David Pellas is the game design director at High Voltage, the company developing The Conduit. This upcoming shooter was built from the ground up for the Nintendo Wii. Sounds pretty dire, doesn't it? Are you getting visions of Red Steel? But The Conduit looks promising, even if only for the technical frippery High Voltage seems to wring from what has traditionally been written off as a last-gen platform. Will it hold up for gamers used to playing shooter on a Xbox 360 or Playstation 3? Will it offer much or anything you can't get in another shooter? And how did it mange to get a Battlestar Galactica cast member among the voice actors?

Mr. Pellas is not above some rather incredible boasts, such as "the most customizable controls and game experience on any console game ever made" and "we look at our product as filling a giant void that gamers have been clamoring for ever since the Wii was first announced". But he can also be very candid about how the development community has failed the Wii, how The Conduit is a traditional corridor shooter, and the limitations of doing a full-featured multiplayer game on the Wii.

Read my interview with High Voltage's David Pellas after the jump.

Tom Chick: You guys have been working on other people's properties for a long time. High Voltage has an extensive background with ports and licensed games. It must be really nice to be working on your own thing now.

David Pellas: It's fantastic. I don't think there's a developer here at the company who, before Conduit, hasn't dreamed of making our own game. We've been spending a lot of years - sixteen years, to be exact - making licensed products for a number of different publishers. But the great thing about The Conduit, what it has afforded us, has really been the opportunity to make the game the way we want to.

TC: Do you guys think of The Conduit as competing with shooters like Halo or do you think of it as a way for Wii owners who don't have other system as a way for them to enjoy a AAA shooter?

DP: We feel that The Conduit stands on its own. Just by calling it a first person shooter, it's going to draw similarities and a competitive reaction to other games of the genre. However, this game is made for the Wii, it's made for a Wii audience who's been underappreciated for a number of years, but thanks to [publisher] Sega has really started to take off and get noticed. We look at our product as filling a giant void that gamers have been clamoring for ever since the Wii was first announced.

TC: There have been a couple of attempts to fill that void, often unsuccessful. You guys from High Voltage have talked about some of these other games. What things have you guys learned from other people who've made shooters for the Wii? For instance, Red Steel was part of the Wii's launch. Onslaught is available on WiiWare. I know you've spoken highly of Medal of Honor: Heroes 2. What have you guys learned from other shooters built directly for the Wii?

DP: In those three instances, you can a little from each of them. But our main influences were the genre itself, looking at the most popular games out there. Like Halo. We definitely drew a lot of inspiration from that game in particular. We also drew inspiration from games like Half-Life and Goldeneye back on the N64 and Perfect Dark. We're gamers and we play a lot of these first person shooters, which is one of the reasons we chose to go down this route for the Wii and for our first original title. A game like Medal of Honor: Heroes 2, it was a fantastic game, but it didn't hold up in terms of the visual quality we were shooting for. And the controls, even though they were probably the best controls at that time for the Wii for that genre, we felt that they didn't offer gamers enough options to play the way they wanted to. So instead of saying we wanted to do this feature from this game and that feature from that game, we took a more critical look at the genre as a whole - on the Wii and on the other platforms - and we decided we wanted to offer something no other game has done. So we decided we wanted to offer the most customizable controls and game experience on any console game ever made. That was one of our major goals. And we did a great job with the ability to re-map the controls any way you want to, change the HUD display any way you want to, even turn the HUD off if you want. There's a near endless amount of customization in The Conduit. That was just one of our major goals from the beginning.

TC: Let's talk a bit about the controls, because I think those can be both a blessing and a curse on the Wii. It's been a pitfall for many first person shooter developers. One of the challenges that I, as a gamer, have when I'm playing a first person shooter on a Wii, is that I'm accustomed to other consoles where my controller moves my viewpoint. The analog stick is connected to the center of the screen and the world moves around as I move the stick. The Wii, however, works more like a mouse pointer that moves around the screen, and then when the pointed gets to the edge of the screen, it changes the view. I presume that's what you're doing with The Conduit?

DP: You can play it any way you want to. If you want to play it with a more traditional focus on the center of the screen, you can adjust the bounding box down so that it remains very tight and you can move it around like a traditional shooter, like Counter Strike. Or you can leave it open to the default setting, which we believe is the best for the system and is a little more forgiving. It is like a mouse pointer. But you can play however you think is the best way to play. That's something that has never been offered before and it was one of our gameplay pillars. If I'm a hardcore first person shooter player, but my friend Jimmy isn't, we wanted to be sure Jimmy could play this game.

TC: Do you have to tune the gameplay taking into account the Wii controller? Or do you just create it like any other first person shooter?

DP: We have tuned the gameplay little bit given the market, but we've also offered multiple tiers of difficulty, which ties into our AI system, our pick-up placement, and other features. For me, being a hardcore guy, I'm going to play on the hardest difficulty to see if I can beat it. By doing that, I'm going to get less pick-ups, there's going to be more enemies, their AI is going to be a lot smarter, they're going to be more reactive. There's a large degree of variety in our gameplay and it's really up to the players how they play the game.

TC: So The Conduit has nine missions, which I presume are larger episodes broken into subchapters or whatever. But it's obviously a linear story-driven experience. Are you doing anything to encourage replayability, to encourage players to go back through the missions? When I ask this, I'm thinking of recent games like Resident Evil 5, Halo 3, Call of Duty: World at War. They were all linear, but there were hidden items that changed the gameplay or upgradeable weapons. In each of those games, there was an entire system in place to encourage you to go back through the game more than once. Are you guys doing anything like that with The Conduit?

