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The Frostbite Engine is fine. It was missing tools required for RPGs, so Frostbite engineers at Bioware created them.

:mca:

That said, the Unreal Engine is allegedly superior and easier/faster to create games with, but the lack of quality of Bioware's Frostbite engine games is still all on them. I will make the claim that the difference in quality would have been ubiquitous even if Bioware had used the Unreal Engine instead.

Further, there is a reason why EA shut down Bioware Montreal. The developers and management were just completely incompetent.
 

Orud

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Frostbite is an in house developed engine where EA does not want to commit the required resources to. Unlike with the Unreal, there's not enough support staff to help their all development teams. So you keep hearing about stories, the latest from Battlefield 2042, where they report delays or issues because every (most likely they mean 'most') person with Frostbite engine knowledge is redirected to a high priority project (Fifa, Madden).

I've had first hand experience with projects like that, where in house developed and enforced software is undercooked and without much support/documentation. It always results into massive issues.
 

Gradenmayer

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Inquisition was the first Frostbite game to include shit like spellcasting, sword and staff fighting, branching dialogues, etc. Of fucking course it was hard for Bioware to incorporate all that with this engine. It was never built for it.

I don't buy it. Frostbite is EA's Unreal engine.

Same thing, same purpose, same utility. It wasn't Frostibite's fault that the animations were poorly rendered in MEA to begin with, but you know what, that's it. There are no technical issues with MEA. It works fine on Frostbite.

Same with DAI, it works fine. There's nothing technically wrong with either of those games. They look fantastic. They play fantastically. They run well on moderate hardware and have all the features you'd expect from a ME or DA game. So how is Frostbite the problem?

Frostbite didn't write the terrible plot. Frostibite didn't make awkward sex scenes, or bland characters. Everything wrong with those games is non-technical.
Frostbite is not an EA'd Unreal Engine. it's a Battlefield engine made specifically for Battlefield only. Everyone else got it shoved down their throat and most of the devs hated working with it.

The pain of what Mass Effect: Andromeda could've been, and what it was, lingers for some developers. One developer, Andromeda designer Manveer Heir, pointed to Frostbite as one of the big issues during the game's development.

"Frostbite is easily the worst, shittiest, most pain in the ass engine I've ever used in my career, and I shipped Wolfenstein off the Doom 3 tech," said Heir on Twitter. "The exact same game design in Unreal vs. Frostbite will take dozens more engineers, money, and time on FB because of the way its architected and how far behind it is from Unreal (unless you are making BF). There is a reason I chose Unreal Engine 4 as my engine for my next project."

had to get to the conversation in-game, open my tools at the same time, and then as soon as I hit the line, I had to hit the pause button really, really quickly," Inquisition cinematic designer John Epler told Kotaku's Jason Schreier for his book, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. "Because otherwise it would just play through to the next line. Then I had to add animations, and then I could scrub it two or three times before it would crash and then I'd have to start the process all over again. It was absolutely the worst tools experience I've ever had."
It's hard enough to make a game," one former BioWare employee told Kotaku. "It's really hard to make a game where you have to fight your own tool set all the time."
 

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Inquisition's major flaws aren't related to the engine. Rather than blaming that, you should look at their design philosophy the team had. For example, those war table missions, where you had to wait, or the empty open world.

It was more Dragon Age x Assassin's Creed x MMO x Mobile Game Wait A certain Amount of Time for Next Task.
 

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Frostbite is not an EA'd Unreal Engine. it's a Battlefield engine made specifically for Battlefield only. Everyone else got it shoved down their throat and most of the devs hated working with it.

Frostbite didn't write the terrible plot. Frostibite didn't make awkward sex scenes, or bland characters. Everything wrong with those games is non-technical.
 

Gradenmayer

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Inquisition's major flaws aren't related to the engine. Rather than blaming that, you should look at their design philosophy the team had. For example, those war table missions, where you had to wait, or the empty open world.

It was more Dragon Age x Assassin's Creed x MMO x Mobile Game Wait A certain Amount of Time for Next Task.
Having an empty open world and spending half of the dev time trying to unfuck the engine go hand in hand.
 

Gradenmayer

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Frostbite is not an EA'd Unreal Engine. it's a Battlefield engine made specifically for Battlefield only. Everyone else got it shoved down their throat and most of the devs hated working with it.

Frostbite didn't write the terrible plot. Frostibite didn't make awkward sex scenes, or bland characters. Everything wrong with those games is non-technical.
Shit plot is not everything that is wrong with these games, dimwit. Maybe read the original post you yourself replied to, since you seem to have a very short memory span.
 

Atlantico

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Shit plot is not everything that is wrong with these games, dimwit.

No, that's the only thing wrong. I've played both all the way through. No technical issues.

Maybe read the original post you yourself replied to, since you seem to have a very short memory span.

