Epic Games and Square-Enix are getting quite a bit of attention thanks to their next-generation engines; Unreal Engine 4 and Luminous engine respectively. Crytek says their CryEngine 3 already surpasses next generation. Not wanting to feel left out, it seems EA and DICE want everybody to know that their Frostbite 2 Engine was also made for next gen.
“Yeah, I’ll be honest with you — Frostbite 2 was built for the next generation,” Patrick Soderlund, EA games label boss said about Frostbite 2’s meaty system requirements. “ That’s how we started it. We had that in mind and we said, ‘We’re going to have to build something that can scale.’”
Frostbite 2, as you know, powers DICE’s rather successful Battlefield 3 – but don’t expect that to be the pinnacle of the company’s output.
“It doesn’t mean that what you see in Battlefield 3 is the end state. That’s the beginning; that’s where we start and then we go forward,” he told Gamasutra in an interview . “But we have a tech base that makes me feel really confident in how we’re positioned for what’s going to come in the future.”
The scalability is one of the reasons that Danger Close, developers of Medal of Honor: Warfighter switched to using Frostbite 2. They were previously using Epic’s Unreal Engine 3.
“It was basically a desire from that team, when they saw the results of Battlefield, and they saw the results of what that engine could do at the time. I’m not saying [Epic has] a bad engine — I’m just saying comparing the two at the time it was like, ‘Okay, we can do more of what we want with the Battlefield/Frostbite engine.’”
Of course, it’s not actually the first time that DICE has proclaimed their engine to be capable of next-generation visuals. Even before the release of Battlefield 3 last year, DICE’s robbie Bach touted the engine as the stuff of next gen.
"I don’t know what the big corporations are thinking but definitely we are desperate to move on into the next generation,” he said “I think Battlefield 3 will look like a next-generation game and all the technology we’re building, the whole Frostbite 2 system – the animations, audio, everything – is trying to aim for a couple of years in the future, rather than looking at what we have today.
"We are already there. If [Microsoft or Sony] were to release a new console tomorrow, the engine would scale onto that platform, because we have been looking at not only the PC technology today but also speculating what will happen tomorrow when it comes to these things. So everything from our streaming technologies [to] rendering technologies is scalable onto future platforms."
Having played Battlefield 3 on an eyeball melting, high end PC, I think he could be right.
Last Updated: June 19, 2012
