Crytek interested in Wii U, no dev kits yet, hopes the consoles has a core market
Last month, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli said that the company was “pretty much running” CryEngine on Wii U. But that’s in spite of the fact that, apparently, Crytek isn’t in possession of Wii U dev kits. CryEngine’s director of global business development, Carl Jones, told NowGamer that he hasn’t seen any kits yet.
Jones also discussed how Crytek couldn’t bring content to Wii due to the technological differences between other platforms, talked about his thoughts on a core market on Wii U, and touched on the possibility of bringing something such as a CryEngine 3-powered platformer to the console.
Crytek’s interested in the Wii U. What do you make of the platform?
CJ: It’s something we’re really interested in. There are a load of Nintendo fans at Crytek, right up to the top of the company. We were unfortunately unable to support the last generation of Wii because it would have been quite an engineering effort to take the engine down to that level of hardware.
So we were quite excited to see a new level of hardware come out that we think we can support, do some good stuff with, and it’s something we’re currently experimenting with.
So you’ve got Wii U dev kits?
CJ: I haven’t seen them myself.
Is there a market for core gaming on Wii U?
CJ: I really hope so but I don’t think it’s a necessary part of their strategy. The Wii is great at the games people like playing on it. I’m not sure yet what Nintendo’s strategy might be for hardcore.
I don’t know if we’ll see flagship core titles on that platform – as a fan of Nintendo I’d love to see it personally, but I also enjoy playing the non-core titles a great deal.
Whether or not we need core titles as well, we’ll see. That’ll be up to the consumer. But if you can get the same visual quality from Wii U as from other platforms, then why not?
So we could see a colourful, CryEngine 3-powered Wii U platformer from Crytek?
CJ: Well, never write anything off. We’re experimenting all the time; we have a large number of very creative people with a lot of great ideas at the studio. Never say never; we’ll have to wait and see.
