Amy Hennig Talks More About Struggling With EA's Frostbite Engine

At the same time, it seems like Bioware themselves have a really bad track record with project management.

Along with the supposed re-allocation of engineering resources (for FIFA), what a recipe for disaster.
We talked about this and it's really ringing true!
“It’s hard enough to make a game. It’s really hard to make a game where you have to fight your own tool set all the time.”

Advancements in game quality starts with advancements in game development!
 
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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.”

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.

Even FIFA needed serious help with making the game on the Frostbite engine, necessitating transferring talented BioWare engineers from Anthem to FIFA to help with the game!
 
because they kept shifting those resources to other games (FIFA etc).
Because of Frostbite too! The engine is wrecking havoc across all of EA studios! EA was prioritizing who gets FrostBite tech support among the studios according to the amount of money each studio makes! So FIFA gets 1st priority, then Battlefield, then Battlefront, then Anthem/Andromeda or whatever RPG they are making.
 
Because of Frostbite too! The engine is wrecking havoc across all of EA studios! EA was prioritizing who gets FrostBite tech support among the studios according to the amount of money each studio makes! So FIFA gets 1st priority, then Battlefield, then Battlefront, then Anthem/Andromeda or whatever RPG they are making.

That wouldn't be an engine problem. Thats a resource problem.
 
New They only needed the resources because of that engine (or other engines) entirely devoid of documentation.
Yup, the fact that EA formed a team dedicated just to do tech support for Frostbite, and the fact that other studios within EA are competing within themselves for that tech support time is very telling about the current state of the engine. Even FIFA (relatively simple game) needed heavy tech support.
 
The point is that they’d face problems regardless of engine choice.

Great Scott! Y’all ain’t thinking Fourth Dimensionally.:runaway:
 
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Even FIFA needed serious help with making the game on the Frostbite engine, necessitating transferring talented BioWare engineers from Anthem to FIFA to help with the game!
They only needed the resources because of that engine (or other engines) entirely devoid of documentation.

Ok, but they talk about not having a working inventory system and specifically mention that an inventory system had already been made in Frostbite for Dragon Age. They just chose not to use it. That's not an engine problem, that's a management problem. There is obviously a huge problem with sharing code and tools that are being made across EA.
 
Frostbite obviously played a part but mismanagement seems to be the biggest culprit and frostbite is turning into the patsy.

Kinda my impression as well. I mean isn't this Bioware's third Frostbite game at this point? Not to mention Anthem seems more Frostbite-y (i.e. you point and shoot at stuff in large-scale environments) than something like Dragon Age. And as much as I loathed that sad excuse for a role playing game, it looked nice and worked rather well for its time. As a matter of fact it certainly looked and ran better than previous DA games (on consoles at least) as well as the UE3-based Mass Effect trilogy.
 
Yup, the fact that EA formed a team dedicated just to do tech support for Frostbite, and the fact that other studios within EA are competing within themselves for that tech support time is very telling about the current state of the engine. Even FIFA (relatively simple game) needed heavy tech support.

Having a tech support team for a shared code base is about the only thing management did right. You can't just hand someone millions of lines of code and expect that they'd know how to use it and fully modify all of its subsystems. If you read industry stuff you'll typically see gamedev mention that using Unreal does not reduce headcount. It typically requires more people than an in-house engine if you're working in the AAA space. Inevitably the engine will not be able to do what you want and you have to modify it and build tooling around the new features. This is much more difficult to do when you don't have experience with the engine.

With the case of Anthem, they were only in full production for 18 months or less! They never decided what game they were going to build and constantly changed their minds about what features would be in or out. On top of that, they didn't use their internal expertise for sub-systems like inventory management or networking from other teams. How would you expect good results from any engine under those circumstances?

They never decided on the game they were going to make, so they didn't put the time in to make all of the modifications, tools they'd need. Things like long times to bake maps (I'm assuming they were referring to lighting?) are not insolvable problems. They're just problems that require investment, which they didn't do.

Edit:
I'm going to add this:
"Engine X sucks because it can't do Y."

You're supposed to identify Y in pre-production and make the modifications and build the tools needed before you hit production. If people are struggling with Y during production, that's a management issue.
 
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So why are they using Frostbite? What's the reason to stick with a one-size-fits-all in-house engine?

Sounds mostly like an executive/management decision. It sounds good on paper to have one engine fits all, and everyone sharing code. Sounds like it'll save time and money, but it doesn't, especially when your studios make dumb decisions not to re-use code, and you don't actually have the headcount to support all of your studios.

Edit: Look at Ubisoft, Activision/Blizzard, Bethesda. They have multiple engines that their studios are familiar with and they're maintained separately. Each one has been tailored over time for the type of game. EA is the only one that's tried to make an internal Unreal Engine, and it looks like it's failing spectacularly.
 
Having a tech support team for a shared code base is about the only thing management did right. You can't just hand someone millions of lines of code and expect that they'd know how to use it and fully modify all of its subsystems. If you read industry stuff you'll typically see gamedev mention that using Unreal does not reduce headcount. It typically requires more people than an in-house engine if you're working in the AAA space. Inevitably the engine will not be able to do what you want and you have to modify it and build tooling around the new features. This is much more difficult to do when you don't have experience with the engine.

Gears 4 had like 10 rendering programmers. :V (The rest of the credits are kinda interesting considering the scope of the game)

Edit: Look at Ubisoft, Activision/Blizzard, Bethesda. They have multiple engines that their studios are familiar with and they're maintained separately. Each one has been tailored over time for the type of game. EA is the only one that's tried to make an internal Unreal Engine, and it looks like it's failing spectacularly.


