The good news for prospective Wii U owners: Madden 13 will be a launch title on the Wii U, just as Madden 2007 was on the original Wii way back when. The bad news: you won’t be getting a few of the key features seen in the PS3 and 360 versions (where have we heard this before…).
While the new Connected Careers mode will be present on the Wii U, the much ballyhooed Infinity Engine, which adds real-time physics and collisions to the Madden franchise for the first time, and the popular Madden Ultimate Team mode are nowhere to be found. The Wii U version will instead use the movement detection system found in Madden 12.
In fairness, it doesn’t seem like the Wii U will miss out on these in future iterations of Madden. “We definitely wanted to get the physics into the game,” said producer Yuri Bialoskursky. “It’s just something we weren’t able to achieve for this first year on the new hardware.”
Also missing from the Wii U edition of Madden 13 will be 3-on-3 online team play, though the Wii U will support up to 5 players…locally.
The Wii U version will naturally have features that take advantage of the Wii U GamePad, like calling plays and drawing hot routes on the GamePad screen. Still, for a system trying to make headway with the core gamers out there, launching with a gimped version of Madden isn’t going to do much to drum up interest. I sincerely hope this is a one-off situation in terms of feature discrepancy between platforms, but as regular readers know, I believe this is more likely to be a harbinger of things to come.
Source: ESPN
