The DICE engine has reported multiple vicissitudes in the developments of Electronic Arts, as recognized by numerous voices involved.
One of the internal graphic engines of Electronic Arts is Frostbite, used in many of the intellectual properties of the American giant throughout the present generation of consoles. Said engine is known for the difficulties it exposes according to what genres and circumstances; Aaron Flynn, former CEO of Bioware, license authors such as Dragon Age and Mass Effect have talked about it now.
As he comments in a meeting with GamesIndustry: "… then we change to an engine called Frostbite", which he defines as "powerful, fast, beautiful and designed to do very cool things. But it is also extremely delicate and needs a lot of people. ”
Frostbite
To that he adds: “Incredible, a great technological feat, with the most recent innovation possible. But it requires a very large group of people to maintain it and get optimum performance. And that is really the metaphor that accompanied at least the initial stage of Frostbite. ” Apparently, as they were using it, they continued to encounter difficulties: “It was getting harder and harder to make the content that people wanted. It is more and more difficult to translate that content with these guidelines and do things. Although we had more people, we were reducing the speed in which we built and shaped those experiences. ”
According to Amy Hennig, who was immersed in the canceled Star Wars game in Visceral Games, the Forstbite is an engine designed for first-person games, not third-party games.
EA did not force Bioware to use Frostbite with Mass Effect Andromeda
It should be added, not in vain, that the former head of Bioware, Aaron Flynn himself, commented in an interview last year that EA never forced the studio to use the Frostbite engine in Mass Effect Andromeda, a title that came to stores with graphic problems and bugs subsequently corrected.
One of the last games that the Frostbite engine has used was Battlefield 5, which is already being adapted for the next generation of consoles. While EA tries to adapt its engine to consoles such as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Project Scarlett with the best guarantees, other studios are using other engines such as the Unreal Engine 4 from Epic Games. An example is found in Respawn Entertainment, whose last two projects, Apex Legends and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, made use of this established tool.
