They should make an Action RPG using Frostbite.
But Frostbite's "razor blades" is what caused a lot of problems for action RPG Dragon Age Inquisition's development. It was built mainly for first person shooters.
https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964
BioWare first shifted to Frostbite for Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2011, which caused massive problems for that team. Many of the features those developers had taken for granted in previous engines, like a save-load system and a third-person camera, simply did not exist in Frostbite, which meant that the Inquisitionteam had to build them all from scratch. Mass Effect: Andromeda ran into similar issues. Surely the third time would be the charm?
As it turned out, Anthem was not the charm. Using Frostbite to build an online-only action game, which BioWare had never done before, led to a host of new problems for BioWare's designers, artists, and programmers. "Frostbite is like an in-house engine with all the problems that entails—it's poorly documented, hacked together, and so on—with all the problems of an externally sourced engine," said one former BioWare employee. "Nobody you actually work with designed it, so you don't know why this thing works the way it does, why this is named the way it is."
Throughout those early years in development, the Anthem team realized that many of the ideas they'd originally conceived would be difficult if not impossible to create on Frostbite. The engine allowed them to build big, beautiful levels, but it just wasn't equipped with the tools to support all of those ambitious prototypes that they'd created. Slowly and gradually, they started cutting back on the environmental and survival features that they'd devised for Anthem, in large part because they just weren't working.
"Part of the trouble was you could do enough in the engine to hack it to show what was possible, but then to get the investment behind it to get it actually done took a lot longer, and in some cases you'd run into a brick wall," said a BioWare developer. "Then you'd realize, 'Oh my god, we can do this only if we reinvent the wheel, which is going to take too long.' It was sometimes difficult to know when to cut and run."
Even today, BioWare developers say Frostbite can make their jobs exponentially more difficult. Building new iterations on levels and mechanics can be challenging due to sluggish tools, while bugs that should take a few minutes to squash might require days of back-and-forth conversations. "If it takes you a week to make a little bug fix, it discourages people from fixing bugs," said one person who worked on Anthem. "If you can hack around it, you hack around it, as opposed to fixing it properly." Said a second: "I would say the biggest problem I had with Frostbite was how many steps you needed to do something basic. With another engine I could do something myself, maybe with a designer. Here it's a complicated thing."
"It's hard enough to make a game," said a third BioWare developer. "It's really hard to make a game where you have to fight your own tool set all the time."
From the beginning, Anthem's senior leadership had made the decision to start from scratch for a large part of the game's technology rather than using all of the systems the company had built for Inquisition and Andromeda. Part of this may have been a desire to stand out from those other teams, but another explanation was simple: Anthem was online. The other games were not. The inventory system that BioWare had already designed for Dragon Age on Frostbite might not stand up in an online game, so the Anthem team figured they'd need to build a new one. "Towards the end of the project we started complaining," said one developer. "Maybe we would've gone further if we had Dragon Age: Inquisition stuff. But we're also just complaining about lack of manpower in general."
It often felt to the Anthem team like they were understaffed, according to that developer and others who worked on the game, many of whom told me their team was a fraction of the size of developers behind similar games, like Destinyand The Division. There were a number of reasons for this. One was that in 2016, the FIFA games had to move to Frostbite. The annual soccer franchise was EA's most important series, bringing in a large chunk of the publisher's revenue, and BioWare had programmers with Frostbite experience, so Electronic Arts shifted them to FIFA.
"A lot of the really talented engineers were actually working on FIFA when they should've been working on Anthem," said one person who was on the project. There was also the fact that BioWare's main office was located in Edmonton, a place where winters can dip to minus 20 or even minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, which staff there say has always made it difficult to recruit veterans from more habitable cities. (One also has to wonder: How many programmers heard about Frostbite's razor blades and decided to shy away?)
When a BioWare engineer had questions or wanted to report bugs, they'd usually have to talk to EA's central Frostbite team, a group of support staff that worked with all of the publisher's studios. Within EA, it was common for studios to battle for resources like the Frostbite team's time, and BioWare would usually lose those battles. After all, role-playing games brought in a fraction of the revenue of a FIFA or a Battlefront. "The amount of support you'd get at EA on Frostbite is based on how much money your studio's game is going to make," said one developer. All of BioWare's best-laid technological plans could go awry if they weren't getting the help they expected.
No matter how many people were involved, one thing about Frostbite would always remain consistent, as it did on Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda: It made everything take longer than anyone thought it should. "We're trying to make this huge procedural world but we're constantly fighting Frostbite because that's not what it's designed to do," said one developer. "Things like baking the lighting can take 24 hours. If we're making changes to a level, we have to go through another bake process. It's a very complex process."
Frostbite's razor blades were buried deeply inside the Anthem team, and it would prove impossible to stop the bleeding.
