A portion of a Gamasutra interview with Epic's Time Sweeney...
Gamasutra: I know it’s under wraps, but you guys are probably feeling pretty okay about Unreal Engine 4.
Tim Sweeney: Yeah, we’re starting a behind-closed-doors showing of the engine to developers; this is part of our very early ramp-up cycle. We went through this cycle with Unreal Engine 3 starting in 2003 and 2004. At some point we’ll make public announcements and ramp up to the point where developers are shipping games, but it’s very early right now. We’re aiming very high, and the intended platforms this is aimed at haven’t even been announced.
If the intended platforms haven't been announced yet, that pretty much counts out Wii U. Looks like Epic can go back to avoiding Nintendo!
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Gamasutra: I know it’s under wraps, but you guys are probably feeling pretty okay about Unreal Engine 4.
Tim Sweeney: Yeah, we’re starting a behind-closed-doors showing of the engine to developers; this is part of our very early ramp-up cycle. We went through this cycle with Unreal Engine 3 starting in 2003 and 2004. At some point we’ll make public announcements and ramp up to the point where developers are shipping games, but it’s very early right now. We’re aiming very high, and the intended platforms this is aimed at haven’t even been announced.
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Intended and supported platform are two different things.
For example, was the iPhone 3G the intended platform for Unreal 3? Of course not, but it did get support.
I wouldn't count out UE4 just yet, and remember, intended does not equal supported.
Pretty much this. Until I hear "Unreal Engine will not be compatible with Wii U" or "we will not support Wii U with our engines" it means nothing.
How predictable. No matter how much Nintendo bends over for third parties, companies like Epic will always find an excuse not to develop on their consoles.
Fair enough. It is likely that there will be another power gap between Nintendo and their competitors. I do hope that the engine is at least functional on Wii U and current gen consoles, even if the more interesting features are not enabled, if only for easier ports.
Not sure I really care about this. Don't get me wrong, having more 3rd party engines for people to use is always good however the Unreal Engine was vastly over used this generation on 360 and PS3. Even if UE4 is vastly superior, if it's used as much as it was on 360 and PS3 in the next gen, it will lose it's new and fresh feeling.
No Epic games on the Wii U? Meh, don't care. Since the incredibly boring Unreal (UT were pretty good though) they've just made Gears of War which to be honest isn't that great either and Shadow Complex which is nice enough but I can safely say that if it didn't exist the gaming world wouldn't be worse off.
All that matters is that other devs will continue using UE3 for quite some time, simply because it costs a lot to make a game as it is without having to use a different engine which will increase costs due to doing fancy shovel that requires more work.
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That's a good point. Personally, I am not interested in Epic's own titles, but this calls into question the importance of future third-party multiplatform support as we all know. I guess the best we can hope for is watered down ports.
I don't see UE4 totally taking over all that quickly. What kind of PC specs would you need to run it? How many people have a PC that can run it smoothly, 1%, maybe. How are Nextbox & PS4 going to be able to run the full featured engine while not selling their systems at a loss, something they must avoid, Sony in particular.
These UE4 games will have huge budgets and a small audience, everyone loses money.
Yeah.. The part where Epic is saying they will continue to avoid Nintendo is pretty clear there...
It doesnt matter because it is still a rumor.. They might get it at the last minutes.. I think that Nintendo is not going to make a mistake twice the way they had for Wii, indeed. Wait and see.
Not pants-crapping worthy folks. Any internet-induced heart attackers can calm down.
Besides, quite frankly, I really don't care for much for Unreal Engine games. A lot of them tend to look rather the same, and I think it's better when companies come up with their own engines anyway. It's called being creative.
@Devil_Rising
And this.
As long as UE3 is ported to the Wii U, I'm fine. There's still a bunch of untapped potential in that engine alone. Besides, if a game that looks as good as Infinity Blade can be made on the iPhone with UE3, I can only imagine what greatness can be achieved with the Wii U running UE3.
