Putting the U in Unreal

After months of mystery, the will-it-won't-it of Wii U's ability to handle Unreal Engine 4 finally seems to have come to an end — sort of. Epic Games vice president Mark Rein told Videogamer that it'll be possible to port Unreal Engine 4 games to Wii U, though Epic itself doesn't intend to bring the engine to the console.

Instead it'll be up to developers to work out the finer details. However, Rein noted that Unreal Engine 4 will be "supremely scalable", flexible enough to run on Nintendo's system should any developer want to port its titles. To what extent, we'll have to wait and see.

Rein also continued to emphasise that Unreal Engine 3 is very much compatible with Wii U. Titles such as Batman: Arkham City Armoured Edition are already using the engine.

You saw games at the Nintendo press conference again this year - a fantastic demo by our friends at Warner Bros. showing Arkham City running on Wii U. And Aliens: Colonial Marines is coming on Wii U, that's also Unreal. There's, I'm sure, several others. Mass Effect [3] was announced for it as well. So we're certainly playing a role there with Unreal Engine 3.

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.

What do you make of Epic's stance?

[source videogamer.com]