Unreal Engine 4 and Frostbite 3 won’t be supported on Wii U

by Greg Woolston

Epic games co founder, Mark Rein, spoke quite candidly at GDC about the Wii U and Unreal Engine 4. When asked if Unreal Engine 4 would work on Wii U, Rein is quoted by IGN as laughingly saying: “No.”
This is unwelcome news for Nintendo fans hoping to get the best-looking games on their new consoles. This may not be old news however, because back in December of last year Rein also stated something similar to videogamer.com. In the videogamer.com article Rein states that it isn’t Epics intent to bring UE4 to the Wii U, but that if a developer wanted to port a UE4 game to the Wii U it would still be possible.

Rein confirms that UE3 is more meant for Wii U than the up coming UE4. He states:

​"I'll state that I don't think it's our intention to bring Unreal Engine 4 to Wii U, but Unreal Engine 4 is going to be supremely scalable. We'll run on mobile phones and on a wide variety of things, so if a customer decides they want to port an Unreal Engine 4 game to Wii U, they could. But Unreal Engine 3 is a really good fit for that platform."

According to IGN, UE4 will be exclusively used on upcoming PC titles as well as the next generation consoles. Which seems to be another stab at the Wii U not being next gen, but rather current gen. Will this be a major misstep for the Wii U, or will fans be just as satisfied playing UE3 games? Eurogamer also reports that the Frostbite 3 engine to be featured in Battlefield 4 and Dragon Age 3 won’t be coming to the Wii U as well. I feel that Nintendo may have missed a big opportunity by not beefing up the hardware in the Wii U to make it more in line with the coming next gen systems from Sony and Microsoft. But, maybe Nintendo’s strong first party line up will be enough for Wii U fans.

Written by Greg Woolston
Junior Tech Editor