Unreal 3 Engine to Skip the Wii

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?

Hasn't this been known for awhile?

[HappySqurriel]

I thought this was known back in August/September?

I swear I saw an interview saying that Red-Steel was an Unreal 2 Engine game and it was unlikely the Wii could support an Unreal 3 Engine game ...

The fact is that the Unreal 3 Engine was designed with a reasonably powerful GPU (probably in the Geforce 6800 range) and a reasonably powerful CPU (AMD X2 3800+ as a guess) in mind and the Wii simply isn't in the same league. The Wii should be able to handle the Doom 3, Unreal 2 and (maybe) the Source engine which are all solid game engines which should be good for several years.

Re:What?

[Dutch Gun]

It could be that Unreal 3 simply has too much overhead to be practical on GameCube, but I have my doubts about that. While the new-gen consoles are very powerful, it's not exactly like the Wii is a complete slouch in terms of processing power. Games tend to be fairly scalable by their very nature. After all, there's nothing that *demands* a certain number of polygons in a scene. I worked at a company that (in a different division) made kids games using the Unreal Engine. They even integrated a software-renderer for the inevitable compatibility problems that would crop up.

My guess is that, as alluded to, Epic felt that the market simply wasn't/wouldn't be there for a middleware engine. It could be that they were predicting the demise of Nintendo's new console, and simply guessed wrong.

If they suddenly realize there *is* a big middleware market, I'd guess you'll see a pretty quick about-turn. It's not all that hard to port an engine that already has proper abstraction layers in place (which Unreal3 surely has, being cross-platform). The GC was one of the more straight-forward systems to develop for, and I'd imagine the Wii is no different (although I'm not developing for it at this point).

Re:who cares...

[Spikeles]

Aye, the exact reason Starcraft, Morrowwind, Baldurs Gate, Betrayal at Krondor, Commander Keen, Doom, C&C (list goes on) are all very fun games that i still play these days. They don't have the gfx of todays games, but heck they are still fun! And here [vgcats.com] is why Bloom sucks.

Re:Hasn't this been known for awhile?

[Ford Prefect]

Although on the whole the Wii is more powerful than the original XBox, and Source did appear on the XBox in the form of Half-Life 2, Valve has stated (although I can't find the quote) that Half-Life 2 will not be coming to Wii.

... But if you're bored, you can always play HL2 with the Wii's controllers [hylobatidae.org]. On a PC!

Epic in Japan... a lack of professionalism

[midnightJackal]

I had the pleasure of hearing a speech from Epic at The Tokyo Games Show earlier this year (titled "Opportunities for Japanese Corporations in Middleware for Next-Generation Hardware"). While Sweeney did a good job of coming off as confident, but not overly so, in the Unreal engine itself. He was willing to offer the mostly Japanese audience a handful of reasons why their engine is and isn't the right way for companies to go, based on what sort of game you're trying to make. I could tell that the Japanese developers around me were on the same page as Sweeney, based on their gestures and the fact that they were actually taking notes about things that he said.

After that, Jay Wilbur decided to add a few words. Or rather, to be American. Now, don't get me wrong, I generally approve of being direct and selling your selling points, rather than mentioning that, yeah, our product isn't going to butter your toast every morning... BUT... when dealing with a Japanese audience, upfront honesty is the best way to go. Sweeney also had the "I'm roughly Japanese-sized" thing going for him. When rotund Wilbur stepped up to the plate, he set a bad tone by telling the rather humble but proud crowd of Japanese developers that "You need this engine". I heard one guy whisper to his friend, "Where does this guy think games started? Huh? *WE* __NEED__ them? Pfft." (in Japanese, so that's paraphrasing, of course)

What started as a good, solid discussion into the benefits of buying A game engine, ANY game engine, was quickly derailed into a product pitch for THEIR game engine. The thing is, Japanese companies, despite what modernizations have happened here, are still rather loyal when it comes to their big huge purchases. They'd rather go with someone they know, and I'm fairly certain that if Wilbur had just said nothing, or said much less than he did, and used much less arrogance and self-pimping in his speech, that the Japanese crowd would have gone home thinking, "You know, there's a company that's honest about their product, and that's willing to come all the way out here to persuade us that game engines are worth buying. We should seriously think about buying theirs". Instead, a lot of people left the room shaking their heads, muttering things about "Typical Americans. All talk. All about them. (etc)"

The thing about dealing with a foreign country is to go in and appreciate their background, their culture, and their style of work. To go in and trample all over their acheivements in an attempt to hock your wares just doesn't cut it.

Re:who cares...

[Broken scope]

I put in "physics" as opposed to physics for a reason. The "" were supposed to denote games where physics serves as nothing but a gimmick, and add nothing to gameplay. "physics" refers to games where you can throw your gun on the ground and watch is slide with no real physics.

As for stair dismount, that was hosted on my county school systems file servers courtesy of me for a while. Along with Q2, tribes, tribes2, and Truck dismount.

Re:What?

[be-fan]

"Full-fledged" was the key-word there. The Gamecube has shaders, but they're a step above register combiners, and not the general processors that you find on modern GPUs. They have a lot more features than the register combiners found in NV20-class hardware, but they're not fully programmable the way the shaders on modern GPUs are. Modern GPUs have shaders with looping, procedure calls, and a full instruction set capable of supporting a C-like language. The Gamecube's TEV's are still oriented around rearranging fixed-function blocks of effects.

Re:No big deal

[be-fan]

Zelda: TP does look great (I own it too). But I remember when I got Ocarina of Time, and was blown away by how it looked. When I got TP, I was like "oh, this is pretty", but I didn't have the "totally new experience" feeling I had with OoT.

My point is simply that graphics are part of the whole package. Think back to some of the great games Nintendo put out on the N64. Would Mario 64 have been quite as immersive if it had looked like the blocky, pixelated games on the PSX? No! Mario 64 had the whole package, it played great, and it looked incredible. In a lot of games, good gameplay can make up for mediocre graphics, but in a series like Zelda, where you're expecting 99% of everything, it hurts to not even be competitive in the graphics department.