Is the Frostbite Engine to blame...?

[@DeathrattleHorror]

This is really interesting - I had no idea about all of the issues of Frostbite, but remember the name well from BF3. Glad to see the engine isn't forced upon some of these games though, and hopefully DS remake isn't a buggy mess.

[@ScornedScallopes]

I just saw that and I'm a little worried to be honest.

[@YavNe]

You mean DeS Remake? And wdym hopefully? It was out already. lel.

[@YavNe]

@@dvdbox360 Not DS, DeS!

[@teengohanssj2109]

Had to come here as UFC 5 is on frostbite

[@Dclin9]

I think its fine, at least its gonna look better then the dogshit we have now. I also think this makes the dev team actually have to overhaul the game and instead of copy pastaing the characters from all the way back to ufc 2 like thevye been used to. That really made it seem like they could care less. But its EA, the MMA game we all want and are waiting for probably won't be released by them in the near future sadly.

[@Tommo020788]

EA's downfall can be chalked up mostly to the fact that they stopped listening to their consumers, got greedy, and tried to shove their greed down their customer's throats... Another huge issue I always hear from every single person I've talked to about EA is that their customer service is basically non existent. Yeah they have some people who you can chat to for support, but almost every time you reach out to customer support for anything that has gone wrong, the problem isn't solved and the customer is left feeling more frustrated by customer service asking them to restart their computer for the 100th time. Lastly, and it seems like most of the big game devs are starting to behave like this now, is how they hype up a game with trailer videos and a bunch of paid influencers, for months or years before release, then they release a game full of bugs or that doesn't live up to the hype, and then they don't bother putting in the time and money to fix it, while putting all of their focus on hyping up the next game. This is what happened when china took over the smart phone games market, they pump the hype, get people to click on the game, make a few purchases, then they dump the game and focus entirely on hyping up the next garbage game.

[@TOoLoUd89292]

Bro you hit it right in the head. CFB 25 right now already had it's first patch update due to bugs you can't do this you can't do that because there are issues in the game. We should've known it was going to be the same buggy mess that persisted in Madden for years still a buggy mess.

[@disturbeddeaddman5880]

Yo, thank for this great video. Just one thing: BioWare used Unreal 3 ( a heavily modified version with custom dialogue & cutscene tools) to create the Mass Effect Trillogy an later used the Mass Effect 3 version of Unreal Engine 3 on the Legendary Edition. On Dragon Age Origins & Dragon Age 2 however they used the Eclipse Engine, an in-house engine they made as an upgrade from the Aurora Engine which was used on KOTOR, Neverwinter & The Witcher 1 (yes, CDPR licensed the engine and made heavy changes to it). In the early days of Dragon Age 3, they wanted to upgrade the Eclipse Engine but they didn't have enough time and it was going to be costly. EA approached them with the idea of using Frostbite 3 instead. BioWare at that time was looking to addopt either Unity or Unreal 4 to power the next DA. EA didn't force them to use Frostbite 3, they gave them the option. It was the leadership at BioWare that accepted the offer that kicked a decade of suffering and mishaps at the studio. The rest is history.

[@YourFrienjamin]

I'm growing a real appreciation for games with this kind of information.

[@s.w.6977]

No, the Frostbite Engine is not to blame. It was made first and foremost to support FPS games and it excels at that. It's not the engine's fault that EA forces it down the throat of all of its studios regardless of genre.

[@TOoLoUd89292]

It's not good for sports games

[@vogonp4287]

Yeah. You shouldn't use a hammer when a wrench is needed. It doesn't matter if the hammer is amazing at hitting nails.

[@rayclay3249]

"It's not the engine's fault that EA forces it down the throat of all of its studios regardless of genre." didn't the video literally stated that EA didn't force anything and the engine choice was the devs' choice? It seemed like EA incentivized the usage of the engine but it wasn't a mandate. I get hating on EA because they actually did some stupid stuffs but it's counter-intuitive and muddles the narrative to attribute every blame on EA.

[@s.w.6977]

@@rayclay3249 What do you think "heavily incentivized" looked like? Just because Respawn, their biggest shot at CoD money next to DICE, were allowed to use a different engine doesn't mean smaller developers had any real choice.

