Uncharted style Star Wars game by EA was canned cause of Frostbite limitations?

[Playstation Tablet 1,771]

"It was missing a lot of tools, a lot of stuff that was in Uncharted 1 ... It was going to be a year, or a year and a half’s work just to get the engine to do things that are assumed and taken for granted."

 

"So I think Visceral was sort of beset with a lot of challenges. Even so, we were making a game; people have said it was an Uncharted Star Wars. That's sort of reductive, but it's useful because people can kind of visualize something in their head. But what that meant is we obviously had to take the Frostbite Engine, because there was the internal initiative to make sure that everybody was on the same technology, but it was an engine that was made to do first-person shooters not third-person traversal cinematic games. So building all of that third-person platforming and climbing and cover taking and all that stuff into an engine that wasn't made to do that. We did a lot of foundational work that I think the teams are still benefiting from because it's a shared engine, but it's tough when you spend a lot of time doing foundational stuff but then don't get to go ta-da! [laughs] You know, here's the game.

I wish people could have seen more of it because it was a lot farther along than people ever got a glimpse of. And it was good, you know? But it just didn't make sense in EA's business plan, ultimately. Things changed over the course of that time I was there. So you know, what can you do.

[Playstation Tablet 1,771]

"Frostbite is wonderful for rendering and lots of things," said a person who worked on the game. "But one of the key things that makes it really difficult to use is anything related to animation. Because out of the box, it doesn't have an animation system." (Frostbite was later attached to an animation system called ANT, that source said, but it was full of "duct-taped issues.")

"Whenever you're trying to do something that fits the engine — vehicles, for example — Frostbite handles that extremely well," the developer said. "But when you're building something that the engine is not made for, this is where it becomes difficult." Designing the large maps of Andromeda's planets became a struggle on Frostbite, where the maximum size of a map was initially 100 by 100 kilometers. The Andromeda team needed their maps to be way bigger than that. Other struggles included the streaming system, the save system, and various action-RPG mechanics that Andromeda needed in order to work.

"It's been painful," said a developer. "The pain started with Dragon Age: Inquisition and continued on with Andromeda as well."

[Remij 4,824]

I'm less and less impressed with Frostbite these days.  Sure Anthem LOOKS great, but it's a disjointed mess and not a seamless open world game at all.

 

Other engines are far ahead these days.  And now EA/DICE have lost a lot of their best engine developers... including Repi.. so it's not looking too great for them.

[Playstation Tablet 1,771]

Devs where shitting out Uncharted style games on UE3 in the PS360 era as well. Uncharted 1 ain't a high technical bar for 2019.

[madmaltese★ 2,701]

Plenty of devs have noted their issues with the Frostbite engine for anything outside of FPS however that is probably not the reason for the game getting canned. EA just didn't want a SP focused game anymore, everything they are doing is them trying to have their own Service game hit. 

[Twinblade★ 4,061]

I don't think the engine tech is just to blame, its more that EA probably didn't want to invest money in adding all these features that would be required by an Uncharted-style game. Look at Horizon, there was no way that game would work if they just built it off the killzone engine as is, but obviously Sony had enough faith in the studio and tech to be willing to give them the resources needed to make it fully compatible for open world games.

 

I do think Frostbite is slowly becoming less impressive as time goes on, the latest versions of the engine have been very iterative and they haven't really made many significant improvements to it since BF4.

Edited February 21, 2019 by Twinblade

[Voidler 1,679]

44 minutes ago, Twinblade said:

I don't think the engine tech is just to blame, its more that EA probably didn't want to invest money in adding all these features that would be required by an Uncharted-style game. Look at Horizon, there was no way that game would work if they just built it off the killzone engine as is, but obviously Sony had enough faith in the studio and tech to be willing to give them the resources needed to make it fully compatible for open world games.

 

I do think Frostbite is slowly becoming less impressive as time goes on, the latest versions of the engine have been very iterative and they haven't really made many significant improvements to it since BF4.

Lmao how’d I know you’d be in here defending this crap