Support NeoGAF

[Mista]

Game director Stig Asmussen and Respawn CEO Vince Zampella told Game Informer recently that “Frostbite wasn’t even an option” when it decided to choose an engine. “When we started this team, this was even before Star Wars, I was the only person on the team and we knew we were going to start hiring a few more people and we needed to start building from the ground up. I did a little bit of research on Unreal, there was a couple of other options out there, and remember we aren’t EA at this point so Frostbite wasn’t even an option.

“I started tinkering around with it and was like ‘Wow, this is pretty powerful with what an individual developer can do with it, imagine what a whole team could do with it.’” The team is “very happy with the decision” as per Asmussen.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order – Respawn Not Mandated to Use Frostbite Engine

gamingbolt.com

 

[TeamGhobad]

and bioware is still using that piece of shit

 

[JohnnyFootball]

and bioware is still using that piece of shit

It's no secret they were mandated to use it for Andromeda and more or less had to rebuild the engine. One of the most under reported reasons for Andromeda being a failure.

Nevertheless, I'm glad Fallen Order is not being forced to do so as well.

 

[Deleted member 752119]

It's no secret they were mandated to use it for Andromeda and more or less had to rebuild the engine. One of the most under reported reasons for Andromeda being a failure.

Nevertheless, I'm glad Fallen Order is not being forced to do so as well.

Yep. Hopefully the mess that was Andromeda and Anthem made EA realize it was foolhardy to force all their teams to use Frostbite. It may save development costs vs. licensing to use another engine like Unreal, but it's not worth it if effects game quality and causes things to underperform badly.

 

[ScaryBrandon]

Yep. Hopefully the mess that was Andromeda and Anthem made EA realize it was foolhardy to force all their teams to use Frostbite. It may save development costs vs. licensing to use another engine like Unreal, but it's not worth it if effects game quality and causes things to underperform badly.

So strange that in the hands of DIce frostbite looks and performs amazingly, way better than Unreal Engine 4. I also don't remember bioware complaining about frostbite with DA Inquisition. It all sounds like bioware incompetency to me. Something must have gone terribly wrong in the studio the past few years.

 

[Deleted member 752119]

So strange that in the hands of DIce frostbite looks and performs amazingly, way better than Unreal Engine 4. I also don't remember bioware complaining about frostbite with DA Inquisition. It all sounds like bioware incompetency to me. Something must have gone terribly wrong in the studio the past few years.

They definitely struggled with Frostbite for DA Inquisition. It's touched on a lot in the chapter about that game's development in the Blood, Sweat and Pixels book. They had to pretty much rework the entire engine, build all kinds of stuff into it to make it work for DA:I. The problem with Frostbite is it was made for Dice's first person games and lacked tools needed to make third person games. Even things like all the UI stuff needed for deeper menus for RPGs was a pain in the ass.

But it's not an either/or situation though for sure. Bioware has been terribly mismanaged and lost a lot of talent over recent years. That coincided with being bought by EA and having less talented staff and incompetent management while also being forced to use an engine that needed a TON of work and customization to be able to make their style of games.

 

[ScaryBrandon]

They definitely struggled with Frostbite for DA Inquisition. It's touched on a lot in the chapter about that game's development in the Blood, Sweat and Pixels book. They had to pretty much rework the entire engine, build all kinds of stuff into it to make it work for DA:I. The problem with Frostbite is it was made for Dice's first person games and lacked tools needed to make third person games. Even things like all the UI stuff needed for deeper menus for RPGs was a pain in the ass.

But it's not an either/or situation though for sure. Bioware has been terribly mismanaged and lost a lot of talent over recent years. That coincided with being bought by EA and having less talented staff and incompetent management while also being forced to use an engine that needed a TON of work and customization to be able to make their style of games.

So they had to reword the entire engine for DAI then Andromeda and Anthem? Did they lose their previous copies of the " entirely reworked" frostbite. Come on now...

 

[zeorhymer]

So they had to reword the entire engine for DAI then Andromeda and Anthem? Did they lose their previous copies of the " entirely reworked" frostbite. Come on now...

The Frostbite engine was designed for one thing when it came out and that was for FPS. It should have been able to do a 40+ hour role playing game with massive inventories, dialogue option libraries, tactical combat, skill trees, and Iron Man flights. Come on now....

 

[Tesseract]

feel like not using source engine was a big mistake as their mechanics will suffer

 

[Deleted member 752119]

So they had to reword the entire engine for DAI then Andromeda and Anthem? Did they lose their previous copies of the " entirely reworked" frostbite. Come on now...

They had to do more rework for each as they were different types of games. But as I said, they were also terribly mismanaged which was the bigger issue. Andromeda was given to their C or D team that had never developed a full game before. Anthem was in development hell with little to no direction and with what we ended up getting being cobbled together in the last 18 months.

Having to use an ill-suited engine just made things worst and was the main culprit for all the bugs, glitches and crashes. The games just being crappy from a narrative and design standpoint is more down to the mismanagement and lack of direction at Bioware--though time wasted reworking the engine certainly didn't help as time spent squashing bugs is time not spent fleshing out other gameplay things.

 

[Mista]

Lesson learned from Anthem I see