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Nintendo - Wii U Ports? - View Post

Soundwave on 02 April 2013
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Viper1 said:
Soundwave said:

no one is going to really give that much of a poop to port Unreal Engine 4 to Wii U. What's the point? The whole point of UE4 is to provide experiences beyond what exists on UE3 centric hardware. Scaling down the engine so far that it can run on PS3/360/Wii U (that it probably ought to be the UE3) is a novelty that a handful of people might care about in actual practice. 

Get back to me when you learn what a game engine is.   Right now, you are so stuck on this graphics only angle.  You're giving zero consideration to the development pipeline at all....which you can be damn sure every single developer is.

To really drive my point home about the graphics not being as much of afactor as you think it is, what game engine did Bioshock 1 and 2 run on?  A modified UE2.5.  Sure didn't look like it, did it?  By the way, several Wii games also used UE2.5.  Sure didn't look like Bioshock, did they?   Ubisoft ported it fist since Epic wasn't going to.  Other companies ported it over as well.  But my point is the engine alone doesn't determine graphics, it's also about the development pipeline and the architecture of the machine itself plays a role too.

Let me ask you.   If you were a developer looking to make gaems across all console and you licensed out UE4.  Would you rather port UE4 to Wii U and then develop all your games natively in UE4 or have to rewrite all your shaders and game code fromk UE4 to UE3 each time for each game?


If I was a developer, I honestly wouldn't even bother with a Wii U version period. Business is business and that's the POV I'm actually looking at this from, not from a graphics POV. I'm a Nintendo fan actually, but reality is reality, and if you're talking to me as a businessman with finite resources, the Wii U is probably the platform getting the short end of the stick. 

Graphics have to be part of the discussion though because that is the primary point of Unreal Engine 4, whether you want to admit it or not. 

It's not an engine designed to grow rainbows and butterflys, it's an engine designed by Epic to push the highest fidelity visuals and take advantage of modern GPU architectures.