Wii U OS will be improved this year, says Miyamoto

Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto has acknowledged problems with the Wii U's often-sluggish user interface, and said fixes are incoming.

Speaking with Time, the legendary designer said Nintendo has been working on the Wii U's first major system update since the console launched.

"What we want to do is make sure that when we release it, that we address as many of the different opinions about how people would like to see the system improve as we can at once," he said.

"We hope to cover a wide range of requests while simultaneously ensuring it’s a very stable update to the system. We think that by this summer, the system is going to be very much improved over how it’s performing currently."

Miyamoto said the Wii U's launch was on an unparalleled scale for Nintendo, and as such, was bound to encounter its share of hiccups.

"We had multiple different teams working on multiple different segments of the hardware and its features simultaneously," he said.

"And with many of those features, you don’t get a true sense for how they interact or where the advantages and disadvantages lie within the broader framework until you’re able to bring all the components together into a single unified system.

"Even during the testing phase, it’s difficult to ascertain what facets of those interactions between the applications are resulting in inconveniences for the consumer until you have an opportunity for many people and lots of consumers to try these features out — to understand how they’re using those features and what they’re doing as they’re switching between them."

The designer commented that he expects system updates to make a significant improvement to the Wii U's performance because the hardware was specifically designed to be robust - particularly with regards to transfer rates between the console and Game Pad.

"Our anticipation is that because of the amount of effort we’ve dedicated to the GamePad’s wireless connection to the hardware, these additional improvements are going to make for an overall device that’s even more convenient to use," he said.

The Wii U had a troubled launch, requiring a major firmware update right out of the box, but hasn't encountered too many issues since then - besides a general dissatisfaction with the system's clunkiness and speed. When have you ever heard a gamer not complain that something loads too slow, though?

Thanks, GameInformer.