Rayman Legends

Overview

Rayman Legends is a sequel to Rayman Origins. On its lead-platform, the Wii U, It features asymmetrical co-op for up to five players total with one player using the Wii U GamePad and the remaining four either using Wii Remotes or Wii U Pro Controllers. In Japan, Rayman Legends on Wii U is being published by Nintendo.

History

On April 27 2012, an internal demonstration video showing a sequel to Ubisoft's critical darling Rayman Origins leaked to a French website, obviously, and made its way all over the interwebs from there.

The video titles the game Rayman Legends, touts new online co-op and showed off Wii U specific features. Those features include input via touch screen support, mirrored gameplay output on the Wii U controller screen and most importantly NFC support. The video shows a couple playing two-player co-op, getting in trouble and playing a heart-shaped figurine on the touch screen of the Wii U controller which causes hearts to appear in the game and saves their back ends. After that, they put a Rabbid figurine on the screen which makes Rabbids appear in the game--naturally going "bwaaaaaaah!! all over the place. The video ends with them reaching for a figurine of Ezio from the Assassin's Creed franchise but before anything happens, it cuts to black.

Shortly after the leak occurred, Ubisoft confirmed the game's existence while emphasizing that the video was meant strictly for internal demonstration purposes. Videos like this are often made by dev teams to show off their ideas. Thus, nothing shown in the video is confirmed to be included in the final game.

In February 2013, shortly before the game was supposed to be released on Wii U Ubisoft delayed the game to September and announced PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions to come at the same time. An Ubisoft rep later confirmed that the delay was strictly a business decision to accommodate the added platforms and has nothing to do with development issues since the Wii U version was ready to go. No details have been provided yet how the ports will handle the Wii U-specific features, if they are included at all.

To soften the blow for those who had been anticipating the impending release of the game on Wii U, Ubisoft Montpellier's Micheal Micholic and Michel Ancel appeared in a video on Ubisoft's Facebook page announcing that they would be releasing the games challenge mode exclusively on the Wii U eShop in early April to make up for the delay. The Rayman Legends Challenges App contains the fully featured challenge mode from the main game including online leaderboards, ghost data and Wii U exclusive levels. Initially, the team said they were working on a second demo for the eShop but instead they chose to release the full standalone challenge mode for all Wii U users to download for free.