Ex-BioWare boss Aaryn Flynn has clarified that EA didn’t pressure the developer to make use of the Frostbite engine which prompted lots of Mass Effect: Andromeda’s improvement points.
During an interview with Kotaku (through wccftech) at this 12 months’s GCD, for Kotaku’s Splitscreen podcast, Flynn revealed it was not EA’s resolution to make use of the Frostbite engine for Mass Effect: Andromeda.
“It was our decision. We had been wrapping up Mass Effect 3 and we just shipped Dragon Age II and we knew that our Eclipse engine, that we shipped DAII on, wasn’t going to cut it for the future iterations of Dragon Age,” Flynn clarified. “It couldn’t do open world, the renderer wasn’t sturdy sufficient, these have been the 2 huge ones. We thought of multiplayer as effectively, as Eclipse was single-player solely.
“We talked internally about three choices. We might have burned down Eclipse and began one thing new internally, we might have gone with Unreal Engine, or we might have picked Frostbite which had proven some actually promising outcomes on the rendering facet of issues and it was multiplayer enabled.”
BioWare finally selected to make use of Frostbite. However, the Frostbite engine prompted many points for BioWare throughout improvement of Mass Effect: Andromeda. The engine had primarily been used for first-person shooters, so didn’t have the fundamental skills BioWare required to create an open-world RPG, akin to stock monitoring and social gathering methods. Developers needed to code these mechanics themselves, however the engine nonetheless struggled a BioWare-tier RPG.
Despite the problems, Flynn maintains Frostbite was the best selection.
“Being part of a community – everybody at EA is on it now – that is powerful, it’s a good place to be,” Flynn defined. “It’s a credit to the Frostbite team how they keep so many diverse titles on one engine, everything from FIFA to Anthem, it’s amazing to me.”
Source
