Amy Hennig Talks More About Struggling With EA's Frostbite Engine
- Thread starter iroboto
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Tools for none fps titles aside, I would say there is also some visible performance regression when used by non original creators of engine. Lets compare sub 30fps andromeda and later 60 fps battlefields. Yeah different rendering setups but even then one could argue which title is doing more... Team who inherited engine will have trouble to know everything about it? Thank you captain obvious, but there are still opinions like engine=flip of switch and forget everything. Who knows how the render is documented when another team is complaining about tools provisions for non fps games.
D
Deleted member 11852
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Building an engine (Uncharted) for one platform for one game is orders of magnitude (literally) than a multi-platform engine for any type of game (Frostbite).
They also have one of the few engines that can manage thousands of unique individual assets moving around a massive world in realtime without smoke and mirrors (like NPC running off into the distance and disappearing) and magically appearing/spawning at the next narrative meeting point. It can also manage thousands of unique, individual items moved around, in realtime, in that world. I can't think of any other game that achieves what Bethesda's engine sets out to do. It comes at a heavy price.
If you've ever attended one of the infrequent Bethesda presentations at GDC then you know they almost never talk about graphics, it's just not their focus at all. They don't want to fall too far behind (Fallout 3 was actually decent looking game on lastgen consoles) but it's definitely not where their time is most spent.
I think either I wrote poor english, but yes, I'm in agreement. They prioritized delivery over graphics.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
MMORPGs are the only other ones that have to track and animate things to that scale that Bethesda likes to do. Where MMORPGs have greater scale in terms of active entities (players, NPCs, monsters), they have significantly smaller scale when it comes to interactive items.
Consequently, you'll almost never see MMORPGs that are graphically more impressive than single player games without some serious limitations. Black Desert Online with the incredibly short viewing distance and pop-in distance, for example.
Still impressive in their own ways though. But graphics are certainly flashier and easier for forum warriors to point to and claim, "Best EVAR!"
Regards,
SB
DavidGraham
Veteran
In that case I think Andromeda is. Bigger maps, denser details, higher polygon count, more AI on screen .. etc.
It's really hard for me to believe this:
1) DICE is made of top developers.
2) Visceral was made at least by experienced developers (probably better) who already worked on multiple tps including one developed with an early version of Frostbite (Army of Two something) and a fps with the current version: BF Frontline.
3) Frostbite is supposed to be a modern engine shared by most EA studios and I bet it was planned accordingly.
4) Bioware released Dragon Age with the same engine (thus invalidating partially the same claims they had made to explain the failure of Andromeda)
So my guess is that Frostbite must have had issues but that it's now used as scapegoat.
All the talks about "the game was shit before the last days" are true, but that doesn't mean it's something "normal" imho means that there were problems during development and the project was behind schedule and it was a miracle that it came together in time.
This is common in artist driven projects, moreso if the team is made by perfectionists that love to do overtime as Naughty Dog apparently is, because that gives artists freedom to do whatever they want, because other people are willing to work 4 times as hard to fix their mistakes.
I am not an expert on game development and I hope to be wrong but..facts and evidence lead me to think this way.
I wish Amy good luck on her next projects, I am curious to see another game from her, hopefully with creative freedom, good tech and people working on schedule without crazy overtime.
1) DICE is made of top developers.
2) Visceral was made at least by experienced developers (probably better) who already worked on multiple tps including one developed with an early version of Frostbite (Army of Two something) and a fps with the current version: BF Frontline.
3) Frostbite is supposed to be a modern engine shared by most EA studios and I bet it was planned accordingly.
4) Bioware released Dragon Age with the same engine (thus invalidating partially the same claims they had made to explain the failure of Andromeda)
So my guess is that Frostbite must have had issues but that it's now used as scapegoat.
All the talks about "the game was shit before the last days" are true, but that doesn't mean it's something "normal" imho means that there were problems during development and the project was behind schedule and it was a miracle that it came together in time.
This is common in artist driven projects, moreso if the team is made by perfectionists that love to do overtime as Naughty Dog apparently is, because that gives artists freedom to do whatever they want, because other people are willing to work 4 times as hard to fix their mistakes.
I am not an expert on game development and I hope to be wrong but..facts and evidence lead me to think this way.
I wish Amy good luck on her next projects, I am curious to see another game from her, hopefully with creative freedom, good tech and people working on schedule without crazy overtime.
