In a recent interview, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto revealed that Pikmin 3 will not be as “user-friendly” as the second game in the series and is being developed to be more like the original Pikmin. By going “back to basics” he hopes to make the upcoming Wii U title a more “strategic game” that makes players feel “some stress”.
“That’s actually something that all the staff members had to debate over when we were discussing what kind of direction we should take for Pikmin 3. First of all by looking at Pikmin 1 we noticed that it wasn’t a very easy game for people to play, and from time to time they had to feel some stress.”
“Our main aim in Pikmin 2 was to get rid of any stress as much as possible, so that it would be very user-friendly. Well, I myself couldn’t agree with that direction perfectly. That kind of nature of Pikmin 1 was exactly what I wanted to reproduce and I was actually intentionally doing so, so that Pikmin 1 could be a strategic game.”
“When we started creating Pikmin 3 I gathered the main members who worked on Pikmin 2 and talked about how I thought it was important to get back to the basics of Pikmin 1. Or I should say that half of my job at that time wasn’t just to talk, but rather to persuade them to understand what I intended to do and to agree to my idea.”
Miyamoto did not specifically mention the aspects of the original title that would be in Pikmin 3, but his comments seem to suggest that we could see the return of the first game’s time limit that forced players to complete the entire adventure within a certain amount of time. Pikmin 2 removed the overall time limit, which allowed players to make multiple trips to the surface to fully explore each area.
While I agree that the timer in the original added some amount of stress to the game, I’ve always considered its absence in Pikmin 2 to be the single biggest improvement that Nintendo made in the sequel. Assuming the timer is indeed one of the changes that Miyamoto is putting into Pikmin 3, it is not a change that I’m all that excited for.
Pikmin 3 is set to launch for the Wii U sometime during the second quarter this year. We will let you know as soon as more details about the game surface.