[@rayclay3249]

@@s.w.6977 "smaller developers" when talking about studios like Bioware is wild lol

[@solitaryopm]

for madden it’s terrible lmao

[@LyleWithaK]

Hey, great job on the video. I used to think that Frostbite was forced on EA studios, and I did blame that on a lot of the issues with Anthem and ME: Andromeda. Good point with the baseline changing with each change made by the studios. I hope we do see in newer games that the engine has grown to point where it can accommodate a variety of games!

[@nicholascocuzzi8943]

Any game I’ve ever had an issue with is using Frostbite. It’s a really amazing engine I just wish it could handle RPG aspects. It would be one of the best if they can make it happen.

[@rohanalias9053]

I'm a need for Speed fan and trust me every nfs game is absolutely comedy in subpar pc systems

[@mystyle_jm8997]

Does E.A. we know and love use Unreal Engine in the past before the existence of Frostbite Engine where Battlefield: Bad Company was launched?

[@andreimarius2979]

Very underatted video!

[@Nebuchadnezzar18]

Agree

[@dan_loeb]

the mass effect series did not use infinity, it used unreal engine 3 prior to Andromeda. dragon age used eclipse which is an upgraded aurora engine which was the successor to the infinity engine. also saying respawn knew and was comfortable with the source engine isn't exactly correct either. they were probably somewhat familiar with some of the basic idtech underpinnings, but the main reason was they no longer had an engine and wanted to use something that had a proven record as a base. IW engine was Activision property and the infinity ward members who left wanted to develop games, not a full custom engine from the ground up. they did still heavily modify source to the point where it's unrecognizable. the lack of unifying via a single frostbite engine is especially notable in medal of honor warfighter. there is one driving mission in the game, and it launches an entirely seperate instance of frostbite for that mission, because it's based on criterion's nfs frostbite codebase. and merging the first person shooter build frostbite with the racing build frostbite was far outside of the scope of feasible things to do.

[@Brawltendo]

The driving portion of MOHW is based on Black Box's work from NFS The Run; nothing Criterion did would've been in there yet. I can't really blame anyone but Danger Close for wanting to do that mission and not being able to settle for using or building off of Battlefield's vehicle sim (which is included by default). Frostbite was still in its infancy at that time so unifying anything, especially when BF3, NFSTR, and MOHW would've been in development simultaneously, wouldn't be easy to do. Also as you mentioned, most studios that use any kind of shared game engine will modify it to their needs. Black Box contributed a lot of useful shared things to the engine and editor, but how were they supposed to figure that another studio would want to use their vehicle sim that was specifically written for NFS's own needs, especially when Frostbite already included Battlefield's vehicle sim? The same thing likely would've happened with any other game engine given a similar situation.

[@dan_loeb]

@@Brawltendo ah, i forgot about nfs the run, that makes more sense in terms of the dev time frame. my bad. I still think EA should have been willing to liscense ue 3/4 for mohw, at least for the singleplayer. after the solid campaign in the first reboot, the sequel was absolutely disappointing. I can't for sure blame that on frostbite, but I can't imagine learning the quirks of it during development versus it's capabilities was a boon more than a burden. however if they went with ue4, we might be in a similar situation, as it was just beginning to establish market dominance and ue3 would have looked graphically dated and affected reception. edit: holy cow, i forgot mohw came out in 2012. nevermind that ue4 bit, for some reason mohw was a 2016 game in my brain. I wouldn't be suprised if even the MOHW managers/ team leads went towards frostbite and weren't pushed due to the incredible visuals in bc2 and bf3. it was incredible for the time, and far ahead of nearly all competitors. However it did seem to negatively affect development, that could be tied more to changing teams, changing leadership, market testing or other forces that pushed towards certain decisions, and not the engine itself, but everything I've heard about frostbite, especially during the tail end of the seventh console generation, mirrors what I've heard about fox engine. It's great for the type of games it was made for, but it lacks common functionality that a general purpose engine has, things like renderware, unreal, unity, are far more quickly adaptable to a wide range of games.