Good grief. You quoted Manveer Heir, a talenteless diversity hire who damaged the MEA reputation more by himself, than any bad animation ever did.

I've better things to do than read his drivel. Besides, that doesn't change the fact that there were no technical issues because of Frostbite. Everything works, looks great.

Frostbite didn't write the terrible plot. Frostibite didn't make awkward sex scenes, or bland characters. Everything wrong with those games is non-technical.
 

Gradenmayer

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Shit plot is not everything that is wrong with these games, dimwit.

No, that's the only thing wrong. I've played both all the way through. No technical issues.

Maybe read the original post you yourself replied to, since you seem to have a very short memory span.

Good grief. You quoted Manveer Heir, a talenteless diversity hire who damaged the MEA reputation more by himself, than any bad animation ever did.

I've better things to do than read his drivel. Besides, that doesn't change the fact that there were no technical issues because of Frostbite. Everything works, looks great.

Frostbite didn't write the terrible plot. Frostibite didn't make awkward sex scenes, or bland characters. Everything wrong with those games is non-technical.
You think story is the only issue with inquisition?
:deathclaw:
Looks like I was trying to convince a coprophile that eating shit is bad. Go back and enjoy yourself, bud.
 

Atlantico

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Nothing. It's a perfect game for people who enjoy eating shit, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

You literally can't name a single thing that's a problem with the games connected to Frostbite.
rating_lulz.gif


Well, ok you concede the argument and you're a moron for wasting everyone's time.
 
Vatnik Wumao
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Frostbite didn't write the terrible plot. Frostibite didn't make awkward sex scenes, or bland characters. Everything wrong with those games is non-technical.
Haven't played MEA so I can't comment on it, but this certainly applies to DAI. The aforementioned, plus dumb MMO style gameplay design for a single player game.
 

Gradenmayer

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Nothing. It's a perfect game for people who enjoy eating shit, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

You literally can't name a single thing that's a problem with the games connected to Frostbite.
rating_lulz.gif


Well, ok you concede the argument and you're a moron for wasting everyone's time.
I did, yet you are somehow convinced that forcing someone to use a hammer to unscrew a bolt doesn't affect the end results.

Proofs don't work with retards of your caliber, who don't even understand what game engine is, so why bother?
 

Camel

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Bioware's problems struggling with the Frostbite are well-documented. Also EA didn't help with taking Bioware programmers who had experience with the Frostbite and sending them to work on FIFA(EA cash cow).

"It was our decision," former BioWare general manager Aaron Flynn told Kotaku Splitscreen in regard to using Frostbite for Dragon Age: Inquisition.
For Dragon Age: Inquisition, BioWare had to create a dialogue system within Frostbite and make an animation system for dogs and horses, but Frostbite could only animate bipedal creatures.
"We started with a really solid foundation of the engine but we had to build a lot around it," said BioWare producer Cameron Lee about using Frostbite on Dragon Age: Inquisition. "The concept of save games didn't exist, at least as Bioware knows them. The tactical camera, just being able to pause a game and still work within it, Frostbite didn't have that, it had no concept of that. We've had to add all of these things to it over the course of our development over the last four years. We built all of these different tools for the engine."
Frostbite doesn't really understand the idea of stats or items or saving a game, conversations, cutscenes. Like a bunch of things that we take for granted it doesn't even really conceptualize.

https://www.usgamer.net/articles/ea-frostbite-engine-history-bioware-ea-sports

Good grief. You quoted Manveer Heir, a talenteless diversity hire who damaged the MEA reputation more by himself, than any bad animation ever did.

I've better things to do than read his drivel.
Looks like his game is stuck in development hell.
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Atlantico

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Bioware's problems struggling with the Frostbite are well-documented.

Unless it affected the final product in any material way, I don't see how their struggles are relevant. Evidently they managed to get over those struggles, looking at DAI and MEA.

Both technically competent games, look good, play well, don't crash, don't bug out... criticisms of the "engine" are little more than deflections by Bioware employees who made a shitty game.

Not a technically shitty game, just a shitty game (DAI)

MEA had some animation issues, which were patched. Other than that, no issues. MEA is fine actually. Even the story is fine. It's really just DAI which blows and that only because the danger-hairs took over full stop.
 

Dycedarg

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the large, empty maps can easily be explained by not having proper tools for worldbuilding an RPG.

Bioware had never done a open world game before Inquisition. IMO, the empty maps, copy paste encounter design and terrible writing is more a consequence of trying to scale the usual Bioware standard on a much bigger game. That's only a partial explanation though, since the main quest was still complete garbage.
 

Skinwalker

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I'm still holding to a repurposed failed MMO theory. It's one thing to make a shit game, it's another to make such a particular flavor of a shit game.
 

AwesomeButton

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Plot twist: the shittiest and most broken tools used for developing Dragon Age Inquisition are really Manveer Heir and his ilk.
 

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