
Prior to the Wii U launch, there was much back and forth and contradiction over the system's capabilities from a graphical standpoint, and no two developers seemed to have the same stance. For its part Crytek, the company behind the widely-used CryEngine 3, stated that its engine ran just fine on the Wii U.
Of course, having an engine that works on the hardware doesn't guarantee game releases, but it does help. In the eShop market we're already starting to see an influx of planned releases that are utilising the Unity engine, which many smaller developers utilise for their projects. The strong custom Unity tool-set on Wii U allows a more streamlined, potentially easy, porting process to the hardware. When it comes to various major blockbuster games CryEngine is a major player, so the inclusion of Wii U in its ongoing technology is important in at least making the option a little easier for studios, should they choose to invest in the platform.
That's why its good news that Crytek's announcement, today, lists Wii U as a supported platform. It may seem minor, but the fact that the new CryEngine development solution that's being introduced explicitly supports Nintendo's system is better, ultimately, than a dreaded exclusion.
Crytek have ushered in a new era for their state-of-the-art CRYENGINE technology, with the launch of the new CRYENGINE an ever-evolving technology service, with always up to date access to the latest features in CRYENGINE for commercial game licensees.
CRYENGINE users will also benefit from the coming together of Crytek's Engine Licensing and Research & Development teams; a move designed to double the level of one-to-one care game licensees can tap into, in essence offering Crytek's R&D as a service for developers using the new CRYENGINE.On top of these changes, the new CRYENGINE supports development on current and next generation consoles (Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Wii U), alongside PC, with further platforms to be added in the near future.
In line with the new services, the all-in-one development solution will no longer be identified by version numbers; reflecting the fact that constant updates and upgrades are always being applied to keep CRYENGINE at the forefront of its field.
While no guarantee of this prompting more third-party multi-platform releases, it at least keeps the Wii U on the table — along with various other systems — for future projects using the technology.
Thanks to Ryan Millar for the tip.
[source cryengine.com, via nintendoeverything.com]
Comments 69
It's just nice to finally see the Wii U not get shunned for once.
I could CRY of happiness.
We will watch Cryengine while they watch us...
@NintendoNaut said:
<blockquote>
It's just nice to finally see the Wii U not get shunned for once.
</blockquote>
Agreed.
I shall celebrate with a flute of Möet et Chandon. Don't know what games could come out of this, but it's nice to see a 3rd party developer acknowledging Wii U's existence once in a while.
PS: Crytek didn't just acknowledged that Wii U exists, on the press release they grouped it with Playstation 4 and Xbox One on next-gen platforms. It is next-gen as far as Crytek is concerned. Hooray!
"One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind."
Pretty garmes timeee
Its good but it doesn't mean much in the long run. Cryenegine 3 hasn't seen that much adoption these days. Right now were seeing
Unity (almost every indie game)
Internal enegines (EA,Ubisoft, etc)
Unreal Engine 4 (Knack, Fable Legends, alot of mid teir gusy)
This at least means cryteck has no exucse for their next game to not hit Wii U.
Per the headline, what is Crytex?
We heard that so many times from so many other devs, the pessimist in me isnt easily convinced these days :/ I hope for the best.
@JJtheTexan Fiddlesticks...
Can't wait to see what the new Cryengine ends up looking like. Cryengine 3 (Crysis games, most notably) is jaw dropping.
I do believe an age old classic is warranted:
How long until EA's technical experts correct them?
They even called the Wii U next-gen!
This is highly unusual.
yet dice still claim frostbite 3 wont run on the Wii U
But runs fine on 7 year old hardware. I dunno about you guys but I know BS when I hear it.
Anyway, the new Cry engine supporting the Wii U is a major plus and great news for the system.
Sweet. I feel like I should purchase more CRYENGINE games just because they support Wii U
If any of the star wars games are going to use the new CryEngine then it's good news for Wii U owners, of course as long as EA wants to release those games on Wii U
YEEEEEEESSS!! This almost made me cry, next-gen... Wii-U... :,D the technology world hasn't quite lost it's heart, thank you!
Yeeesss!! This is great news!!
@Sony_70
yeah I'm gonna go with you on this one. I've seen some impressive presentations demoing the engine but I haven't seen a game using it other than the crisis trilogy. Anybody got a reference?
