be drawn between Discovery and Minecraft (the game that heavily influences many of these other blockworld games. Among these similarities between the two games are the ability to explore a giant world- one of which that is made of blocks and can be modified. It is also possible to create most of what the mind what’s to see including houses, villages, cities, constructions or just dog deep and explore under the earth.
Discovery originally arrived in 2012 and during this time has arrived on a variety of platforms, however the freshly announced Wii U version will be one of the first systems to feature the newest 2.0 update. Noowanda has confirmed the updates most important features are as follows:
– support for multi-threading thus providing very smooth and continuous gameplay (smoothes out block placement/removal, loading/generating of new parts in the world)
– more accurate lighting compared to 1.x versions (block lights can light up to 15 blocks far, sunlight propagates correctly into caves and buildings)
– support for shaders on block materials, real-time shadows, HDR-rendering and advanced post processing effects
– new block-types
– slopes and stairs can now built “headlong”
These certainly sound like great additions, though at this time a release date for the Wii U version of the game can’t be pinned down, from my understanding of the situation the developers at Noowanda are waiting on a Wii U development kit to test/debug the game and “fine-tune to deliver a satisfying performance for Nintendo fans.” Discovery is already finished in development but once the studio gets the required materials and plays around with the game we should begin to see a concrete release date set.
I will try to keep track of any news regarding the Wii U release but in case you are like me and honestly didn’t know Discovery existed until today then I suggest you watch the games first ever trailer.
