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.
Something that might be a little more interesting is comparing and contrasting the various games made or attempted by other studios than DICE.
List of games for Frostbite 3.0
Bioware
- DA: I - meh. But at least it works and was relatively trouble free.
- ME: A - a mess, technically and from a gameplay standpoint.
- Anthem - good graphics, but a mess WRT design and implementation.
- Shadow Realms - Cancelled
Victory Games
- C&C Generals 2 - Cancelled, an anonymous person who claims to be part of development claimed it was due to politics and meddling on the part of EA.
Visceral Games
- Battlefield Hardline - basically just another Battlefield in a different environment
- Star Wars - cancelled despite this company having extensive experience with the engine from making Battlefield Hardline.
EA Vancouver
- FIFA 17, 18, 19 - graphically relatively simplistic games. Static arenas with limited texture variation, etc. About as easy as it gets to graphically enhance.
EA Tiburon
- Madden NFL 18, 19 - same situation as FIFA. Relatively simplistic from a graphical perspective compared to even corridor games much less open world games.
- Rory McIlroy PGA Tour - I didn't even know this game existed.
EA Spearhead, Ghost Games, EA Black Box
- NFS games. I don't do racing much anymore so don't know much about these. I know a few of these had issues on PC. But graphically I think they were fine. Still racing games are generally as linear as you get with some exceptions. I don't know if any of these were open world or semi-open world?
It's interesting to see that the best results with Frostbite by studios other than DICE are the rather more simplistic games graphically and games that are basically only doing what Battlefield already does.
Once teams start doing more complex rendering loads (open world, for example) it appears they start to run into trouble.
This could quite likely be more about not having the tools available to do what they want. If production is rushed, it's quite likely that time wasn't allocated to develop the tools for the job prior to work beginning on a project. Trying to create the levels, implement systems, etc. and develop the tools to do those things simultaneously just seems like a recipe for failure unless your game isn't attempting to do much (NFL, Madden, NFS for example).
It isn't like Bioware doesn't have (or didn't have) people with extensive experience in the types of games they were crafting. I may have issues with the direction the company took with their games, but they had competent people there.
Likewise, Visceral games has the experience and the talent for large story based games with complex systems.
Meh, too many things in play, IMO, to blame the developers over potential issues with the Engine...or more likely the tools available for the engine and the timeframe within which EA expects the game to be developed.
While I like what DICE has been able to do with the Frostbite engine, I think it's unfortunate that the engine was forced on the developers rather than the developers being able to choose the engine best suited to their project.
Regards,
SB