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DICE’s Johan Andersson has suggested that Wii U is unlikely to receive the company’s Star Wars games after the revelation that its new engine Frostbite 3 is not planned for the console. On Twitter, the Technical Director stated that the company had done tests with Frostbite 2 and the results were “not too promising.”
The announcement will be quite worrying for Nintendo, since third-party developers are a resource on which it’s currently running rather short. While the company may be able to manage without Star Wars games, it would be rather more problematic were it to miss out on even bigger titles like future Battlefield games.
Still, the third-party support for Nintendo has been slowly trickling in. Resident Evil: Revelations is to be released on the system, and Watch Dogs is a multiplatform title for all existing consoles, including Wii U. The 3DS continues to hold on well, since it currently has around 85% of the installed base for handhelds against the PS Vita’s 15%.
Source: Nintendo Life
Remember N64 and PS1 games, when game developers would actually develop games instead of getting hung up on their favorite one-size-fits-all middleware?
EA/DICE and anyone else who claims they can’t coax beautiful imagery out of the Wii U are lazy, incompetent, or both. Yes, HD games take talent to develop, but writing real code for actual hardware is not voodoo or even rocket science.
Look at the insane detail and advanced visuals in Nano Assault Neo. Two guys at little old Shin’en wrote that engine themselves. Frostbite is a different animal, granted, but if its engine developers can’t accomplish what a tiny studio did, then maybe they should look into licensing one of the many general-purpose engines that _do_ run great on Wii U.
If only more developers made as much sense as you!
They do actually. Dice is focused right now on PS3 and 360 development. This is mostly what they have really said. This market is too volatile for them to do much else and so right now their focus is on those older consoles. If you people applied your “logic” to other console manufacturers with new consoles who also have most of these games not announced for them either than you’d realize how stupid it is. New games will come to new consoles but it will be as their userbase can support them. What EA isn’t doing is convincing everyone to wait for next gen versions of games that they can buy on PS3 and 360 that they already own. This would cut into their immediate profits. My beef here is that the internet now believes this conspiracy theory of yours as if EA is just being mean to Nintendo and not simply acting like a business waiting for a sustainable market to arise.
I don’t mean to imply there’s a conspiracy, it’s simply dishonest to imply that some specific piece of tech can’t do what’s needed when clearly, even with very limited resources, it can. They’re not saying they’re waiting for a bigger Wii U market, they’re saying it’s not viable technologically. That’s dishonest.
I understand that big corporations always want a fat bottom line this quarter, at all costs. I’ve worked at companies like that. Doing so has made it a little easier for me to spot excuses and BS in press releases and the like.
EA’s not being “mean”, but they are lying (probably to themselves as much as anyone) and enabling their own bad practices.
Penduin: They have never actually said it can’t be done. They said it is not running on WiiU as of now. The reason is one of market though. The WiiU can certainly handle the games developed in FB3 but it would be an additional cost for the engine developers and right now the market is not of a size that they believe it would benefit them to push to this and delay their progress. They have never implied that this was the end of FB3 on WiiU or any other such thing. The problem with these articles is exactly that. Not only did some fan/journalist/guy with a voice that is heard/whatever he wants to be called insinuate that this meant that FB3 was never going to come to WiiU even though many of the games will not be released until late 2014 if not later. It’s ridiculous to think this business is that stagnant. Even when we are talking about EA.