[@Brawltendo]

@@dan_loeb I mean MoH is an FPS game, so if anything Frostbite would’ve been perfectly suited toward the type of game they wanted to make at that time, especially since they were building straight from what DICE had already built. I just see all the complaints about Frostbite and then look at all the NFS games on the engine that have worked just fine since 2011, and wonder if there’s just a skill gap between them and everyone else lol. They’re the ones dealing with world/asset streaming at fast speeds, getting the most use out of the physics engine, using complex pathfinding, and were the first at EA to do cross platform multiplayer. Yet there’s never been a complaint from them, just acknowledging that it was a challenge but one they were glad they took on in the case of Black Box working on The Run. It’s funny that you mention Unity though because one time I was on the Unity forums trying to figure something out and randomly found a guy that had used Frostbite, complaining about Unity’s prefab workflow in comparison with Frostbite. All his complaints were completely valid, considering Unreal’s (which I use at work) workflow is similar to what he described in Frostbite, and it’s much more intuitive to use than Unity’s prefab system. As for Unreal, it’s got its own set of issues mainly concerning bloat as time goes on (at least they finally gave us the option to use a fixed timestep out of the box after nearly a decade lol). RenderWare is hardly even a game engine in the modern sense, but I guess in its simplicity it would’ve been decent to work with especially at a time when consoles used wildly different hardware from one another.

[@dan_loeb]

@@Brawltendo only included renderware because it was of the early examples of a game engine becoming so widely liscensed and used by all sorts of games and developers. I guess technically idtech and unreal 1 did see some traction, but there was a point during the ps2 era where renderware was dominating on par with what unreal has now. You've probably got a much better perspective on game engines and how development works these days, I went to college in the field when unity was absolutely dominating in the mid 2010's, but i found my passion in audio and have only really worked in the field in the mobile space, and almost entirely on baked sequences/ video cutscene audio. I haven't touched unity in close to a decade, but i've heard it's gotten pretty miserable with how much is constantly being depreciated or swapped out. a friend who works in unreal and had previously worked in unity too told me he was shocked by how endnight's sons of the forest looks and the systems in it, so there's still devs that manage to do great things with it, but unreal is here to stay.

[@Archangel96]

mass effect and dragon age was unreal

[@texmexman1]

Madden has 0 hope of actually being good until they retire this engine and hire the guys from 2k to make a good one for them

[@preuen7130]

The Frostbite engine was only developed for Battlefield, a first-person shooter. So to now blame the Frostbite engine for the fact that EA feels like it wants to use it everywhere, even where it shouldn't, would simply be wrong

[@SantanaMiller]

nervous cuz UFC 5 is gonna be on the frostbite engine

[@spidey4653]

Yeah! I hope that go well

[@Schamadu]

@@spidey4653 Nope 😅

[@Schamadu]

How You're feeling now? 😂

[@uchiha013itachi]

Just opened up Mirrors Edge Catalyst to try on my new PC. I have to say it looks like it would've come out 2022

[@positivelycurvedpikachu]

big FIFA fan here, i can say this engine ruined sports games. Even today with the new eafc24(fifa24) its a real time bug simulator. Players cant make three steps without their lengs glitching thru everything and getting entangled with everything in the stadium. I can't describe how much i hate EA

[@BlakeTheSnake98]

I feel your pain and frustration. I used to love fifa 12 and 13 back in the day. Now fifa is so trash. EA has been using the same damn engine for fifa since 2017 and it killed the games for me. I can't even touch the new games so I just go back to the Xbox 360 and play the best FIFA games instead.

[@TOoLoUd89292]

I feel your pain now it's CFB 25 being held hostage by this garbage engine.

[@TOoLoUd89292]

​@@BlakeTheSnake98NCAA on 360 played way better than this bs CFB 25 don't get me wrong I still want to have fun but with the lame logic and ghostly graphics and bugs every game they drop it's sometimes unplayable

[@positivelycurvedpikachu]

@@TOoLoUd89292 I can tell I got my opinion shifted after all this months... been playing the first frostbite fifa, this is fifa17, and the game is good... so the engine may not be the main issue with our games.

