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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?
I am sure they will plenty of other engines for Wii. Maybe even a few just for it.
Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
Huh? Nintendo came out said (and proved through actions) that the Wii was not about graphics, but gameplay. Why should it be a surprise that Epic took that to heart and decided not to invest in getting it's latest engine to run on underpowered hardware?
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.
What version of the Unreal engine didn't support "high def" resolutions?
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?)
So Epic wants to have a "representative" in Japan, but their newest engine doesn't support Wii? Doesn't Nintendo own the market over there?
This is not a troll. Anyway, who cares? The whole point of the Wii is not to deliver stunning movie-quality graphics. The point of the Wii is to change the way games are played. High end graphics are overrated anyway. Doom 3 and Quake 4 both have fantastic fx but the game play is not innovative and is boring. WarioWare for the Wii has minimal graphics, but IMHO, is very replayable. I know I'm sounding old here but I'm sick of the argument that graphics are everything. In other words, the PS3 and the Xbox 360 may render a piece of crap in high detail... capturing all the intricate details and using 16X anti-aliasing to render the post steam convecting off of it... but it still a piece of crap. I want to be able to play with that piece of crap... toss it around like bowling or in tennis. I can do this with the Wii and it smells fantastic.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
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.
1) Yes, but the latest version of Unreal is something else.
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.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You're forgetting the flip-side to that argument. There are a large category of games that are *expected* to look great. Zelda: TP got a lot of flack for looking last-gen, because people expect Zelda to both have great gameplay *and* look pretty. Licensing something like Unreal 3 frees a lot of developer resources to working on other things besides the graphics engine, allowing for better gameplay.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Exactly! I actually think the graphics on the Wii are _too_ flashy! All those polygons are detracting from my gameplay experience, when really they could satisfy me with simple cubes and squares to represent the players. Why not have Wario be a cube with a W on it, Link a green pyramid with an L, etc. And now seeing as they aren't going to have one of the industry standard engines on the Wii, well, we should probably reduce the expected level of graphics requirements that gamers want since getting anywhere will be that much harder. ...
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.
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.
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His point exactly - Zelda isn't a Nintendo exclusive for technical reasons, obviously..
The people who own wiis, or the target audience for wiis compared to the target audience of Unreal are like comparing Slayer fans to Radiohead fans, they're so far apart it's like night and day almost. I mean there's really no reason to have unreal on the wii when it's on every other platform. That said, there will be FPS titles on the wii and I'm sure a developer with a 3d engine developed for the wii will emerge as the defacto wii 3d engine soner or later, or a ported engine will take that place until something beter comes along. It obviously won't be able to compete graphically, but the gamers on the wii are looking forward to Mario Planet (or whatver it's called) or Metroid Prime to establish what we can come to expect from the wii in graphics as well as gameplay, we don't particuariuly care if unreal makes it to wii or not and we know the hardware isn't going to support Crysis or Company of Heroes really - but that's not the wii's niche anyways.
Gaming for over 25 years
Aiming the bow (or boomeraing, or whatever else) is much, much, better with a pointer than with an analog stick.
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.
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Perhaps you missed the word "full-fledged" in the parent post. Or were you implying that the shaders are equivalent in PS3/360 and Wii.
The new Wii controller isn't necessarily going to work with "traditional" games like Unreal. Red Steel for example was completely crap... even if you factor out the bad graphics and horrible voice acting, the gameplay itself was pretty lame *because of the controller*. For me at least, the Wiimote is going to supplant, not replace, the existing types of games out there. When GTA4 comes out I'll grab a PS3 or 360, but when friends come to visit I'll throw WarioWare up on the Wii for everyone to laugh until it hurts.
501 Not Implemented
1) Calling its Texture Stages with Logical Operations a 'shader' is abusing the terminology. At best, it has a PSEUDO-pixel shader, like the DX7 style texture stages, not the PROPER DX8 pixel shaders.
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?
No, its because the Wii's graphics card isn't capable of doing the kind of things that this engine is designed for, which is obviously delivering realistic graphics, which isn't the focus of the Wii
But couldnt they just crank the graphics and textures down to nil? The wii isn't that crippled graphically.
I just played it for the first time on my friends 72" plasma, and the cursor was much more accurate than I'm used to (of course my tv is only a 28" LCD so it could have been that). I've played the new monkey ball too, and I thought the controls for that were pretty rough, but maybe if I play more I'll get better. I sucked at red steel, but thats mostly because I kept moving both hands at the same time when you need to gesture with them independently. Maybe I'm overconfident, but I think when I master the controls it'll go pretty smooth.
He said a *good* Wii joke.
You're right about the XBox, but that's kind of a moot point -- UE3 isn't going to be ported to the original XBox either, at least AFAICT. UE3 really seems to be targeted at DX9-10, even if they do plan on making it run eventually on some lower end PC hardware. So, let's just say the Wii doesn't have shaders in the sense of a 360 or PS3. The definition of a "proper shader" has been a moving target for several years now, and will continue to be that way. In the meantime, we can revel in the Wii's inexpensive hardware and focus on fun gameplay.