A long video on the subject from one of its project leads (Mark Darrah): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y65eoBVF0Y&t=10s

The frostbite engine seem to be the tip of the iceberg.

Core issue was lack of clear leadership from what I read on Wikipedia.

Iirc it was a stupid C-suite decision to use Frostbyte across EA studios. It never made much technical sense and DICE lacked the bandwidth and capital to support so many teams and usecases.

Yes after the success of frostbite around Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 or so, EA decided it should be used in everything. Not unlike the mistake Capcom is making with REngine right now, if the performance woes of Monster Hunter Wilds and Dragons Dogma 2 are anything to go by.

Pretty sure there was even a Need for Speed game on Frostbite which was... huh.

> Pretty sure there was even a Need for Speed game on Frostbite

7 if wikipedia is to be trusted

I worked on three of them! While there are some serious issues with Frostbite and everyone loves blaming it for everything, its role in sabotaging huge projects is definitely overblown.

There are some issues with workflow and it is true that the UI definitely was, as many at EA said, "by programmers for programmers". But it's a very capable engine in the right hands.

That said, I'd pick Unreal any day for a AAA project and Unity or Unreal for smaller projects.

cool, i think Frostbite is really pretty honestly. performs well in BF but ive not played other games that use it knowingly.

Why would you pick unreal? It seems a lot of games made in it suffer performance issues. In my mind its a really unwieldy engine. (ofc, because its so feature packed, and perhaps because i am no professional engine dev :-))

For a professional project with at least 30+ developers the complexity of using Unreal is necessary and on par with any competent engine. In fact, I feel it is often much easier to do things well in Unreal.

I like Unreal because it's really quite intuitive and ergonomic for larger productions, fairly well documented, and has some of the coolest tech in the industry. Their rendering pipelines are beautiful and a joy to work with and I could rant all day about my love for Nanite and Lumen. It is light years ahead of Unity and much easier to understand and modify than Frostbite.

I will say that Unity has better support out of the box for custom shaders and compute than Unreal (and Frostbite).

Now, you mentioned performance. Funny thing: performance has been my primary professional concern for the last six years of my career. Unreal itself performs very well if you use it correctly and has really good documentation for best practices as well as amazing tools for measuring performance and indicating what is wrong. The tools in Frostbite were very lackluster. Unity has some fairly good stuff. Unreal feels so far ahead.

I believe the reason there are more visible Unreal games with performance issues is because there are a lot more noteworthy ambitious productions in Unreal. That means games which push what they can deliver, and often don't quite get there. And for smaller productions it's likely just a matter of less experienced teams not following the best practices or cranking settings up to 11 without proper performance budgeting.

It’s just a rerun. Bioware had an entire prototype of a game called “Agent”, a james bond style bioware RPG built on EA technology from sports games … until it became clear the technology to render madden NfL lacked something like “non flat surfaces” you’d need to build a world :/

The core issue is wanting to jump on the Fortnite hype train. Every exec wanted their own money printing machine. It's not unique to this studio: abandoning the core IP to pursue an Overwatch clone.

>Internally, the project was codenamed "Dylan" by BioWare, in reference to Bob Dylan in hopes that it would be a name that would be spoken about years later.

lol wut. Is this like an SEO thing?

No, this is more like a The Secret thing.

Well, a finger curled on the monkey paw, that's for sure.

>Just weeks prior to E3, EA notified BioWare that their desired name for the game, Beyond, would be too difficult to trademark.

They dumped the coolest name ever because of the legal department. Sad!

Frostbite was also a bugaboo for Mass Effect 3, contributing heavily to its shortcomings (although it was a great game nonetheless)