Things were not going well. At a current “multiplayer” event for The Conduit, Sega and High Voltage reps were all over the place, trying their ideal to keep smiling.

It was all cell phones out, reset Wiis, unplug this, plug in that. Hell, at one moment, it looked like the stars aligned and all was going to go as planned, but, unfortunately, it was for nothing. The GameSpy servers powering the 12 player multiplayer for The Conduit were down. There was going to be no multiplayer that night. There were sad pandas all around, that’s for sure.

However, perhaps the most disappointed person at the event was Eric Nofsinger. He’s the Chief Creative Officer at High Voltage and working on The Conduit, a game many have been watching as the future of next-gen Wii games outside of Nintendo. In between the single-player demo and bites of risotto, I sat down with Eric to get a clarified explanation of the multiplayer portion game. Game modes, voice chat, Friend Codes, and the future of The Conduit all came up.

Needless to say, while it isn’t exactly a hands-on of the multiplayer, it does bring clarity to a game many people have been wondering about.

Hit the jump for the interview.

DESTRUCTOID
So The Conduit is really a fairly important game, especially for third celebration developers for the Wii, as you guys have been really proactive in pushing the game to the limits of the Wii. Can you explain to me what you feel the multiplayer for The Conduit represents for the Wii?

ERIC NOFSINGER:
Obviously, I think you hit it on the head that we’re really trying to push the boundaries of the system and I think a huge part of a first person shooter experience is the online component and being able to hook up with other folks and play in various different formats. If The Conduit was just a single player experience it would be a good game, but I think it would fall short of the promise to players for the definitive first person shooter experience for the Wii.

You know, we want this to be a great experience, and multiplayer is a part of this. For us, we needed to minimally hit the base means, which were Capture the flag, deathmatch, team deathmatch. For a long while, that’s all we kind of announced to folks, but what we’re doing silently behind the scenes, well internally, not so silently [laughs], there were a lot of heated speaks, looking at a lot of