We’ve been discussing BioWare’s troubles for a while now, and they’ve even had a meeting last Wednesday to discuss them internally.
We’ve been discussing BioWare‘s troubles for a while now, and they’ve even had a meeting last Wednesday to discuss them internally.
Among those troubles, they’ve had a bad relationship with DICE’s Frostbite engine, which they’ve been using since Dragon Age Inquisition (with very little satisfaction, to be honest).
The main issue with the engine is that it has not been built with role-playing games in mind, so they have to build a lot of new features they’re going to be making use of in their titles.
Anyway, reportedly, this is not leading to a change on projects which are already in the making, such as Dragon Age 4.
Specifically, according to Kotaku’s Jason Schreier, BioWare has no intention to switch to the Unreal Engine for Dragon Age 4 as it’d take too much time and would be more difficult that keep working on Frostbite for it.
“I believe the response to that question was that it’d take much longer to start from scratch on Unreal for DA4 than it would to stick with what they’ve got,” he said on Twitter.
I believe the response to that question was that it’d take much longer to start from scratch on Unreal for DA4 than it would to stick with what they’ve got
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) April 12, 2019
Electronic Arts as a whole seems to be starting to understand that the Frostbite engine is not capable of running certain types of games.
For example, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is being built on Unreal Engine 4, which is because Respawn has always been working on that technology even before being acquired by EA.
In case it gets a great reception, both from critics/fans and internally, that game could lead to a huge change for Electronic Arts-published games in the future, at least for several genres where Frostbite could be not the best choice.
