When it comes to dealing with Frostbite, Aaron Flynn, the former general manager of BioWare, has plenty of experience. He was the head of the studio when they shipped Dragon Age: Inquisition and was the face of Anthem at E3 when it was announced, only to leave the studio before Anthem shipped. Anthem and Dragon Age: Inquisition had particular problems developing with Frostbite, and in a new interview, Flynn tacitly highlighted those issues once more.
“We couldn’t seem to find our footing with the tools in this case,” Flynn said in a keynote talk at Reboot Develop Red, a Canadian conference which Games Industry transcribed.
The keynote touched on a lot of the difficulties that BioWare and Flynn personally had with Frostbite, which Flynn would have a particular understanding of being a former tools programmer on Neverwinter Nights.
“My experience with [Frostbite] was very much like this: you could do amazing things, go very fast in some elements, but very delicate and very hard to manage,” Flynn said, likening the engine to a Formula One car that required a large, specialist crew to properly manage.
“It was getting harder and harder to make the content that people wanted … It was harder and harder to move that content through these pipelines and do things. And even though we had more people — we had more teams, more folks — we were slowing down the rate at which we could build and craft these experiences.”
Coming from a tools background, Flynn said “the frustrating part” was why the studio struggled with the tools so much. In our lengthy report into Anthem‘s development, multiple sources within BioWare cited problems doing basic iterations with Frostbite. “I would say the biggest problem I had with Frostbite was how many steps you needed to do something basic. With another engine I could do something myself, maybe with a designer. Here it’s a complicated thing,” one person who worked on Anthem said.
“It’s really hard to make a game where you have to fight your own tool set all the time,” a BioWare developer told Kotaku at the time.
You can read the full story about Flynn’s keynote over at Games Industry.
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/04/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/exdc3ykoz5srvo7t4wuo.jpg” title=”How BioWare’s Anthem Went Wrong” excerpt=”It wasn’t even supposed to be called Anthem. Just days before the annual E3 convention in June of 2017, when the storied studio BioWare would reveal its newest game, the plan had been to go with a different title: Beyond. They’d even printed out Beyond T-shirts for the staff.”]
Comments
3 responses to “Former BioWare GM Says Frostbite Was ‘Very Delicate And Very Hard To Manage’”
I wonder if EA is content to just beat the servant they’ve forced to use shitty tools, or if they’ll actually divert some of their attention to the tool-maker whose tools have fucked over three major titles.
It looks like the smart thing to do is to commit resources to improving Frostbite’s usability, or training the relevant staff. If a game isn’t made properly its potential is lost and this hurts EA.
In other news, water is wet and the sun is still hot as hell. Personal tip for Bioware from an Ex-SWTOR player – Next time, don’t take a prototype version of Frostbite and try your hand at making a MMO (SWTOR) for the first time in your company’s history with it while forgetting to implement so many other standard MMO features.