Just Some Feedback/Venting on MEA
First I would like to emphasize that I am a huge fan of the DA & ME games, I have them all including DLCs :-) I'm just playing though the original trilogy again and was ruminating on the last additi...
Forum Discussion
@ThandalNLyman It makes sense that they want to keep using their own engine, but I wonder if it's worth it. From what I read in those tweets, it takes a lot more engineers to get certain features working in Frostbite compared to Unreal, so I can imagine it would be a lot cheaper for EA to just pay Epic Games the licensing fees. Development time would be shorter and the games would be better. They spent five years on MEA (which is as long as the development of ME2 and ME3 combined) and they ended up with an incomplete game, lukewarm reviews, and not enough sales to justify DLC development.
That said, Dragon Age Inquisition was also developed in Frostbite, and it was better all around and developed in significantly less time, so maybe this is a case of a bad craftsman blaming his tools.
@Fred_vdp wrote:That said, Dragon Age Inquisition was also developed in Frostbite, and it was better all around and developed in significantly less time, so maybe this is a case of a bad craftsman blaming his tools.
Oh, I think that's a big part of it. And I'm sure that having to develop on Frostbite caused difficulties for a team not familiar with it. But as you pointed out, DA:I is proof most of them could be overcome.
While none of us have the full picture, the partial one we do have paints a pretty miserable scene of ME:A's development process. The, (by all accounts enormous) waste of time trying to auto-generate worlds that no one actually playing the game wants or cares about, the treating the story itself as an after-thought, the 2D character development because "not enough time"... The list of mostly unforced errors by BioWare Montréal is pretty long. And the majority of them had little or nothing to do with the game engine per se. (Although the infamous, and hilarious, facial animations may have. :eahigh_file: )
