Unreal 3 Engine to Skip the Wii 245
Mark Rein, speaking with Chris Kohler and Game|Life, has stated that Epic's next-gen Unreal engine will never make it to the Wii. Touting the virtues of high-definition gaming, the 360, and the PS3, Rein said that their engine is simply not designed for Nintendo's hardware. He also quickly mentioned the upcoming deal between Epic and Square Enix: "It's definitely a challenge to convince Japanese developers to work with a third-party technology like ours. But Square Enix, they're the granddaddy. I'm hoping that'll be pulling the stopper out of the drain, and we'll gradually crack that nut. We've been looking to hire somebody in Japan, to be our representative there. " Update: 02/06 04:19 GMT by Z : Accidentally misattributed the interview to CVG when it was a Game|Life piece. Fixed. Also, Chris made sure to point out that a partner of Epic's is trying to get UE3 onto the Wii, so ... maybe someday?
What will wii do (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No Wii? (Score:5, Insightful)
And really, is this a loss for Epic or Nintendo? If a killer game comes out using unreal 2 I think I'd still buy it.
High def gaming? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, that's right... None of them... Yet they all managed to support running at a lower resolution too. This is a huge load of marketing bullshit.
Besides, they'll change their mind and compile it for the Wii (and the PS2) as soon as not doing it costs them a licensing agreement. (Unless Microsoft or Sony is paying them actual cash to be High-Def only?)
Misreadind trends (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What will wii do (Score:3, Insightful)
Its the same hardware, after all.
(seriously not joking, the differences are so small it wouldnt even be worth calling it a major refresh. I guess thats the real reason they canned the "revolution" codename.)
who cares... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No Wii? (Score:1, Insightful)
If you make Formula One cars, it's not "shooting yourself in the foot" to ignore the go-cart circuit. Go carts may be fun and they may be way more plentiful than Formula One cars, but you're not going to get your customers really excited about your F-1s by saying, "look, we also have a huge presence on the go cart circuit!"
It says nothing worse about their business sense or their market savvy than the fact there is no Zelda:TP for the 360 or PS2. Zelda may have sold well on those platforms, but it was designing for the unique capabilities of the Wii. Unfortunately, the Wii doesn't also have the capabilities to handle the needs of the Unreal Team.
BTW, you're gonna see a lot of this. There are a lot of games that will look awesome on the other platforms but will not look good on the Wii. Nintendo made their choice and they picked Fun and Inexpensive. A lot of games striving for high-end visuals will opt to go with the platforms that chose High-End Visuals rather than put out a port that looks like Far Cry.
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
2) The Unreal Engine is designed for hardware with shaders. The Wii hardware doesn't have full-fledged shaders like the PS3 and 360 have. Even if Unreal 3 would run on the Wii, there would be no point. Without shaders, you couldn't do any of the fancy lighting and texture effects that Unreal 3 is designed to enable.
Ultimately, it's just Epic admitting that the Wii isn't designed for the kind of games that will use Unreal 3. And that's OK, Nintendo has its niche, Epic has theirs.
Re:What will wii do (Score:3, Insightful)
With the Wii you get to produce an Unreal 2 Engine game with some graphical enhancements over a Gamecube game but costs don't explode; in contrast to make a PS3/XBox 360 game your budget will probably explode to being 3-4 times what a PS2/XBox game cost. Now, what I hope happens is that the Wii demonstrates that pushing graphical limits is not necessary so that in the next generation developers produce games which focus on gameplay and have graphics on the level the developer can afford.
Re:No big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, I can't continue with that. But seriously, just because it doesn't have the "leading edge in graphics" doesn't mean it has no graphics, or is going to get along with stick figures. Its more powerful than the Gamecube, and the cube had some pretty nice looking games last generation, at least on par with the Xbox and PS2, and in many cases (personal opinion, of course), exceeded them. And yes, yes, the Wii is all about gameplay and not graphics, BUT getting to at least the bar set by the last gen is hard enough - the bar is only going to get higher. Line up a late gen PS1 game next to a late gen PS2 game (or N64 to GameCube). Its a pretty big difference. How do you get to that bar and possibly surpass it while still having lots of resources to focus on the gameplay? By having someone else do the work of course! That's where engines like Unreal come in - they do all the fancy shading techniques so you don't have to. You have extra costs in the terms of artists, but in your average shop the realities of the situation are artists and art techs are cheap, graphics engineers are not. Its a shame they're losing Unreal, which is a great engine. I don't know if Unreal2 is on the Wii, but it seems likely given the similarities to the GameCube.
To sum up: gameplay for graphics was a trade-off made by Nintendo to reduce costs for the system. Its not quite the same for gamedevs - you don't magically get a game thats more fun by firing all your graphics engineers and hiring 2x more designers. You still make models, textures, build sets, etc. Its at least as much work as it was last-gen. BUT those tasks can be done in parallel, and having the code partly done for you gets them completed faster.
Re:No Wii? (Score:2, Insightful)
There's no reason Twilight Princess couldn't use conventional controls, any Wii-specific stuff is superfluous at best and sometimes more of a main than a joystick.
Re:What will wii do (Score:1, Insightful)
Reality Distortion Field: disengage.
Having to maintain ports for two different engines is a cost. Textures and models are typically downscaled for consoles anyway. Your 3-4 times figure has zero connection with reality.
