In what realm of sanity did EA believe forcing all their devs to work on Frostbite was a good idea?

[KORNdog]

I think it makes a lot of sense on paper. Everyone is on the same page within EA. It removes the need for third party engine licensing fees. And theoretically any improvements from Individual teams can be incorporated into the overall engine for future use. It would mean the engine sees solid growth. And it's clearly a capable engine technically. But if what I've read is true it sounds like it's origins are producing limitations?

I think if they want to make a robust engine that can be adapted to any scenario it needs to be created with that in mind from the outset, and it doesn't seem like frostbite has been. It sounds like it's just a patchwork of duct taped features layered atop an engine ultimately built for first person shooters. The dev tools need to be there to make it viable and it doesn't sound like they are.

I think forcing it onto a studio is maybe a bad idea if it means a vision cannot be achieved as easily as possible.

 

[Deleted member 47843]

They only care about profits and using their own engine means not paying fees to use others' engines (like Unreal) and games coming out faster than if devs were making their own engines.

 

[Astra Planeta]

This comment makes no sense
Reports about the engine pertains to difficulty using it and lack of functionality for non fps games. not that it to cant make good looking fps games

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Need for Speed looks & runs great as well. The games weren't actually good but they ran well. So did dragon age.

 

[Deleted member 9306]

Yeah, I have issues with it's design, but on the technical side it's fine?

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I have no idea. Maybe it affected the way the game mechanics were made? Maybe with Frostbite it was harder to do a more strategic battle system, for example?

 

[funky]

You can see the logic but they utterly failed to adapt Frostbite to being a all puropus engine.


Epic and Unity are kings for a reason. Trying to replicate UE flexibility without the decades of experience of making a flexible engine is not gonna be easy.

 

[SantaC]

Who is?

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A seperate frostbite team.

 

[Dekuman]

Need for Speed looks & runs great as well. The games weren't actually good but they ran well. So did dragon age.

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Did you read anything in this thread at all?

 

[sickvisionz]

I think they looked at how much Unreal dominated last generation and figured you really could have one engine to rule them all. They had a studio who already had the talent and seemed like they could pull it off. Their own engine, their own team of experts. Every studio sharing knowledge about the toolset. It wasn't that crazy of an idea.

The only EA games I played this gen and last gen were BioWare titles. I don't know if Frostbite is to blame. I didn't like all the fetch quests in DAI. I don't think Frostbite really impacts that. My issues with MEA didn't have anything to do with technical problems. I mean, I loved KOTOR2 so I can overlook a sci-fi WRPG of BioWare lineage with intense technical problems.

 

[The Albatross]

I think EA wanted to have a flexible internal engine that all of their development groups could use to bootstrap development... Instead of having to turn to license something like Unreal Engine, Unity, or one of the other major engines.

It's not a bad strategy, it's just questionable how well it's working for their major new franchises. But developers also get a lot of stuff 'for free' with Frostbite... Lighting systems, physics simulations, partical effects, `support for variable resolution, HDR, sound tech (Dolby Atmos or w/e). WHen you're a major developer/publisher, you look at dollars and cents and see that you have 5 studios who are all working on the same features for all of your games, and that's costing X amount of dollars per year, so you decide to invest in a single flexible engine that'll work across all of your platforms. WHat's pretty amazing is that Frostbite is the same engine behind Battlefield and FIFA/Madden and Plants v. Zombies.

 

[SpotAnime]

Right idea unifying the tech stack across the company. Helps with knowledge transfer, employee development, R&D and maintenance costs. If it worked, it would have probably meant cranking out higher quality games at a faster more frequetbpace, with lower operational costs.

The problem is, it appears they backed the wrong engine.

 

[iksenpets]

If you're just the executive with no hands-on dev experience, it seems like a great idea. We poured a ton of money into this tech, that legitimately seems to produce some best-in-industry results in terms of visuals and performance in Battlefield games, why wouldn't we have a company wide directive to use it? It'll save us money that we'd orherwise be paying to Epic, and we'll gain prestige from all these great looking Frostbite games. By the time you're hearing back from BioWare and the various Star Wars teams that this isn't working, it's too late. We've already invested tons into all the Frostbite assets you've made for your game, and all the work you've done to add the necessary features for your game too the engine, so just stick with it. And now that you've done the work, surely it'll be smooth sailing for your next game, right?

 

[Dekuman]

If you're just the executive with no hands-on dev experience, it seems like a great idea. We poured a ton of money into this tech, that legitimately seems to produce some best-in-industry results in terms of visuals and performance in Battlefield games, why wouldn't we have a company wide directive to use it? It'll save us money that we'd orherwise be paying to Epic, and we'll gain prestige from all these great looking Frostbite games. By the time you're hearing back from BioWare and the various Star Wars teams that this isn't working, it's too late. We've already invested tons into all the Frostbite assets you've made for your game, and all the work you've done to add the necessary features for your game too the engine, so just stick with it. And now that you've done the work, surely it'll be smooth sailing for your next game, right?

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Yeah from experience, expensive internal systems have a lot of inertia against not using them due exec egos and the fear of switching.

 

[Detail]

Fifa has been pretty unplayable this gen. I legit stopped playing soccer games because as good as Pro Evo is, it's been the same game every year for 3 years and Konami won't put any money into it so no features get added and it loses licenses.

Fifa just plays like fucking shit and is basically RNG/Fifa Street.

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Agreed, I purchased pro evo this year and it plays more like a game of football than Fifa does but even Pro Evo is pretty bad tbh.

Fifa however is just awful, lobbed through balls that go about 100 foot in the air, ping pong passing, terrible animations, bugs galore, woeful season mode.

It's just awful tbh.

 

[Detail]

It actually was a sound and solid plan in concept.
Management across EA just executed it with about all the grace of Lukaku's first touch.



I remember hearing or seeing something last week that even just getting replays to work in Frostbite for FIFA was a nightmare

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It makes no sense, a few gens ago Fifa played a much more realistic game of football than it does now.

They need a brand new engine for their sports games, people keep saying sports games aren't popular anymore but I don't believe that whatsoever, it's that people are fed up of the same old stuff year in year out and they are more focused on ultimate team money than actually making a fundamentally good game.

I want nothing more than a good NFL game, a good Fifa game, a good NHL game but whilst these licences are with EA we aren't going to get any, that's the sad reality of it.

Whatever happened to cool games like SSX? Fifa Street? NBA Street? These kind of fun, outlandish games just don't exist anymore and it's a real shame.

What I would give for another Def Jam game as well or an actual decent Need For Speed game like underground 2.

It feels like moving to frostbite has caused a lot of limitations as well and that's probably why we aren't seeing games like this anymore.

 

[Aokiji]

EA operates on "anything to further the bottom line". Not paying license fees on engines or waiting & paying for new engines to be built to them seemed better than doing the opposite.

 

[Haze]

Agreed, I purchased pro evo this year and it plays more like a game of football than Fifa does but even Pro Evo is pretty bad tbh.

Fifa however is just awful, lobbed through balls that go about 100 foot in the air, ping pong passing, terrible animations, bugs galore, woeful season mode.

It's just awful tbh.

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Pretty much. It seems like there's a new cheese every year

 

[SPRidley]

Upper management sees how good looks Star Wars Battlefront, doesnt undertand how engines work and thinks that forcing all their studios use that engine will cut costs and make all the games look really good.

As simple as that, Ive seen this thing exactly happen in real life near me so I do not doubt is similar to how it went at EA.

 

[RogerL]

Inventory was one of the things Bioware had to add, in the upcoming BR mode of Battlefield you can see DICE using an inventory system.