Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is the only yet to be released game from Electronic Arts not to be based on Frostbite engine. While Respawn Entertainment has always worked on Source, it’ll be coming with Unreal Engine 4 support, a choice that was recently explained in an interview with Game Informer.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order stands as the only game released by Electronic Arts not get designed in the Frostbite engine. While Respawn Entertainment has always worked on Source Engine, Jedi: Fallen Order is coming with Unreal Engine 4 support, a choice that was recently explained in an interview with Game Informer.
Game Informer had the opportunity to have a quick sit-down interview with Jedi: Fallen Order‘s game director, Stig Asmussen.
“When we started this team, this was even before Star Wars, I was the only person on the team and we knew we were going to start hiring a few more people and we needed to start building from the ground up,” Asmussen said. “I did a little bit of research on Unreal, there was a couple of other options out there, and remember we aren’t EA at this point, so Frostbite wasn’t even an option.”
“I started tinkering around with it and was like ‘Wow, this is pretty powerful with what an individual developer can do with it, imagine what a whole team could do with it,‘” Asmussen added.
Vince Zampella, Respawn Entertainment’s co-founder, said that back in the days when the game’s development first started Respawn wasn’t even an internal studio at EA. Meaning, Respawn could never have had access to Frostbite engine when they began working on the game.
“Frostbite is an engine that EA uses internally,” Zampella said. “At that point, we were an external studio, so it wasn’t even available to us. Now, as part of EA, it would be available to us, but we’ll still make the choice on what’s best for the game because ultimately we are making something that has to be fun to play so it’s the tech that fits what you’re trying to do.”
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order releases on PC, PS4 and Xbox One on November 15, and perhaps it’s a good thing it is using Unreal Engine 4. Frostbite was namely made for first-person shooter games, and action-adventure title always has their fair share of issues when it comes to player handling.