[@juanignaciopapa7557]

FIFA was a different Game with Ignite Engine. Now with Frosbite it's a disaster

[@familydiaryjason1100]

I mean the frostbite engine could also create the wonderful games like battlefield 1 and tons of other games that I forgot the names of

[@standardLit]

I really love game engine, I think they are cool and the fact that they are among most complex software the human can made made me want to try making one too, and put cool name for it :)

[@Big_Chungus935]

Wow. I didn't know source was the engine behind Titanfall. Source came a long way ahead

[@SomeNobleGamer]

when used properly u get games like bf4 with godlike grafics and it runs like water on pretty much everythin.

[@d3fq0n1]

Uhh.. one thing at 4th minute- someone said Frostbite cannot understand dialogs and cutscenes? IS this dude played battlefield ever? In Battlefield I've one of the most smooth cutscene to gameplay transitions...

[@superboss7403]

How does battlefield 5 run so well if it's on frostbite engine

[@GamerDaPeter]

Because frostbite was made for battlefield games,and battlefield games will run amazing with it

[@FS-me8mj]

But the frostbite games graphically look very good, especially nfs games like rivals and unbound.

[@jphuwae4505]

@@FS-me8mjyou serious ? Unbound looks last gen next to Forza Horizon 5. Dead Space remake looks last gen next to Callisto Protocol. Frosbite is behind

[@limwellz]

@@jphuwae4505 not really its just EA wants to rush things on art style department look at bf3,need for speed 2015 ,battlefront the graphics is beyond its time lol

[@swft_]

@@jphuwae4505 Frostbite is completely behind in terms of graphics mainly because their TAA implementation is complete trash. Also, Unreal Engine 5 with Nanite and Global Illumination already completely out-classes Frostbite since it has none of those next-gen features. These next few years will make EA games on Frostbite look like jokes compared to some indie games using UE5.

[@Turgineer]

In short, EA failed to develop the game engine the way lower studios' games needed it.

[@JahJah223]

They need to retire frostbite Madden is suffering

[@iwantgoals1566]

Glad to hear that Frostbite isn’t actually forced on any studio and I heard a rumour that the new Mass Effect will go back to the unreal engine. So here’s to hoping it can return to its glory days. Also the fact that fifa devs keep choosing this shitty Frostbite engine just shows how lazy they are.

[@Andum48]

Blake Jorgsen was very open about the companies efforts to move ALL development teams to the frostbite engine. The fact the 1 studio refused it's corporate overlords is a testament to the leadership at that studio. My guess is, respawn was a newer acquisition by EA during the frostbite push, as a result the leadership structure at respawn would not yet resemble EA's awful corporate culture. To say the the EA execs didn't force frostbite, is to say that middle managers don't try to suck up to their bosses, or to say EA is a highly functional corporation.

[@Hokunin]

Shame, that when they finally got used to Frostbite and built many new features for it, they are abandoning it.

[@UrbanBackflip]

I hate how I can get a car in NFS that could do 260+mph EASILY and even the stats will say that it does, in game the car will stop increasing speed at 245mph which is annoying as hell but then again with frostbite being as bad as it is I don't think I want to go much faster

[@IPlayKindred]

thats not how that works

[@Brawltendo]

Frostbite has nothing to do with the cars' top speeds being capped lol. It's literally a single parameter that's set to 245. Change it to anything above that, and the cars will go faster than that if they have good enough performance.

[@UrbanBackflip]

@@Brawltendo erm yes it does. And you're right about the parameters but as soon as they set it to above 245 weird things start to happen you should know that from NFS payback

[@Brawltendo]

​@@UrbanBackflip Like what? Explain how the engine has anything to do with it. I've tested this in all the other games and they handle it just fine. The actual engine limit is something like 700 MPH, which you'll never reach under normal circumstances. Assets are streamed in more than fast enough to keep up with bumping up the artificial speed limiter up a few MPH (unless you're on a really slow HDD, which in that case you're gonna have problems with a lot more than just Frostbite games).

[@positivelycurvedpikachu]

Fifa17 is a good game and it was the first using frostbite engine with the fifa franchise. It is 1000x better than next iterations... so frostbite may not be the main culprit with EA games being so bad now

[@evanpasquale7554]

I love your voice, you could be in a documentary

[@Mightypi]

I have to say, any statement about ea and its engine(s) are always going to be 2nd to ea just being a shit company for the consumer

[@jerbs5346]

What?

