EA is now Making Star Wars Games, Running on Frostbite

EA has had a rocky relationship with the Wii U, there’s no doubt of that. Sales of Mass Effect 3: Special Edition didn’t particularly impress (and there are likely good reasons for this that aren’t the fault of the Wii U, but that’s another story) and recently EA confirmed that Nintendo’s newest console wouldn’t be seeing ports of Madden or FIFA games, as promising as the GamePad would be for those games.

Now that EA has acquired rights to the Star Wars titles, it has been announced that all the new Star Wars games will be built on EA’s proprietary Frostbite engine. Frostbite is exciting in it’s ability to simulate real-time destruction, and look fantastic graphically while doing so. However, this does not bode well for the Wii U.

Technical director on DICE and EA’s Frostbite engine confirmed in a tweet that they have never had Frostbite 3 running on the Wii U, and that they have tested Frostbite 2 without promising results. For this reason they have not even tried to run Frostbite 3 on Wii U hardware.

What this could mean, is that we won’t see any new Star Wars games on the Wii U at all.

This sounds rather unusual to us, since the Wii U is at least as technically proficient as the other HD consoles, if not more in some aspects. We have to wonder whether with some tweaking, the Wii U might be run Frostbite admirably. It’s possible that EA wouldn’t see sense in customising the engine for Wii U hardware thanks to its minimal userbase currently, it’s hard to say.

Will you miss Star Wars if you only own a Wii U?