Wii U to lack Unreal Engine

Demon_Skeith

Demon_Skeith

Administrator
Staff member
Administrator
Credits
51,979
Steal Penalty
You're Rich Money Bags Award
Profile Music
The Wii U uses hardware that's more or less as powerful as the current Xbox 360 or PS3. It's certainly still more powerful than your average mobile device. Epic has been unclear about the Wii U's support for UE4 in the past, with Epic co-founder Mark Rein telling Videogamer that Epic doesn't intend to bring the engine to Wii U, but that "if a customer decides they want to port an Unreal Engine 4 game to Wii U, they could."

I figured I'd ask straight-out, so during the Q&A with Rein, I did. "Will UE4 run on the Wii U?"

"Hahaha no." Rein said, with expert comedic timing. The room erupted with laughter. As the laughs died down, Rein continued: "I mean, sorry, it's not really a correct answer. We're not… we have Unreal Engine 3 for the Wii U. Right? And Unreal Engine 3 is powering all kinds of amazing games, still lots of games are being made with Unreal Engine 3. We announced today about a new Unreal Engine 3 license. Unreal Engine 3 doesn't disappear because of Unreal Engine 4. But our goal for Unreal Engine 4 console-wise is next-gen consoles. That's really what our energies are focused on. If you want to make a Wii U game, we have Unreal Engine 3, and it's powering some of the best games on the Wii U already.

"Nothing controversial, guys," he jokingly chided.

So, it sounds like for all intents and purposes, the Wii U won't be getting the Unreal Engine 4, and therefore won't get games made using the engine. Coupled with the news from earlier this week that the Wii U won't run EA's new Frostbite 3 engine (which runs Battlefield 4 as well as the next Dragon Age and Mass Effect games), it's looking like Nintendo's console is going to have an increasingly difficult time keeping up with the competition.
Click to expand...

source

hopefully they will go all the way with the next console.
 
This was one of my major worries about Nintendo's console and why I was (and still am) reluctant to buy into it... 

Sony (and likely Microsoft too) have powerful hardware that can do so much more than Nintendo's. So naturally there will be new engines to make use of the new hardware. But Nintendo's console (while it is indeed a next generation console) is only marginally more powerful than PS3/360. Which means that it very likely can't handle those engines built for the other consoles... So in turn that means it won't be able to have those games ported to it as easily. (Developers would have to try back porting the game to an older engine, fixing any bugs and then optimize for the new hardware. And there is no telling if that'd even work.)
Which leaves Nintendo again in the position where their 3rd party support is crippled (because 3rd party may not want to spend extra time/money to develop on Nintendo's console or if they do they may create an inferior work) and they have to rely on 1st party again.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top