@Sony_70 Monster Hunter Online, the one that was revealed in China a few months ago, runs on CryEngine 3 (now to be named just CryEngine). That's more than enough to complain: I would expect that good-looking Monster Hunter to most definitely come to my Wii U.
Thank goodness Crytek is a better engine developer than DICE can ever hope to be.
@Grubdog
Well as far as I know, Crytek isn't owned by EA at all. Only reason games like Crysis 3 didn't come to Wii U is because EA owns the publishing rights...sadly.
@Square-Head +1
@Sony_70
There's still an excuse: Publishers. EA apparently has the publishing rights to Crysis, so we may not see Crysis 4 or beyond on Wii U as long as EA wants to keep blocking it out. Perhaps Crytek can ask Nintendo to publish any of their other games?
It's good news, that means companies have realized that it's not this underpowered waste of time the media let it on to be so early on.
That being said, the only game I know of for sure running CryEngine was the Crysis series. What other games do the have? I'm curious, so does anyone else know?
@Sony_70
Crytek don't publish their own games, so it's not their decision what comes to the Wii U and what doesn't. Good news though.
Umm... was it just me or did they still call the Wii U a "current generation" platform? :/
Crytek have always supported the nintendo. They had a game completely done and running for the wii u and EA pulled the plug. That actually made Crytek upset cause from what they stated the game was running great and the cryengine 3 is design for architectures like wii u's.
So here's what I'm hoping. I'm hoping that nintendo picks up and publishes timesplitters 4 for the wii u.
@MasterGraveheart
Just you.
its about time
Good news, but not "great news" until some games using the engine are brought to market for the Wii U. Hopeful news is where I would classify this as a Wii U owner.
@Samurai_Goroh Good because Crytek's engine is easily the best looking nextgen engine so far.... DICE's FB3 doesn't look anywhere near as good, and apparently its full of bloat and can't run well on anything but high end stuff, where as the Crytek 3 engine (yeah no more versions i know) can run on just about anything.... Also Epic games mentioned their engine is also full of bloat and needs really high end system as well.. Epic wanted Sony to make their console 2.5 teraflops to handle their bloated engine.... Sony PS4 will be 1.8 teraflops, which caused Mark Rein to lower the visuals in Unreal engine so it could run on the 1.8 teraflop PS4.
seems the engineers at Crytek are far more talented at designing engines than DICE/Frostbyte and Epic/Unreal.
That Eternal Darkness spirtual successor is going to run on CryEngine (3.0+)
Here is a good example of the CryEngine for Wii U owners:
If Crytek can get their engines to run on Wii U, then there should be no excuse for other 3rd parties to have their engines run on Wii U as well.
Great news. Will be even better if they release games on wii u using it
@DePapier
Lord knows that I want MH Online to be released on Wii-U. I'm glad Crytek is supporting the system instead of whining about it's "lack-of-next-gen" features like many other devs.
Im sure I read that crytek are soon going to become a publisher. Not only for their own games but a general publisher. This overhall of their engine and support service is all part of that.
That means that if crytek truly are fans of nintendo then we should see not only crytek developed games but also crytek published games.
Of course they will not continually make poor business decisions so ultimately sales will decide
All I know about Crytek is the best rare n64 people are there.
@armoredghor here's a good reference for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryEngine
As you can see, quite a few games were made with the CryEngine game engines (there are 3).
@DePapier nice effort but I think that you probably wanted to show people something Nintendo related and with that it is unfortunately not the best example of what this engine can do. For that, you should look at this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgLGe1tWxp0 - play at the highest resolution and full screen to let it sink in...
Now THAT is the complete list of things that the CryEngine can do, and they didn't even use all of that in the console version of Crysis 3, which of course ran on the 'old' consoles, so imagine what they could do with Nintendo's hardware...
And for all you tech heads out there, here's one of the earlier beta clips of CryEngine 3 for movies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqNHJ-ekMR4
Anyone want to place bets how many other news sites report on this? I bet I can count them on one hand.
The level of anti-Nintendo bias is so overwhelming right now- I'm surprised, no, I'm AMAZED to see the Wii U be included for something. Article after article all I hear about is "Game X is NOT coming to Wii U." and "Game Y will be on PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Vita, PC, Android, and Mac. Not coming to Wii U."