Re:No Wii? (Score:3, Insightful)
Who Cares (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No Wii? (Score:3, Insightful)
People who have never actually tried the system, and are just talking out their ass, tend to assume the Wii has nothing but motion sensing, but it's not so.
Re:who cares... (Score:3, Insightful)
Commander Keen: pixel-wise fluid scrolling unseen before on EGA IBM-PCs
Doom: No need to mention. People were blown away by the full-screen (pseudo) 3D graphics. I knew someone who bought a Pentium60 more or less just to play the game for its graphics.
C&C: new frontiers for FMV cutscenes and the best use of the 320x200*8bit vga resolution seen in any strategy-game at that point of time
Baldurs Gate: 5 CDs full of high-resolution scenery graphics back when games didnt even manage to fill one, usually
Morrowind: hyped years ahead for its graphics, the use of shaders, the big visibility range, the water reflections, ect, blabla
just starcraft looked like crap when released.
So your point doesnt exist: just because you picked the games from 1.5 decades that YOU likes, and those of course are outdated now, doesnt give any correlation. Especially since you have games in your list that demanded highest-end computers for their graphics at the release-time (doom and morrowind).
Re:High def gaming? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What will wii do (Score:5, Insightful)
These games are capable of much more power, and with more power, you do not simply not "downscale" as much. Next-gen games feature more assets (more particle emitter assets, more model assets) nevermind that producing environments for next gen games is far more time consuming due to the increased scale.
More power also means you can do far more in code, so typically, you have larger teams of developers in order to produce more complicated AI systems, more complicated physics engines, more complicated shaders, etc.
Also, since the assets 'weigh more' on disk, your tools and technology infrastructure to support explodes. More disk space, more powerful hardware to work on, more files to support (because of more assets being created.)
Game budgets ARE far higher on next gen games, for all the reasons listed
And how do I know this? I'm a game developer, at a company that produces both current (ok, well now last) gen and next (okay with now current) gen games, for the xbox, ps, and nintendo families.
So really, he doesn't have a reality distortion field. Its a reality
"Textures and models are typically downscaled for consoles anyway."
Textures and models are typically "baked" (and LoD models set) relatively early in a single-generation production process, in order to ensure that artists are working on exactly what appears in the game. If you downscaled every time you made a build (ie, proceduraly,) you'd never know exactly what you'd end up with. Your comment regarding two ports at the same time, is of course correct. Especially so if you're producing a next and current gen version of the same game, which is why you just won't see it done very often. (Legends was one such example.) But your comment about budgets being generation specific are completely contrary to what the industry is experiencing and trying to grapple with.
Re:What? (Score:1, Insightful)
different gaming platform, different games (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
2) The Wii doesn't have vertex shaders -- unless you write your own. Are you going to call CPU skinning a 'hardware vertex shader' ??
So it's not ridiculous to claim the Wii has no shaders. I agree with the gp "the Wii doesn't have full-fledged shaders" At best, it has 1/2 a pixel shader.
Or do we need to take this to the 'rvl.graphics' group?
Re:No Wii? (Score:1, Insightful)
But couldnt they just crank the graphics and textures down to nil? The wii isn't that crippled graphically.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:who cares... (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, those are better as PC games, so I still may agree with you for consoles
Re:What will wii do (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No Wii? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mixed Mitaphors (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What will wii do (Score:3, Insightful)
It is precisely what is not independant of the technology. If a company releases a game for the 360 or ps3 and it features the same asset counts, texture resolutions, code base, etc of a current gen game, a publisher will wonder why the hell you arn't releasing it on the PS2 which has such a massive install base that PS2 exclusive games will continue getting made for another 4 or 5 years, most likely. (Certainly, I can promise you of titles that are two years away from release, and our company, as well as others, pick 4 or 5 years as the best guess at this stage.)
but an increasingly discerning gamer culture does independent of the technology as well
The gamer culture has become more mainstream, and it is certainly not more discerning than it was in earlier years. Maybe the more mainstream consumers will not actually become dependant upon the technology. This is the very hotly debated issue within the industry right now, and its why we see two bohemoths, Sony and Nintendo, picking different horses.
The costs such as voice acting is the only real 'hollywood' cost, given the celebrity nature of some of the voice actors. I'm talking in most games. Note that Mass Effect, Bioshock, etc may put alot of money into those fields, but for the blue collar nature of the industry, the 'normal' costs, they are insignificant to paying the artists/modlers/programmers and the technology they need to make the game. But so far, we are seeing HUGE incubation periods, production pipeline costs, etc for next generation technology because to compete, well, you just have to do so much more in order to stand out.
I agree with you regarding that there is no One True Path, but the matter is that creating a game for a next generation system will cost a lot more money, even 4 years down the road when the overhead of learning and perfecting the pipeline is right for the same reasons that creating Office now costs more money than it took to make Office back in the day. You CAN do more, and somebody WILL do more unless you commit to meeting that barrier to market. Thats why making games for the Wii is a significantly less risky scenario from a financial perspective, and alot of publishers see it as a double play; you can make a game for the PS2 and the Wii (I can only speak for ourselves, but I'm sure many developers now have engines that minimize the platform specific code as much as possible) and cover both generations