DICE: Frostbite 3 engine could be scaled for Wii U

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EA’s sudden lack of commitment to the Wii U has seen the decision mean that the console will miss out on fifteen games being built using the company’s new Frostbite 3 engine.

Although it has now been revealed that it isn’t that the Wii U couldn’t support the engine, it’s just that there aren’t the necessary resources to dedicate in order to make it happen.

Such comments were made by Battlefield’s executive producer Patrick Bach, who had been discussing their current stance towards Nintendo’s console.

“If the Wii U was immensely popular we would probably put more focus into seeing how we could mitigate this, because it is a technical problem,” Bach explained to Eurogamer. “It is a technical problem at its core because the Frostbite engine is not designed to run on that hardware, and the hardware is quite different from the next-gen consoles and the previous gen consoles.”

Although the Frostbite 3 engine is designed to be scalable, evident through Battlefield 4 being released on current-generation consoles. So why isn’t the Wii U seeing similar support?

“From our perspective it’s not as powerful as it should be to be able to run a Battlefield game,” Bach responded. “Straight out of the box, as in Frostbite 3, it doesn’t run that well on the Wii U, which means it takes a lot of time and energy from us that would then take from something else.

“So, we made the decision to say, no, let’s not take away the focus from the PlayStations and the Xboxes and the PCs to do this. At the end of the day it’s about focus and priorities. If we could press a button to move it over to Wii U, of course we could make a Wii U SKU, but it would take some substantial time to do it. I know some fans get very upset when we say that, but it’s true. There’s a reason why not all games are on the Wii U platform.”

With Nintendo preparing a steady stream of first-party support, if the console’s fortunes change then DICE would openly consider reconsidering the situation.

“Absolutely. Of course. There’s no reason why we couldn’t focus down and make a Nintendo GameBoy version of it as well. It’s all about where you put your focus and how you scale things. Where do you scale down? Where do you put your team efforts?

“We need to do what is right for the franchise and what feels right in our gut. If you have to scale your game down in the wrong places too much, then you lose some of the core values of what your game stands for. It’s complicated. It’s more complicated than people would like it to be. I would love for us to be able to be on Samsung TVs as well, but we have to draw the line somewhere.”

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