Indeed. Even looking back at the history of UE3, we've got a slew of horror stories for games that went beyond the third person shooting. Folks should recall Too Human or even Mass Effect 1. It should not be a surprise just how level-based Mass Effect 2 and 3 turned out, and even just look at how the Citadel/civilian areas evolved. It's not hard to piss on Bioware for their infamous UI issues throughout the Mass Effect games. :p (clearly, starting over from scratch with Frostbite wasn't ideal after half a decade of iteration).

Arkham is very much level by level with a dash of smoke & mirrors to make it seem open-world. That clearly changed over the years with a singular studio focused on expanding their branch of UE3 (things got borked for different reasons with the PC branch of Arkham Knight, but that's a different story).

Netherrealms did a metric ton of work to get their branch of the engine up to speed for a Vs. Fighter. I mean, just imagine. It's a level-by-level side-view of a limited scene and they had so many troubles with hitting 60fps, and then a bunch of other issues (still have issues with load times considering...). Japanese studios making use of UE4 for Vs. Fighters aren't really impressing either.

More recently, we might even look to how the popularity of PUBG spurred Epic to finally optimize UE4 for their own erm.... purposes. Clearly, the PUBG folks have a lot of work themselves to do to this day.

Ark - I don't think I need to voice much about this at this point, but folks have to kind of sit back and think a bit about the scope.

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Context.

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Back when Bioware was finishing up DAII, there was that huge question about what to do engine-wise since they were just trucking along with a rather archaic engine. Granted, perhaps they should have pulled a Bethesda while not pissing on the modding community, which has its own benefits for consumer mindset/expectations.

Heckin, Team Ninja switched engines (finally) for DOA6, and that's still a learning curve for their artists currently while still being a bit of a technical... oddity. The Xtreme branch of the DOA engine is a funny one, but I digress. :p

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CryEngine? Well, good luck with the technical support/documentation, and so on.

/AlRant
 
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@AlBran It's funny. You'll see people say, "Call of Duty runs on the Quake engine." No, it doesn't. By this point, there may be some config variables that have a legacy look, but the whole thing has been top to bottom re-written. There is a reason they didn't start from scratch, and choose to make incremental changes instead. On top of that, I think each studio that makes Call of Duty titles maintains their own branch of the engine, but share their work between studios (I think).

Same with Respawn ... It's Source Engine! ... Except they basically re-wrote the whole thing to make it do what they wanted. They even supposedly scrapped Titanfall 3 because their Titanfall engine no longer met the bar for what they thought a AAA story game should be like. It'll be interesting to see if their Star Wars game is frostbite.

Ultimately, it looks like Bioware had a lot of crazy ideas and didn't actually figure out if they could get it all done in the time frame they had left. Also, I'm reading online and a lot of gamedev is basically saying the Anthem story is not much different than how most projects go, which is kind of scary.
 
mmhm... So it comes down to - what choice would Bioware have had really... I was a bit surprised when they didn't just churn out an MP-only spin-off for Mass Effect earlier in the generation given how well folks received ME3 MP. A) focus on getting the gameplay systems copy/pasted into Frostbite. B) smaller scope. C) give the SP folks more time to screw their heads on straight.

Jumping straight into a full-on game clearly was frostbiting more than they could chew. :V

Oh well.

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It'd be interesting to have a peek at Rockstar's engine(s), though again, hundreds of millions of budget many people years involved... :p
 
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mmhm... So it comes down to - what choice would Bioware have had really... I was a bit surprised when they didn't just churn out an MP-only spin-off for Mass Effect earlier in the generation given how well folks received ME3 MP. A) focus on getting the gameplay systems copy/pasted into Frostbite. B) smaller scope. C) give the SP folks more time to screw their heads on straight.

Jumping straight into a full-on game clearly was frostbiting more than they could chew. :V

Oh well.

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It'd be interesting to have a peek at Rockstar's engine(s), though again, hundreds of millions of budget many people years involved... :p

Look at the timeline for Anthem. They had 7 years, but 5.5 of it was pre-production, and they didn't even spend that time adapting the engine to make the game they wanted. Dragon Age came out in 2014!

Maybe there are some internal politics with Frostbite where the Frostbite engine team doesn't want want studios branching? I don't know. Bioware had a lot of time, they just spent it all trying to decide what they were going to do before they ran out of time. Doesn't sound much diff than my workplace. Managers that want results but don't want anyone to have to plan ahead("red tape").
 
Also, to all of the people saying, "Get rid of Frostbite!" ... Enjoy another round of sub-par games as the studio struggles to adapt to a new engine whether internal or external. They obviously do not have the management in place to deal with those transitions.

There is a need to avoid that sunk cost fallacy. There may be a point where starting over is the best option. I don't know if Frostbite is it. There are immense management issues to overcome.

Some of the GDC talks about Overwatch are interesting. The tech came from the team that was building that mmo that got scrapped. They ended up with an ECS and some very interesting and clever netcode. If you think about the timeline for overwatch, it was not a game made in two years. It inherited the work of an mmo team that were shifted on to overwatch from what I understand. The investment to make even a small game (content wise) is huge when you're starting from scratch. I guarantee that if there's an Overwatch 2, or another internal fps game from Blizzard, they won't be started from scratch again, though the initial investment in time and resources was necessary. To me, it doesn't sound like Bioware made that investment, because they didn't scope their game.
 
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