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?

Comments

What will wii do

[DesertBlade]

I am sure they will plenty of other engines for Wii. Maybe even a few just for it.

Re:What will wii do

[SirSlud]

Unfortunately, it is you who is incorrect. Development costs do "explode" for the 360/ps3 games over the ps2/gc/wii kind of games.

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 .. even more than 3-4 times higher in some cases when comparing a triple A PS2 title to a triple A PS3 title. One of the biggest issues within the industry is how to keep costs down on next gen games since the financial risk is much higher. Procedural art assets is one common discussed potential approach.

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 .. a reality that has a lot of developers and publishers concerned.

"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.

Mexed Mitaphors

[Khakionion]

"I'm hoping that'll be pulling the stopper out of the drain, and we'll gradually crack that nut."

Yeah, better jump under that bandwagon before the train leaves the station!

Re:No Wii?

[mingot]

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.

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.

One of the related links reads

[antifoidulus]

"never make it to the Wii"

That sounds like a painful medical problem.

Re:No Wii?

[Pc_Madness]

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. Seems abit stupid to gut the main feature out of the engine just to get it to work, only to have an engine equivalent of the previous generation.. I could be wrong, but didn't they say the Unreal 2 engine would work fine on the Wii?

who cares...

[thedogcow]

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.

Re:No big deal

[be-fan]

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.

Re:No big deal

[badboy_tw2002]

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.

Not News

[My name is Bucket]

Is anyone really surprised that UE3 won't run on the Wii?

I mean, far be it from me to drone on about hardware limitations, but the Wii wasn't even made for that kind of software. It's all about gameplay, man, the gameplay! When will you people learn that the ability to wave a stick around offers endless gameplay possibilities?!? You can pretend it's a sword or a bat or a racket or a longer stick or some bat/sword hybrid. A bword, if you will. The Wiimote responds to your every movement, duh. It then translates that movement into a general "the Wiimote is moving" signal which then triggers one of three generic sword-swinging animations. How can you not see the potential?

Seriously, though: there may be a shortage of horsepower for the Wii, but thankfully the world will never run out of people to say "Man that game would be soooo awesome using the Wiimote".

Who Cares

[Rev Jim (AKA Metal F]

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.

So no uncanny valley for Wii?

[Jartan]

Ok so basically nobody is going to be able to make horrendously ugly "realistic" graphics that end up looking like a 12 year old made them in bryce and poser right?

Nintendo must be sweating bullets.

Re:What?

[UnknownSoldier]

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?