A Twitter conversation between a fan and Ubisoft Montpelier's Jean-Phillippe Caro revealed that the developer is in the prototyping stage for a follow-up to the Wii U launch title ZombiU.
@kingrex32 thank you for your interest in zombiu. The team is working hard on a prototype. it´s too soon to tell you more.
— Jean-Philippe Caro (@Bignozjip) May 11, 2013
Just because a game has a prototype doesn't mean that it's in development. However, a sequel to the game formerly known as Killer Freaks from Outer Space makes sense. ZombiU currently sets on a Metacritic scoreof 77 percent, which is about average for games on Nintendo's faltering console.
Another Ubisoft Montpelier employee, Guillaume Brunier, told Nintendo World Report that multiplayer is something that he'd like in ZombiU's sequel in January.
"How to bring cooperative experience and still keep fear and tension is a question we would love to address," Brunier says, "In our most exciting dreams, we would like to create an online experience where players never quite know where they stand between co-op and player-versus-player. Doubt is a great nest for fear."
Last year, Ubisoft senior vice president of sales and marketing Tony Key alluded to the possibility of the franchise going multiplatfom to IGN . Key pointed to Microsoft's Smartglass and Sony's Playstation Vita as examples of ways to handle the game's multiscreen gameplay.
"ZombiU at its core was designed to be a great Wii U game and in order to make that work on other platforms they would have to change a lot of what makes the game cool," Key said. "And I'm not saying that can't be done, but not in the next six months, you know?"
Ubisoft has been a key third-party supporter of Nintendo's console. During the 2008 launch of the Wii, the developer behind Rayman and Splinter Cell released Red Steel along with a sequel 2010. On the other hand, fans of Nintendo's console were angered at the studio when Rayman Legends went from being a Wii U exclusive, to being delayed for a simultaneous launch on Xbox360 and Playstation 3. A former developer for the company blamed Ubisoft's "men in ties" and said that the the studio went into crunch time in order to have Wii U version finished.
