Unreal Engine 3 confirmed for Wii
Mark Rein confirms that a dev team is indeed working on using the Unreal Engine 3 on the Wii. A portion of a Kikizo interview with Mark Rein…
Kikizo: Youʼve been able to squeeze Unreal Engine 2 onto PSP previously; with that in mind is there any potential to get some form of Unreal Engine 3 running on Wii at some point? Because after all, commercially it has to be worth it now right?
MR: It wasnʼt us, it was Ubisoft! [laughs] You know, actually, commercially, itʼs probably not worth it to be honest. And I donʼt mean that as anything against the Wii, but the Wii is an improved evolution of the GameCube - I mean itʼs hardware compatible with the GameCube! So if youʼre going to make a game for the Wii youʼre just going to use whatever tools you used on GameCube, and bring them forward and enhance them a little - thatʼs what the Gamebryo guys are doing - and thatʼs a fact; I just donʼt see a big market there to bring this big hulking memory intensive engine over to a much smaller system. I mean, Iʼm sure some of our licensees, just as a commercial exercise, will probably do it. I know one of our licensee whoʼs giving it a shot; itʼs their own port, in the same way Ubisoft brought Unreal Engine 2 to the Wii - I mean Splinter Cell and Red Steel - Unreal Engine 2, and thereʼs a few others… but itʼs just, we wonʼt donʼt do it ourselves. Look, thereʼs so many things we can do and are already doing, to improve our engine, on the platforms weʼre aiming it at, that going back and working on that [for Wii] just doesnʼt make sense. Unreal Engine 3 is a better engine today than it was a year ago when Gears of War shipped. So Unreal Tournament 3 for example pushes the PlayStation 3 harder than Gears of War did on Xbox 360. So the engine is getting optimised and weʼre improving it all the time; thereʼs too much low hanging fruit that we already have on the engine side, and new improvements and things we can do to try and make an engine for the Wii - it wouldnʼt be smart business for us.
I think it is a really safe bet to say that Brothers in Arms for the Wii is the title using the Unreal Engine 3. Especially after hearing the question asked in the recent IGN interview.
