Last week we brought you the news that development of Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution for the Nintendo Wii had been stalled indefinitely, although there was no real reason why. After some detective work, however, it seems that a combination of time issues, perception of the console’s target audience and perhaps even a hint of developer laziness are to blame.

MTV’s Multiplayer blog managed to track down Scott Lewis, a programmer with developer Firaxis in an attempt to discover more about the stalling of the Wii build of Civilization Revolution. He explained that the Wii version had been lagging behind the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360’s for over a year and that, in fact, Wii and DS versions weren’t even considered until the former machine’s surprise success in the months after its launch.

Given that Civilization Revolution on Wii would need a team to build assets from the ground up (not pilfered from a PS2 or PSP port, for example), Firaxis decided there was too much work involved to carry on:

CivRev was originally a 360/PS3 project and was in development for over a year before the Wii/DS platforms were added, largely because we saw the success of those platforms and a lot of people (including myself) were very excited about them,” said Lewis.

He added:

“All of our assets were originally created with the 360/PS3 in mind. In order to bring them to the Wii, a great deal of work would have to go into making those assets look appropriate on Nintendo’s system,”“If we had started the project with all four platforms in mind, it is far more likely that we would not have put the Wii version of CivRev on hold,” said Lewis.

Lewis reiterated the point once more, suggesting that a complete re-design of controls as well as graphics would be an issue:

“The Wii version came online very late and we think that the audience would not be happy with a simple mapping of the 360/PS3 controls. (It is particularly tough because the Wii has fewer buttons.). I think the Wii would be perfect for a game like Civ, but we’d have to throw out all of our interface work (and some of our game design decisions) to make it feel like it truly fits on the platform.”

Lewis concluded:

“Development for the Wii version of Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution is currently on hold. We are focusing our attention on creating the best possible Civilization experience for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo DS platforms.”

So there we have it, a reasoning behind the cancellation of Civilization Revolution for the Wii, something that seemed like a rash decision given the popularity of the console and the cost of cutting short a project mid-way through. It seems as though the only thing that could have saved the project is if a PS2 or PSP version had been planned from the beginning. We’re sure many Wii owners would have preferred that over no game at all, but using less powerful consoles as a basis for its software instead of building from the ground up, we expect, is not a trend that we hope will continue for too much longer.

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