DP: We are. We have bonus items, hidden text, and achievements in the game. There's a lot to encourage you to go back and find and discover and unlock. If you're the kind of gamer who just wants to blow through and experience the game as an intense action shooter, you can do that. However, if you get through it and you're like, Okay, I'm going to up the difficulty setting. Or I'm going to go through and try to find the data disks throughout the levels and if you collect enough of them, you unlock content. Or the hidden text, which is for those gamers who want to know the story more, who want to dig deeper. We give them little glimpses into the bigger world of The Conduit. And the third part is the achievements. I'd be really surprised if anyone was able to unlock all the achievements in one single play-through. So that's another way we're pushing people to play over and over again. On top of a fantastic single-player, we have our multiplayer component, which we hope will keep you around playing for many many months to come. It kind of all works together to keep people playing, to get them excited, and to make a community.

TC: Is there any sort of online ranking or persistence, since you don't have that Xbox Live infrastructure? Have you been able to build anything like that into The Conduit?

DP: We aren't able to do an Xbox Live feature set. It's just something Nintendo doesn't really offer. Maybe they will in the future. That would be great. But right now, they don't offer that level of support. What we are able to do is an experience system. We do have 25 ranks in the experience system. What that does is allow players to instantly know who's really the top dog on the list and who they want to go after in the match. If you've got a group of people who are really high up in the ranking, then you're going to know these guys are working a certain way and maybe they've got some strategies. Or maybe if you get into the clan fights, things like that, you're going to want to make sure your rank is high enough so you can maintain a similar skillset with the people you're playing against or you'll just get dominated.

TC: Is there a matchmaking system to take into account a player's rank?

DP: Our matchmaking does take into account a player's rank as well as a bunch of other things. We take into consideration your experience level, connection speed, location, things like that. We are constantly trying to give you the most enjoyable experience possible whenever you're online. So if you're rank 1, the chances are pretty slim that you're going to walk into a match and see a bunch of 25s around. But if you're a 23, you should expect to see 25s all over the place. However, if you happen to be on at three o' clock in the morning, you may find yourself against a person who's three or four ranks above you or below you.

TC: You guys are presenting an "alien invasion from within" conspiracy angle. Let me ask you a few things about that. I don't know for the sake of spoilers how many of these questions you can answer, so if you have to say 'I can't say yet', feel free to say that. Does the entire game take place in Washington DC?

DP: I cannot say.

TC: Okay, fair enough. Do you guys get crazy with alien weapons?

DP: We do have three different types of weapons, and one of those types is of an alien nature.

TC: You have a device called the All Seeing Eye in The Conduit. Tell me about how you're building it into the game. It sounds sort of like the visor modes in the Metroid games.

DP: Metroid was an inspiration on many levels. The All Seeing Eye has similarities, but it's so much more. Our main goal with the All Seeing Eye from the beginning was to use it as a mechanic to solve puzzles. So instead of your traditional 'here's a green key, go find a green door', we wanted a more interactive way for gamers to play our puzzles and interact with the world. So we came up with this mechanic for unlocking and finding secret areas. The All Seeing Eye is the catalyst to find and unlock these secret areas. So whenever you play, it has its own tones when you're near a secret. Whenever you're trying to find some secret hidden text or unlocking doors, it has a lot of features built around the functionality of finding secrets, progressing through the game, unlocking doors, that kind of thing. Really it's our all-stop-shop to progress the gameplay past the traditional first person shooter experience.

TC: How important is storytelling in The Conduit? Some shooters put a premium on combat set pieces. Other shooters are willing to pull back to take some time to lay out a story. Some shooters even let you have stretches where not a lot happens. Where do you guys fall in that spectrum?

DP: Well, the goal of The Conduit's storytelling mechanism from the very beginning was not to force-feed the player. We created a game where the storytelling is done in the most unobtrusive way possible. It's in between mission, primarily. It's through cut scenes. We do have in-game cinemas from time to time. We don't have a lot of them. But what we do is we have a very solid storytelling mechanism that's pretty basic in how it delivers to story to the player and pretty traditional. But on top of that, there are so many story elements with all the conspiracy elements. We want players to get really excited about it, and to want to find out for themselves, because there's a lot here. That's where we came in with the [All Seeing Eye], that's where we came in with the hidden text. There are hidden objects throughout that game that you'll come across and you'll be, like, 'What exactly is that?' We're hoping it'll pique your interest and you'll do some research and find out that certain occurrences. Maybe like Roswell, for example. You'll find out how they have some similarities to this other reference that we reveal in the story or in a subplot along the way. We're giving you hints early on that allow you to discover the bigger picture on your own.

TC: You guys have assembled quite a cast for your voice actors. Mark Shepard, who everyone knows as Romo Lampkin from Battlestar Galactica. William Morgan Sheppard goes way back with various Star Treks and even Babylon 5. Kevin Sorbo, of course. These guys may not be A-list celebrities, but in a way, they're better than that. They're talented guys from shows that geeks like me love. They definitely appeal to a videogaming audience. Did you guys have any input in the casting or was that something Sega handled?

DP: We were very very lucky. Our lead designer Rob Nichols actually knew the Sheppards.

TC: Hey, are they related? That didn't even occur to me.

DP: Yeah.

TC: I can't believe that didn't even occur to me. Mark Sheppard and William Morgan Sheppard. Duh.

DP: They're father and son. Rob knew them from his time when he worked at comic book conventions and he used to essentially chauffer people around. They called him a handler. He was the one who would pick them up, take them to the show, make sure they had everything they needed. This was years ago, but they maintained a close friendship. Those two are very nice. And so is Kevin Sorbo. Very very nice people. But the Sheppards had a personal relationship with Rob and that's where the initial contact came from. But when we were trying to figure out who's going to fill the role of, uh, our main alien influence, our main character and storyteller - I won't give away the name - we wanted someone recognizable, a distinguished voice people would know. That's where we