BioWare Technical Director on Using Frostbite for Dragon Age

BioWare technical director Jacques Lebrun has penned a guest blog post on the official website for the Frostbite engine detailing the reasoning behind the decision to use it for Dragon Age: Inquisition, and the challenges the company encountered working with it. Here’s a couple of choice quotes:

We started with an independent evaluation of engine technologies. We looked at an upgrade to our own Eclipse engine, at third-party game engines, and at game engines developed within EA, including DICE’s Frostbite. After a three-month evaluation, we chose Frostbite as our preferred technology for BioWare’s next generation of titles. There was no corporate mandate; this was decided unanimously within our studio. The timing was perfect because the Frostbite team was already making plans to break out into an independent engine team.

Many other teams in EA were coming to the same conclusions. We were suddenly part of a growing community of developers able to share ideas, share code, and collaborate on common interests. This will open up all kinds of opportunities for BioWare since we’ve traditionally developed our games in a vacuum. (Until now, every BioWare title has made their own technology assessments, which has prevented us from collaborating on improvements.)

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BioWare games are known for developing its characters and story through cinematics and interactive dialogue. We’ve spent years developing a powerful suite of tools for writing and scripting conversations into a cinematic experience that interacts with a complex plot structure, while feeding into the pipeline for voice-over recording and localization. Many of these tools wouldn’t integrate with the Frostbite tool chain, so we rewrote them for the new framework. It was a massive undertaking we wanted to do only once for all of our future games. Accordingly, we collaborated with the Frostbite animation team to develop engine improvements that would support rapid creation of cinematic content. We also worked with the teams for the next Mass Effect game and the unannounced IP to incorporate the cinematic authoring tools into the workflows for conversation scripting and localization.

Another major undertaking was creating a next-generation RPG combat system. We created new workflows in the Frostbite toolset for visualizing animations with visual effects, sound effects, and gameplay scripts. This visual workflow has allowed our designers to create hundreds of unique spells and abilities along with a wide variety of interesting and challenging enemies. The dragons that you’ll encounter emphasize the complexity that we can now get from our combat systems. These apex predators showcase targetable limbs and a component system that lets designers reconfigure each dragon to take on a unique set of behaviors.