Former vice president of BioWare, Aaryn Flynn, told why the company began using the Frostbite game engine instead of the Eclipse engine of its own design.
Some fans believe that BioWare switched to Frostbite on the orders of Electronic Arts so that the owner company could save money on developing new games.
Flynn denied these speculations. According to Aarin, BioWare itself chose the DICE studio engine because Eclipse did not support multiplayer and coped worse with rendering open spaces.
“We discussed three options: quit Eclipse and start developing the engine from scratch, use Unreal Engine or try Frostbite.
Frostbite had promising rendering capabilities and supported multiplayer, so we leaned in its favor.
I made this decision after an in-depth study of the technical aspects sometime at the end of 2011,” Flynn said.
He also said that EA did not force BioWare to implement microtransactions in games. “In any case, with me,” Aarin clarified.
Aarin Flynn left BioWare in 2017. His post was taken over by his former colleague Casey Hudson, who returned to the studio to work on a new project — the multiplayer action Anthem.
BioWare has developed two games on Frostbite — Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda.
Frostbite is the engine of the EA studio DICE. He is well known for the Battlefield shooter series and other projects.
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- Source: Critical Hit