If 2042 used Unreal Engine

@OskooI_007 

It reminds me a bit of Argonne Forrest in BF1.

Looks stunning.

Dice is desperately hanging on to Frostbite because it’s developed in-house. Once it used to be state of the art and considered best in business, but those times have passed and they lack the ability to update their engine to current standards. And on the other hand they are probably too stubborn to admit this and move over to a modern 3rd party engine like Unreal.

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@SharpGoblin wrote:

@OskooI_007 

It reminds me a bit of Argonne Forrest in BF1.

Looks stunning.

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Mmmm I have many happy memories of Argonne Forest, really loved that map.

I'm not entirely sure why everyone keeps saying Battlefield should use the Unreal Engine. I've tinkered with it myself in game design class, and played tons of Unreal Engine games, but I just don't manage to see it. I think it would take a trained Frostbite developer just as much time to make new maps in Unreal as it would in Frostbite, if not more because they need to learn a new workflow. That was my experience moving from, for example, Godot to Unity and Unreal level creation. (I'm an amateur of course, DICE developers are not.)

Nevertheless, workflow aside, all the design principles remain the same. You still need the same amount of people on a team to create one map, people to create terrain, test the map, program any functions unique to the map, art and design teams to create assets and decorate the map, people that check the art and decor while pointing out anything that can be changed, the list goes on.

Of course I'm not trying to discredit your opinion, maybe you see something in an Unreal-powered Battlefield that I don't, but I personally also just find something about Unreal physics to be strange and off, and their temporal anti-aliasing solution is frankly just as bad as Frostbite's. It would definitely take a ton of work to get the Battlefield to feel like Battlefield if they moved on from Frostbite to any other engine, possibly a ton of work spanning multiple Battlefield titles.

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@nixRidge wrote:

I'm not entirely sure why everyone keeps saying Battlefield should use the Unreal Engine. I've tinkered with it myself in game design class, and played tons of Unreal Engine games, but I just don't manage to see it. I think it would take a trained Frostbite developer just as much time to make new maps in Unreal as it would in Frostbite, if not more because they need to learn a new workflow. That was my experience moving from, for example, Godot to Unity and Unreal level creation. (I'm an amateur of course, DICE developers are not.)

Nevertheless, workflow aside, all the design principles remain the same. You still need the same amount of people on a team to create one map, people to create terrain, test the map, program any functions unique to the map, art and design teams to create assets and decorate the map, people that check the art and decor while pointing out anything that can be changed, the list goes on.

Of course I'm not trying to discredit your opinion, maybe you see something in an Unreal-powered Battlefield that I don't, but I personally also just find something about Unreal physics to be strange and off, and their temporal anti-aliasing solution is frankly just as bad as Frostbite's. It would definitely take a ton of work to get the Battlefield to feel like Battlefield if they moved on from Frostbite to any other engine, possibly a ton of work spanning multiple Battlefield titles.

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I agree with your general premise, but I will say, it would probably give a significant influx of experienced developers to EA/DICE if it transitioned. Having a freely available SDK/IDE like Unreal allows people to use it in a game design class. I haven't looked super hard, but I'm not aware of any places teaching frostbite, just that if you get a job at EA you see it for the first time. 

@AnobixThat's a good point, there are way more Unreal devs out there than there ever will be experienced Frostbite developers. And you're right, most likely the only place you can learn how to use Frostbite is at an EA partnered studio. If only EA / DICE realised the potential of letting people go amok with Battlefield modding tools when they were still developing on Refractor engine.. 🙂
(Didn't the Desert Combat developers get hired to work on Battlefield 2?)

  The sad part is, Frostbite was one of the best engines out there but hasn't been put to good use.  Unreal has been proving them selves now and has some of the best visuals so far.  If they did a 2004/2009 modern war game with it, it would be a diamond 

This shows what level design will look like in the future, but so far they are not there yet, with what you think with 1 map a month without bugs.

UE are the pioneers, and they are only at the beginning with this technology, which is already impressive.

This technology will also be adopted by all other engines eventually, so we will simply see where this leads.

Dice and others (Bioware) have said that Frostbite is very hard to use for development, and it requires a lot of deep knowledge of the engine.

At the moment Dice have a big problem with producing content. We need at least 2 new maps each season and it would be nice if Dice would be able to adjust existing maps in a shorter time. In older titles, any meaningful adjustments to existing maps were not done, because it would take way too much time (Suez in BF1 is a good example). Adjusting lighting in BF1 was very time-consuming as well.

Dice needs to make better tools, that help them with lighting and other "tasks". We don't know if they are doing this, but the amount of content in 2042, indicates that they haven't.

Also, BFV and 2042 have shown that Dice has no idea about good game-design and quality, they should perhaps spend all their resources on improving Frostbite instead and leave the games to other, more competent people.