4A Games chief technical officer Oles Shishkovtsov made headlines this week due to a comment made about the Wii U’s CPU. Shishkovtsov said that its tech is “horrible” and “slow”.
Now THQ’s Huw Beynon has clarified the situation. Beynon acts as a representative of 4A Games and the Metro franchise.
Speaking about Shishkovtsov’s remarks, Beynon said:
“I think there was one comment made by Oles the programmer – the guy who built the engine. It’s a very CPU intensive game. I think it’s been verified by plenty of other sources, including your own Digital Foundry guys, that the CPU on Wii U on the face of it isn’t as fast as some of the other consoles out there. Lots of developers are finding ways to get around that because of other interesting parts of the platform. I think that what frustrates me about the way the story’s been spun out is that there’s been no opportunity to say, ‘Well, yes, on that one individual piece maybe it’s not as… maybe his opinion is that it’s not as easy for the way that the 4A engine’s been built as is the others. What it doesn’t go on to look at is to say that, you know, we could probably get around that. We could probably get Metro to run on an iPad if we wanted, or on pretty much anything. Just as in the same way that between PC and current console versions there are some compromises that need to be made in certain places and we strive to get the very best performance that we can from any platform we release on. But I understand that there’s a real appetite in the media at the moment because the Wii U is a hot topic to spam some stories that are going to attract a lot of links if they present it in a certain way.”
Beynon additionally said a few words about the possibility of Metro: Last Light ever coming to the Wii U:
“We looked at Wii U as a target platform. It’s a really small studio. There were 50 for Metro 2033, there are 80 now. With Metro 2033 most of their experience was with the PC. The Xbox 360 was their first console version. We’ve now added PlayStation 3 to the mix. We genuinely looked at what it would take to bring the game to Wii U. It’s certainly possible, and it’s something we thought we’d like to do. The reality is that would mean a dedicated team, dedicated time and effort, and it would either result in a detriment to what we’re trying to focus on, already adding a PlayStation 3 SKU, or we probably wouldn’t be able to do the Wii U version the justice that we’d want. It would be a port or we wouldn’t be able to get to grips with the system. That’s really the essence of it. It’s something we can potentially look at and return to later. Given the targets we’ve set for the game, it didn’t make sense to proceed with it at this point.”