I'm sick of the bias, from all angles.
Sites like N4G and Destructoid run nothing but endless PS4 praise articles. You MIGHT see one article about a Wii U game every once and awhile, but even then it's criticism. It's ALWAYS criticism. Oh, Wii U has an amazing, game-changing exclusive coming? Yeah well, the game's not that good. Or yeah well, the game should have already been out. Or yeah well, we don't care cause it's on a Nintendo console. Or "This game is absolutely amazing! Oh what's that, it's a Wii U game? Oh, well... it's a solid 6 out of 10 I guess".
Nintendo has an EARTH-SHATTERING LINEUP coming as we speak, yet all the gaming sites want to talk about is how Vita's memory cards are now $80 instead of $100. Or how the PS4 controller is "the greatest gaming input device ever conceived". Or "Vote which next-gen console you plan to buy: PS4, Xbox One, both, or none." They don't even acknowledge the Wii U exists. Ughhhh.
Can someone please explain to me why an entire INDUSTRY of so-called "journalists" acts in such a prejudice manner toward Nintendo? I mean I could understand one or two people here and there, but it's everyone!
dont get your hopes up just yet wait till later when they say the wii u version will be missing something -__-
YES ITS ABOUT TIME
@JaxonH you need a beer, guy. I know its frustrating. As much as most of us love Nintendo, lets not pretend they haven't done a lot of it to themselves and it will take time to undo it. Its not going to change overnight no matter how great the wii u is. Its going to take time for publishers to believe they wont do it again. These publishers want predictable. Not saying all Nintendos choices are bad but a lot of how Nintendo does things doesn't always work for publishers when they try it.
@JaxonH
AMEN!, On a daily basis, us Nintendo fans have to deal with nonsense like that. Instead of just enjoying a video game for what is and not by who made it, most of those so-called "professionals" say and write things that are just asinine.
@DePapier Monster Hunter apparently isn't good enough mate... This is what CryEngine is designed for
(Insert greeny grey apocalyptic dudebro shooter with depressing music here)
@Sony_70 Woah...Knack runs on Unreal Engine 4?
...Why does it look so horrible?
That's good. At least it wasn't excluded. And another company rightfully AGREES that the U's next gen. Lovely news.
@JaxonH
It is frustrating. Much of the media is full of uninformed hearsay; misinformation. Popular ideas are repeated, exaggerated, or denounced. The internet has magnified that problem.
I thought Unreal Engine was a "scalable" engine. From what I remember, it can run on Wii U. Maybe the newer version is less "scalable".
Good news? I'm... not quite sure how I'm supposed to respond to this.
@TheRealThanos
thanks for the tip, the specs on the engine look very impressive compared to what I work with! It needs more adoption though. I see the handful in the list but I don't see any that really stand out as games on my radar.
@unrandomsam I didn't realize they were from rareware. That's impressive!
Hm, that showcase shows a monster hunter game made with it. That, on my wii U, with great online please - you've got my attention!
@raith I was starting to feel that one of the requirements to be a game journalist is that you need to have a certain level of snarkiness.
Which is tricky because I do freelance writing and occassionally write about the gaming industry when I can but I hate snarky writing.
This is why people get so annoyed with the likes of EA, It wouldn't be quite so bad if they'd just admitted from day one that they weren't intending to support the Wii U very much and left it at that, but all that nonsense about about Wii U not being good enough to handle their latest Frostbite engine (when it very clearly could with a couple of tweaks) and then those horrendous tweets from Bob Summerwill just made them look ridiculous.
The Wii U is an extremely powerful, capable machine. If publishers choose not to support it for whatever reason, then that's their issue, not the Wii U's.
@ToxieDogg My beef with EA is the whole "unprecedented partnership" talk before the launch of Wii U, and the near immediate abandonment and bashing of the console soon after. Remember when Battlefield was coming to Wii U? My cousin bought one with the legitimate expectation of playing Battlefield 4 on it, after EA Origin and DRM nonsense ruined his experience of Battlefield 3 on the PC, he wanted a hassle-free experience on a console with free online.
