Mass Effect 5 might use Unreal Engine instead of Frostbite
For Mass Effect 5, EA and BioWare are strongly considering replacing Frostbite with Unreal Engine, according to multiple sources.
venturebeat.com
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GamesBeat: Mass Effect 5 might use Unreal Engine instead of Frostbite [Update: New Job listings might be further proof]
- Thread starter Deleted member 51691
- Start date
venturebeat.com
EA is making all the right decisions lately. Forcing (or at least, encouraging) Andromeda to run on Frostbite was a big reason for the way it turned out. Jedi Fallen Order is also on Unreal Engine. If the game was made a few years earlier it probably would've been on Frostbite, too..
I assume they are referring to the recently announced Mass Effect sequel as 5 and Andromeda as 4?
I think this is much ado about nothing. Of course they're going to say all options are on the table, but miraculously they'll end up choosing Frostbite.
You can't exactly advertise for somebody with Frostbite expertise, because nobody else can use Frostbite. "Have you ever worked for EA in this capacity before? Then come work for us again!" Somehow I don't think that's a recipe for getting a lot of these positions filled.
You can't exactly advertise for somebody with Frostbite expertise, because nobody else can use Frostbite. "Have you ever worked for EA in this capacity before? Then come work for us again!" Somehow I don't think that's a recipe for getting a lot of these positions filled.
Andromeda was Frostbite.
Good to hear that EA is at the very least considering no longer shoving an engine made for Battlefield down everyone's throat.
I know nothing about coding, but they at least have a base to work from this time with Dragon Age: Inquisition. Bioware doesn't have code RPG basic functions this go around.
DA:I's DLC shows that Bioware is able to put out quality content if the base is there.
If you take the character animations and some of the models out of the equation, Andromeda with Frostbite looked gorgeous. The open spaces in all the planets, the indoor areas, etc. It still looks good with Max settings.
The real question is: What could the switch to Unreal again provide them, vs all the modules-code they already had to do with Andromeda?
The only difference between proprietary closed tech stack and publicly available tech stack is that the publicly available one requires less onboarding. That's about it.
Of course they'll consider different options. But the job listing doesn't mean much when they can't exactly hire people with Frostbite experience unless they only want other EA employees. It's sort of a pointless article for a game that's literally 5/6 years out.
I kinda doubt it. Job postings usually mention engines like Unreal or Unity since they are publicly available. Since Frostbyte is proprietary it's kinda hard to expect that someone who hasn't worked at EA has actual experience with it, so logically you would post that you require some general game engine (like Unreal) experience.
In some ways. There was some not-so-great stuff going on too.
But the reality is that there are any number of people who left BioWare after working on Andromeda (on the technical side) who basically said it was the worst experience of their career. Frostbite delivers results, but it was not easy or painless for them.
Maybe it will be different now that they said Anthem is the baseline for the systems they'll be using (and obviously the toolchain has to have evolved over the past decade or so since they started using it). But they get to make that determination, and UE5 is there if they need it.
tbf, while that is true, it's not as if there aren't a fair share of horror stories from those who did touch it. Which is not to say it's bad, but to paint it as just an uniformed public perception seems unfair to a degree.
Except for Andromeda. Frostbite (or specifically the version they had then) was a clusterfuck to develop in for the Bioware Montreal team before they were shut down.
Of course the job listing is going to ask for familiarity with Unreal Engine. Unless someone worked at EA and left they wouldn't have much hands-on time with Frostbite, so if you're hiring for someone with the skillset sought after they're going to have most likely been working in Unreal. The assertion at the end of the article that Frostbite will look ancient in 2025 when the tools could and likely are being updated to where we might see a 4.0 in the future shows what kind of low quality bait an article like this is.
I mean it's a little late. At this point, they've already spent years and multiple projects turning the Frostbite engine into something suitable for an RPG game. So they might as well continue to use and refine it, especially if Dragon Age 4 is being developed on it.
There was some postmortem BioWare articles where they had issues making the type of games they make with an engine that wasn't initially built for it. People claim it ruined madden too.
I think there were some articles related to Andromeda where someone working on the game said it couldn't do shit related to the making of a RPG out of the box and how it lacked an animation system. I'm on my phone so I can't find it easily but I know someone blamed the engine publicly and it led to that perception
Yeah that makes sense, its similar in most other areas in the tech industry. People are usually not tied to a specific tech, most are tech-agnostic. If they already know how to do something, a new tech-stack just means initial time at the start (training-on-boarding-kt)
I think that reverting back to Unreal for an Andromeda project would be a bigger milestone (more expensive in Time-Cost-Scope) in their plan. With Frostbite they could focus in improving the specific pain points we all know from Andromeda.
Then again, maybe the "training people on Frosbite" its the biggest pain point and switching back to Unreal would facility massive on-boarding and quicker initial turnarounds.
Interesting.
That makes no sense. Unless you're talking about something from a few decades ago, tech stacks are so powerful and flexible now to empower you to make any game you want.
Sure.
But...How was the door for you in the PS4 version? Or the massive pop-in in the market area?
Unreal is not a "solve all" magical engine, it has the same constraints all engines share.
Well we've read the articles/books and seen the YouTube videos with ex-Bioware devs that all talked about the studio's difficulties with using Frostbite to make its last 3 games.
Imagine being the person who thinks Frostbite will ever not deliver cutting-edge visuals.
Idk, Frostbite has some potential.
There were definitely moments in Andromeda where I thought "wow, I wish ME1-3 was built on this engine with this style of gameplay".
But of course it is also the reason the game came out buggy and in bad shape.
Exactly.
My take from that Kotaku article is that Andromeda mostly suffered from them going after procedurally generated planets like No Man Sky or SC so they essentially lost 2013-2015 on that. Since game it came out in March 2017. that's not really a lot of time to build everything from scratch so no wonder it all fell apart.
The Story Behind Mass Effect: Andromeda's Troubled Five-Year Development
In 2012, as work on Mass Effect 3 came to a close, a small group of top BioWare employees huddled to talk about the next entry in their epic sci-fi franchise. Their goal, they decided, was to make a game about exploration—one that would dig into the untapped potential of the first three games...
kotaku.com
Sure when they first got their hands of it in 2011. it didn't have tools they needed so some time was lost there too, but essentially if they used any other engine and tried to do full sized procedural planets it would probably ended the same way.
bruh I swear I was the only one who played infiltrator on my iphone 5
honestly I'm fine with that.
that as long as you need to EA, just don't fuck it up because ME is my favorite new IP from the x360 gen
I feel this generally has to do with the fact that we do not have to make any advertising about our tech stack, since we're not trying to sell it to anyone. So no need to make fancy press events or presentations or eye candy.
It's the same rule for any other internal tech stack, basically, you don't really see any press about Blizzard's tech, or Ubisoft's, or whatever. It's only Unity and Unreal that get most mainstream eyes on, as they are the only "mainstream" tech available out there. :D