From Battlefield to Mass Effect: How One Engine is Shaping the Future of EA Games
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That quality is one of the biggest impacts EA's decision will have on gamers. Instead of developers continuously building all of their own features for each project, they have access to what many believe is one of the best toolsets in the game industry. What proprietary work they do now feeds back into the engine's toolset and can be used for all future projects, giving developers time to focus on innovation instead of busywork.
"Let's try to do things once really well, and then let developers iterate to make things better, as opposed to reinventing things over time," said BioWare Edmonton's General Manager Aaryn Flynn. "More and more as we look at it, Dragon Age: Inquisition has a lot of stuff that's getting built and done satisfactorily, letting innovation happen -- we couldn't have done that before because we didn't have the time."
Before BioWare began work on Inquisition, the engine could only animate bipedal creatures. However, thanks to the team's efforts to bring horses into its game, we could possibly see ponies (or more dogs) as an add-on pack for Battlefield 4. BioWare also brought a new version of its trademark dialogue system to Frostbite, and now everyone has access to it.
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The freshman round of games these teams are developing have taken longer to develop because the studios are learning the ins and outs of the software, and are essentially molding what was a first-person shooter engine into something that works for their own genres of games. For example, Flynn said BioWare typically has 28-month build times, but Inquisition is taking longer because his team had to create tools for handling back-end systems common to role-playing games (skill proficiencies, attack stats, etc.) that the engine didn't already have.
"We've got a longer development cycle for Dragon Age, but that comes from two things: One is the investment in Frostbite to make it an RPG engine, and that's a big one for the team. They're helping eat that rock for Mass Effect," said Flynn.
The inherent beauty of this, though, is that the next studio that makes an RPG won't have to do that back-end work; it can simply build on the back of BioWare's work. These longer dev cycles won't last forever.