@chris_the_wing
Yep. Consider that iOS is going to support UE4, and WiiU will have UE3... I think it would be too hard to not get UE4.
it seems to me they will go ahead with their move of making ue4 non wii u . To use it as a selling point and a street cred point . It doesn't matter the reality of "power" between the systems, they pride themselves in both graphical performance and adaptability , but that one was the latter years , the apple money . It's a bad deal that's for sure .
but at the end of the day , epic is not the only player in town and more importantly the wii u use a modern architecture unlike the wii . So there is still hope for third party support . As of right now , activision did port cod , well treyarch really every year despite having to re work the game , surely with much less work they will continue . Ubisoft got their assassin's game , and ea might they said it was gen4 next gen whatever. although yeah even those three do not guarantee that every of their game will be on wii u .
we'll see . bad news for third party support and that's what all the specs talk are about. I still don't care about those stupid shooter with analog , and even with enhancement it's getting boring .
Unreal 4 could work in the tablet only games, which is the way I want to play FPS's any way.
"We’re aiming very high, and the intended platforms this is aimed at haven’t even been announced."
I think you guys are misquoting this. What Epic likely means is that they haven't announced the platforms that they are intending to put UE4 on, not that the platform itself haven't been announced. In other words, while UE4 may be ready on Wii U, no official announcement have occurred yet on Epic's end. That's all there is to it, nothing more.
MS and Sony have one ace up their sleeve: Money. They know for a fact that, all things being equal, if they took on Nintendo directly they would get slaughtered every time. So they rely on their money to get them out of it. They sell their hardware at a loss and they pay off developers to make games for them (this, of course, infers that they're also paying developers to keep certain games off of Nintendo's hardware).
Sure, the Wii U not getting UE4 would be a blow, but not just to Nintendo. To 3rd parties as well. It would ensure more 3rd party support for MS and Sony's next systems but it would also lock devs into a more expensive environment. And the money they would potentially save from using an existing engine could very well en up being eaten by the need to keep up with the Joneses.
This generation we saw numerous devs jump on board the engine train in order to keep costs down and yet they still lost insane amounts of money. If UE4 doesn't come to the Wii U (power issues withstanding, which I don't buy anyway), that's going to end up being a huge blow to 3rd parties as well.
Do we know that PS420 will meet the full UE4 requirements? People seem to think that Microsoft & Sony are going to put out systems that match bleeding edge gaming PC's (in Microsoft's case including Kinect2.0) at a mass market price. Good luck with that, I'm not looking forward to paying $600+ for a video game machine, & if these companies remember the money pits that were the PS3 & 3DO they shouldn't be to keen on it either.
Hmmm looks like us "gamers" not nintendo gamers will deff need to invest in more then one console as usual. Doesnt mean Wii U will be bad but it does mean it will miss out on alot of experiences.
My favorite part wasn't the Gamautra article was the juxtaposition of talking about programmingcross platform for consoles and iOS, then talking about how Flash is becoming such a tool. (For those who don't now, iOS won't run Flash).
Mike from Morgantown
The way people are discussing things, they seem to be expecting the same exact situation that we saw this generation with the Wii being severely underpowered. It doesn't really matter though. If Sony and MS throw enough money at them to keep the engine off the Wii U, it will stay off the Wii U. And it won't be hard to convince them. Seeing as how badly developers treated the Wii this generation all it would take is one game to flop and they'll run crying back to Sony and MS. Developer support this gen made zero sense. There was no reason why they ignored the Wii like they did but they still did. And there's a strong possibility that even if the Wii U was more powerful than the most powerful desktop PC, cost $200 at launch, and came with a giant "MAKE GAME" button they STILL would ignore it.
Really, you shouldn't try to bring logic into the equation as to why 3rd parties have been ignoring Nintendo hardware for so long. All you're going to do is end up having an aneurism.
I just recently saw 3DS for the first time and it stunned me. I actually started wishing that Nintendo wouldn't push conventional hardware so hard, and put 3D screen into the tablet with that money instead.
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