DICE Says Tests on Wii U “Not Too Promising”

The odds of EA’s future Star Wars games (and a whole bunch of other stuff) coming to the Wii U appear to be growing very long indeed.

It seems that former Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello might have been on to something when he said earlier this year that Nintendo’s Wii U lacks the stones to be a true “next gen” console. In a comment posted on Twitter yesterday, Johan Andersson, the Frostbite technical director at DICE – the studio best known for the Battlefield games – denied a claim that the latest iteration of the engine had at one point been running on the Wii U before development efforts were stopped.

“FB3 has never been running on WiiU,” he wrote. “We did some tests with not too promising results with FB2 & chose not to go down that path.”

“FB2” would of course be the older Frostbite 2, which DICE rolled out in 2011 with Battlefield 3 and that has since been used in games including Need for Speed: The Run, Medal of Honor: Warfighter and Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel. It’s been EA’s go-to engine and Frostbite 3 is set to fill the same role, which would seem to exclude the console from EA’s future plans. That perception is reinforced by EA’s recent announcement that the 25th anniversary of the Madden NFL franchise would also skip the system. It may not matter – Nintendo’s never been big on third-party developers anyway – but in the arms race of the coming console generation, it doesn’t look good.

Source: Twitter