[@roddasilva4288]

Add ufc5 to that list now SMH

[@Brawltendo]

3:17 They had to create a dialog system???!!!?!?!?!?!? You mean the thing that also isn't in any other game engine by default? And it had no concept of RPG elements, also not available in any other engine by default? That's insane, I can't believe they'd have to actually do work and program the game mechanics they need for their genre. I thought the engine developers were supposed to do all that work for you......

[@ahmeryaa865]

r word

[@RobinsonV007]

They should just switch to Unreal Engine 5 and Meta human for the characters for some of their games like EA FC.

[@sanji663]

Nope It is management decisions that lead to most of the talent that has worked at dice leaving the company.

[@minekize]

Im gonna See nfs on source engine the same tactic what respawn entertaiment choice for youre series titanfall (with apex legends) frostbite was maked for reality narrative in fps and thats done but why this must be powered nfs series

[@Drift4Drifters]

Frostbite is fair by make all EA niches unhappy equally. NFS, Fifa, Battlefield, the upcomming Skate game, you name it. Doesn´t sims that this engine can make decent precedural measures in physics models, handling models, and so on. Everything looks artificial and scripted after some point.

[@Drift4Drifters]

At least in the NFS case, theres a bunch of assets recicled since NFS 2015 and may be difficult to start all over for something better in the gameplay core, but maybe uglier. And eyecandy sells copies at least in the first weeks.

[@Brawltendo]

@@Drift4Drifters switching engines won’t change NFS’s gameplay lol. Half the vehicle sim dates back to Black Box’s games before Frostbite, so the engine is completely irrelevant to the handling.

[@trevorshubin]

I've been saying this for years - I hope Microsoft buys them and fixes them.

[@daurdeh]

I think frostbite is made for beat cod,

[@ben_sisko2149]

In my experience, It runs terribly bad. I get stutter sí dont get with way better games

[@Fallen_Ninja]

Ugh engines are engines.

[@gamerd8709]

madden player here smh game is awful

[@aspirewot8408]

Wut you talking about ? Frostbite engine is best lmao . You can see it's full potential you could see in bfv or 2042. The graphics are awesome tho

[@aspirewot8408]

@Duncan Burden lmao I'm a battlefield player they don't need to pay me . Just check bf V ultra graphics

[@johntrelthomas841]

That’s the point. Frostbite is a FPS exclusive engine, which is why with the battlefield games look great. It was not made for RPG, and Sports games in mind. Which is why Frostbite in madden is ass.

[@aspirewot8408]

@@johntrelthomas841 oh idk about any other title I only play bf

[@prestonak]

@@aspirewot8408Frostbite was originally made for Battlefield by DICE which is why the Battlefield games looks so good. Battlefield games before 2042 were developed by DICE devs who might’ve originally worked on Frostbite.

[@WORLDWIDESOCAL9]

madden and CFB 25 is trash cause frostbite

[@captainAlex258]

they should of created frostbite 2 to compete with unreal engine 5

[@OodldoodlNoodlesocks]

Current games use Frostbite 3.

[@guilherme5094]

Did you guys still buy EA games? You see, that's your problem.

[@zanderstein1739]

>Frostbite worked great with bf4 What? Bf4 beta and release were awful. It took like year and a half for dice la (ex danger close) to fix this piece of shit to at least playable state

[@Redxyellow1]

Frostbite is 100% dogshit

[@Interestingworld4567]

Not look at how good bf3, bf4, bf1 look even bf hardline uses frosbite and they look really good in quality detail.

[@ghostdzn9907]

​@@Interestingworld4567​@Interestingworld4567 it's outdated and from a by gone era the games that you mentioned are great but it's time for EA to make another engine for Fps,action,sport games

[@CC-bm3wb]

For sports games, yes

[@helpme9488]

In the old days of EA it was much simpler. Dice uses the Frostbite Engine for Battlefield games, then Crytek engine for Crysis games from Cryteck.