With Xenoblade Chronicles X’s Planet Mira being five times larger than the world of Xenoblade Chronicles, Off-TV Play via the Wii U GamePad would be nice to have, and luckily, this week’s issue of Famitsu confirms that the feature will be supported.
In our previous report, there were details about how you’ll be able to use the Wii U GamePad as an information terminal while exploring Planet Mira. As you explore, you accumulate data about the world, which can be viewed on the GamePad, You also use the GamePad to teleport to areas you’ve previously visited. A feature with Tetsuya Takahashi in Famitsu mentions that, even though the GamePad has a bunch of support features, you can also use it for Off-TV play.
Meanwhile, the Xenoblade Twitter shares a few other bits of info. Xenoblade Chronicles X’s key developers have been sharing plenty of information on Twitter lately, and they recently spoke about how they barely managed to fit the entire game onto a single Wii U disc—which can hold 25GB of data—with some difficulty.
Shingo Kawabata, producer of Xenoblade Chronicles X, took to the game’s official Twitter account and tweeted, “Xenoblade Chronicles X almost uses up an entire Wii U disc’s capacity to its limits. Really, it barely fits in (it got to the point where we were concerned that one disc wouldn’t be enough).”
Kawabata continued, “You’ll be able to play comfortably while [the console] continuously loads the vast and seamless map (Monolith’s programmers worked hard on making this possible), but Nintendo assisted us by implementing a mechanism that improves it even further.”
“I believe we’ll announce more details on the official website [in the future], but on behalf of the developers, I’d like to recommend those of you that plan on purchasing the retail version of the game make use of this feature.”
Judging by Kawabata’s tweets, it sounds like Nintendo could have worked out some sort of data install option that will allow the game to more efficiently stream its gigantic maps without the need for loading.
Xenoblade Chronicles X will release in North America and Europe later this year, and April 29, 2015 in Japan for Wii U.