Nintendo should have tied EA to a legally binding agreement, words of kindness do not suffice in this day and age. EA is actively sabotaging Nintendo, they are trying to do to Wii U what they did with Dreamcast. But Nintendo will not have it, they'll stand tall to this grotesque backstabbing. 3rd parties should be neutral like Switzerland, not go DEFCON 1 and engage in nuclear war with a platform holder. It's just bad business for them in the long run.
@unrandomsam OH! Now that explains the quality.
@TheRealThanos Wow... That's real...
@Samurai_Goroh Yep. All I know is the folks at EA must feel really dumb to have given FPS monopoly to Activision this November on the Wii U.
@DePapier Capcom would give me a heart attack if they greenlit this project for Wii U...
Also this is a poor representation of what Cryengine can do... it looks good as a Monster Hunter game, but the engine is so much more capable... A video of Crysis 3 on a PC running on Ultra would be a great example of Cryengine in action.
@DarkNinja9 There is no reason why the Wii U version will miss anything in any ports from xBone/PS4 and PC games.
The Wii U natively supports OpenGL 4.0, like the PS4.... and it CAN run DirectX 11 level of effects, as claimed by one developer already who was able to port it over, even though the system wasn't designed for it.
The GPU is just as modern and in the same generation as the GPU in the xBone, in fact they are both Radeon 6000 series based GPU's, they are just on different ends of the performance spectrum, which means they can handle the same effects, but the xBone GPU is made for 1080p gaming mostly, and the Wii U was designed with 720p in mind mostly.
I'm getting tired of people claiming the Wii U is last gen, even with plenty of games being released that are out of reach of anything the PS3 can do (Need For Speed Most Wanted, Pikmin 3, DKCRTF, SM3DW, X, etc).
For instance, this is a big one, the Wii U can do dynamic lighting without any visible hit to performance.... whereas the PS3/x360, while capable, not a single game used it liberally, they always had to hide in very dark rooms, with janky texture and low poly-models, and even then struggle to run it above 20 fps because of the massive performance hit dynamic lighting has ps3/x360.... yet the Wii U runs it with zero trouble, PIkmin 3 never drops below 30fps even with dynamic lighting bouncing off walls/ground/characters.
How about HDR lighting? The PS3/360 has zero evidence of ever achieving it. The Wii U has several titles available that showcase (The Wii U version of COD:Ghost, Nintendoland, Pikmin 3, Mario Kart 8 and Need For Speed MWU)
The PS3/360 versions of NFS:MW and COD:Ghosts do not use this modern effect.... I really wish we could put this nonsense to bed already.
JaxonH, the gaming media, very simply, goes where their clicks are. Theres no bias beyond a need to cater to the audience that still takes them seriously, even as fewer and fewer do.
Nintendo's done most of the damage itself, but they know how to fix it and theyre in the process right now for the most part. That still doesnt change the fact that even with the wii being an outright phenomenon, nintendo fans dont deliver on traffic revenue cuz the electronic interest just is never there.
This brings tears to my eyes.
@jsty3105 Oh yeah, being snarky is perfectly fine when the person reporting has legitimate criticisms towards a specific feature or news. Nearly everyone gets on Nintendo for region-locking, and I concur that their systems should not implement said feature. Though it's also about respect and professionalism. When the President of Epic was asked a while ago if the Wii-U could handle Unreal Engine 4-to which his response was"Hahahaha...no". That was incredibly juvenile of him to do that. He could've easily said," unfortunately the Wii-U won't be able to handle 100% of UE4 but it is scalable". Many (not all) people in the industry see Nintendo as some kind of joke, as if they were N-Gage. I don't blame JaxonH for how he feels. Constructive criticism is always welcome and needed, but not inept disdain. Will the Wii-U version of Cryengine be as powerful as PS4/Xbone? Of course not, but I applaud Crytek for trying and not dismissing.
@armoredghor I guess you don't like Far Cry then? It's a VERY impressive series, especially the latest game and it is definitely not Call of Duty or any other generic shooter. They at least TRY to do something different.
Far Cry 3 review: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB7X_1eJQH8
Blood Dragon review (Far Cry 3 spin off): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-4LZVfur6o
@DePapier You're welcome...
@element187 Guess you missed my previous comment in which I posted links to the EXACT video you were talking about...
EDIT: comment #45 that is...
great news , cause the wii u deserves recognition just like the other 2 consoles this day in age never count nintendo out !
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