Gamers now have a reason to be worried about Nintendo’s upcoming console as Epic Games has confirmed that the Wii U will not support the Unreal Engine 4 but will be built around another, as yet, unannounced strategy.
For those readers who are unaware of the technical side of video games, an engine is the foundation on which games are built. It is the basic code which defines the set of rules that the game itself will be restricted to and within which developers can create
their masterpieces.
These days almost every major developer has their own engine powering their own games yet a number of major studios still rely on the Unreal Engines, which are built by Epic. The engine currently being used by the likes of Rocksteady and EA, among others,
to power titles such as Batman: Arkham Asylum, Mass Effect, Mirror’s Edge and Borderlands.
All those games however, were built on the Unreal Engine 3 and the next iteration from Epic is set to raise the bar even higher, that is, for every console apart from the Nintendo Wii U.
It turns out that Nintendo’s next generation console will not be supporting the Unreal Engine 4 but will instead run on the current, Unreal Engine 3 instead. This means that one can expect the same level of graphics and visuals that one can find on the current
generation of consoles such as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
While it would make it less of a hassle for developers to get into making games for the Wii U, there is a huge risk of the console becoming a case of ‘been there, seen that’ as it will only be marginally better than the current generation of HD consoles.
The lack of Unreal Engine 4 for the Wii U was confirmed via Twitter when Geoff Keighley, one of the executives at Epic, responded to a question on Twitter relating to the whether or not the Wii U would run Unreal Engine 4.
His response was, “No, at GDC Mike Capps said Wii-U will be Unreal Engine 3.”
At the same time the studio issued a statement claiming that it had not finalized a strategy for the console as of this time. More on the story as it breaks.
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