That shows they didn't think it through, and let it carry on that way ridiculously. For ionAXXIA, I faced the same issue. It was apparent I needed an immediate 'test' mode for ship designs so players could try new components and builds. After a bit of prototyping, I settled on including the ship designer inside the ship flying levels. The ship building 'level' is a normal game level with some easy target-practice enemies. Flexibility like that allows a game to evolve to its best, most fun form, as I can have special levels where you adjust your ship as you go, and could take the game more in that direction if it proved more fun.
Loading screens to try anything new out is really poor.
I have a feeling the problems had more to do with creating single player game scenarios, like having decent AI, maybe even issues with actively transforming environments like Uncharted's ubiquitous collapsing game arenas. Frostbite may have had massive level transformations, but AFAIK like in BF4, they are not playable and being caught up in them (like the collapsing skyscraper in Seige of Shanghai) resulted in an insta-death. You didn't get to play and potentially live out the collapse like one of Uncharted 2's set pieces, which I imagine could be a nightmare to get working properly on an engine not made for it.
The only possible response I could see for game design is that they wanted it like mechwarrior where you could only alter your mech in a garage and not modify your parts in the jungle.
But yea, it’s not really thought out
It was a mix of indecision and having the folks at Bioware Montreal coming off of ME3 MP/DLC, so re-inventing the wheel must have been part of the issue here.
Bioware Edmonton was responsible for Inquisition. The nature of Frostbite tech sharing is a bit convoluted due to having to sync back with DICE about changes, though I'm not entirely clear on it.
Ike Turner
Veteran
Frosbite is definitely being used as a scapegoat ever since Andromeda was released (and as a matter of fact most of the Andromeda issues have more to do with it being a badly managed development mess than anything related to its use of Frostbite). All the popular hot takes about Frostbite make it sound like this is some obscure FPS only engine that only DICE knows how to master etc...when the reality is that the damn thing literally powers the best selling games in the world every year (Fifa + Madden) which are in no way shape or form FPS games...The NFS Series (which are not...FPS games) which may be crap but this has nothing to do with the engine (NFS: Undergroud is IMO one of the best looking game of this generation & didn't have a single technical issue in sight). Dragon Age didn't seem to suffer from its use of Frostbite but more from a rushed dev cycle to release it early in the generation. The only outliner is Andromeda which had a clusterfuck of a development history and was literally developed in little more that a year (it was rebooted several times). Anthem is also the results of a totally messy dev cycle with Casey Hudson coming back to the rescue after quitting Bioware to move to Microsoft and then being called back to save the day...
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If you look at the frostbite release list, it is not really used for adventure games with the type of design that Uncharted has in the time frame that Amy Hennig's Star Wars game was cancelled. It seems very possible to me that it didn't have the feature set they needed, or maybe not at the quality they wanted. Looking at Anthem and Andromeda, it doesn't seem particularly shocking to me that there could be a lack of tools to create that kind of game. Maybe the Visceral team bears some responsibility for that, in not investing in the tools they needed during development. I don't really know.
DavidGraham
Veteran
Dragon Age
Andromeda
StarWars
C&C Generals 2
Anthem
That's too much scapegoating going on, and from game developers no less. Even Battlefield still has mabor engine flaws that never seem to get fixed despite multiple game iterations. Not to mention the awful DX12 problems that never seem to get fixed, for comparison the much smaller Metro team made a capable DX12 path, yet DICE never managed this feet.
They damn well should be. That's what they have multiple software engineers there for.
And by the way, on the same interview, Hennig did say the studio did a great job building up the tools and pipeline she felt they needed, it just took them time because these things simply do take time. Also, she said other studios were already benefitting from their contributions, so it means EA succeded, at least to an extent, in their vision of a single engine making the work of each studio benefit every other.
And by the way, on the same interview, Hennig did say the studio did a great job building up the tools and pipeline she felt they needed, it just took them time because these things simply do take time. Also, she said other studios were already benefitting from their contributions, so it means EA succeded, at least to an extent, in their vision of a single engine making the work of each studio benefit every other.
I think that'd be a prerequisite of being a AAA studio. AAA being best of the best. Any big-ticket game should be employing engine and tool development as part of the budget, as these are vital to the success and efficient operation of the whole project.
I agree that time rules all, and I have little doubts that they are capable. But time is the largest constraint they are working against, and time is money.
I don’t think Amy is scapegoating frostbyte, at least not intentionally, but the argument she made without getting lost in the details is that to make the game they needed, they needed more time and money. If frostbyte already shipped with a lot of those items, they would have needed less
Time and thus less money.
I don’t think Amy is scapegoating frostbyte, at least not intentionally, but the argument she made without getting lost in the details is that to make the game they needed, they needed more time and money. If frostbyte already shipped with a lot of those items, they would have needed less
Time and thus less money.