If you were hoping that any of the upcoming games from DICE – including the inevitable Star Wars games that EA has said that they're working on – would appear on Nintendo's Wii U...think again. DICE has made it clear that anything running the Frostbite 3 Engine will not be available on the Wii U.
In a heartbreaking post by the technical director on the Frostbite 3 Engine, the proprietary tech that DICE has been using to power many of their games, Johan Andersson simply stated in a tweeted response to a question about DICE getting the Frostbite 3 running on Wii U, saying...
FB3 has never been running on WiiU. We did some tests with not too promising results with FB2 & chose not to go down that path.
Ouch.
Andersson also explained that all the Star Wars games that DICE are working on will be running on the latest iterations of the Frostbite Engine, exclaiming that "of course" the titles would be powered by the highly praised technical design engine.
Many speculate that it has very little to do with the engine actually running on the Wii U (because let's face it, the Frostbite 3 was scaled way down to run on the Xbox 360 and PS3 with Battlefield 3 and the Wii U's specs run circles around the seven and eight year old home consoles, respectively). The rumor mill is that this is sort of payback by EA for Nintendo opting out of allowing EA to operate the Nintendo Network using Origin at its base.
The Origin deal would have been pretty huge for EA, boosting up their network service numbers with just about any and everyone who decided to go online with their Wii U, and since Nintendo opted out, EA decided to fondle the business deals in a bad way. In result, Crysis 3 for the Wii U was shelved at the eleventh hour, specifically in relation to “business support” between EA and Nintendo, as cited by Crytek's CEO Cevat Yerli, and Madden 25 won't be arriving for the Wii U either, the first time in 23 years that a Madden game won't be appearing on a Nintendo console, as reported by Nintendo World Report. Take note that Madden NFL 13 was released last year on Nintendo's gaming platforms.
There is still the possibility that it has to do with the tech and hardware setup (and only a technical engineer who has had access to both the Wii U's development kit and the actual engine code for Frostbite would be able to comment on this) but for now a lot of people are under the impression that it's more about business politics than technological limitations. Let's not forget that the latest iteration of Unity runs just fine on the Wii U, according to Unity Technology's CEO David Helgason, and the Unreal Engine 3 powered Mass Effect 3 and Batman: Arkham City were also able to run on the Wii U without any problems.
