The publisher also promises a “renewed focus on partnership with our teams and creators.” “Over the years, we’ve been working hand-in-hand with game teams across EA to understand their development and technology needs better prioritizing changes that create more flexibility for innovation and a positive user experience for developers.”

While Frostbite wants to “unite and amplify” the expertise of teams who use Frostbite, it also notes that developers are free to develop on their engine of choice, as seen in Unreal Engine’s use for the Star Wars Jedi series and the next Mass Effect.

Regardless, as the publisher notes, “It’s up to us to make Frostbite the best choice for our games.”

As for the logo, it began in a fractured state to emphasize the sheer destruction that it offered with Battlefield, the first title to utilize the engine. It’s now about “the collaborative relationships transforming Frostbite from within.”

“Constructed from consecutive, overlapping layers, our new handprint embodies how our teams build upon each other’s strengths, reaching beyond what is possible when they work alone. Each layer, like each piece of Frostbite technology, is both an innovation and a foundation, enabling the layer above it and building toward a cohesive whole.”

Opting for smoother edges and “more fluid shapes” represents the company’s commitment to addressing the engine’s “rougher edges.” It’s interesting to see games like Dead Space through the logo, with the various layers of the handprint being more visible.

The only other Electronic Arts title developed on Frostbite is Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, which receives new details in Summer 2024. Stay tuned in the meantime for updates.

BioWare’s precipitous fall from grace in the last few years has also been accompanied by their forced adoption of DICE’s Frostbite engine, which almost every internally developed EA game now uses. Frostbite is a great engine, that can put out some gorgeous games, and has created some of the best looking shooters on the market. Unfortunately, it’s also completely unsuited to RPGs, which has led to BioWare struggling to get it to do what they want—and ignoring other critical things in their development process (such as quality assurance) along the way.

This is no longer just speculation. No less than former BioWare General Manager Aaron Flynn has admitted as much in a candid interview with GamesIndustry, where he has pointed out that though the Frostbite Engine has a lot of strengths, trying to use it for RPG development is like attempting to push a square peg into a round hole.

“… we switched to an engine called Frostbite. And Frostbite is an EA internal engine; very powerful, fast, beautiful, purpose built to do some really cool stuff. But it’s also extremely delicate and needs a huge crew,” he said.

“Incredible, impressive feats of technology, really at the bleeding edge of what’s possible,” Flynn said. “But they require a huge crew of folks to maintain them and get that optimum performance out of them. And that really is the metaphor for at least the earliest days of Frostbite.

“It was getting harder and harder to make the content that people wanted,” Flynn said of his experience with Frostbite. “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.”

There have been reports that Respawn’s ongoing success (first with Apex Legends and then with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order) may have convinced EA to stop forcing all developers to use Frostbite, which… is a good, if long in the coming, realization. All I can hope is that freed of the shackles of Frostbite, BioWare can start putting out the sort of generation defining experiences that they were once synonymous with.

It’s become a bit of a running theme with EA’s projects. Their mandate to switch to the Frostbite engine company-wide seems to have caused more trouble than it’s worth- and the latest causality of it all? Anthem, BioWare’s looter shooter that launched to dismal critical reception.

What happened that caused Anthem to turn out the way it did? The answer is nuanced, and multi-faceted. In an excellent investigative piece, Jason Schreier of Kotaku explores the various reasons that led to Anthem being what it became. But one thing that stands out in particular is the Frostbite engine, and how it, yet again, created a glut of problems for BioWare and its developers to have to navigate.

Anthem was originally envisaged as having a lot more mechanics and systems in place—but it turned out that the Frostbite engine flat out couldn’t support them, and the vision had to be cut back down, according to this report.

“Part of the trouble was you could do enough in the engine to hack it to show what was possible, but then to get the investment behind it to get it actually done took a lot longer, and in some cases you’d run into a brick wall,” said a BioWare developer, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Then you’d realize, ‘We can do this only if we reinvent the wheel, which is going to take too long.’ It was sometimes difficult to know when to cut and run.”

The issue was that even simple things like bug fixes were taking way too long—which in turn led to a psychological reluctance to try anything too ambitious, because even simple things were hard to achieve with Frostbite being the way it was.

“If it takes you a week to make a little bug fix, it discourages people from fixing bugs,” said one person who worked on Anthem. “If you can hack around it, you hack around it, as opposed to fixing it properly.” Said a second: “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.”

Adding insult to injury was the fact that many of BioWare’s best developers weren’t working on Anthem. In a show of great absurdity, it seems EA had pulled them to assist FIFA, which during this time was also transitioning to the Frostbite engine.

“A lot of the really talented engineers were actually working on FIFA when they should’ve been working on Anthem,” a person who worked on Anthem is quoted as saying.

“It’s hard enough to make a game,” said a fourth BioWare developer. “It’s really hard to make a game where you have to fight your own tool set all the time.”

BioWare responded to Schreier’s report; however, their response seems to answer allegations of crunch, and the like, and doesn’t really address the Frostbite point at all. Assuming there is any grain of truth to it, then EA has to see that the Frostbite adoption policy is causing more harm than it is good, and that it may now be time to allow studios to pick whatever engines are best suited to the kinds of games they want to make.

EA’s support for the Nintendo Switch has been extremely lacking thus far. We’ve received two half hearted FIFA games from the publisher on the console, as well as the indie hit Fe. While a lot of criticism can be (rightly) leveled at the publisher for how it has handled a platform that is currently the fastest selling one of the generation, there are also actual technical reasons that have prevented EA from bringing more of their games over to the Switch.

Specifically—the Frostbite Engine. The Frostbite Engine is the engine that powers most of EA’s internally developed games, and thus far, it has not supported Switch, which rules out Switch versions of most EA games off the bat (even FIFA has to be built on a custom engine for Switch). However, going forward, that may be changing.

YouTuber Doctre81 has discovered an interesting snippet on EA’s LinkedIn page (you can see a screenshot of the relevant portion below)—specifically noting that software engineers at the company have been involved in engineering their software development pipelines for the Xbox One, PS4, and PC for the Nintendo Switch. Games that use said pipelines include, apparently, Anthem and Battlefield 5, both of which are Frostbite games, which leads to a pretty obvious conclusion.

If this is true, then there are several takeaways—more of EA’s games, especially their sports games, can now come to the Switch going forward. And, it seems like EA may finally be beginning to take the Switch more seriously. Perhaps two years of record breaking sales was all that was needed to change their mind in the end.

Electronic Arts’ FIFA 18 will be coming to the Xbox One, PS4, Xbox 360, PS3 and PC later this month but this year marks the debut of the FIFA franchise on the Nintendo Switch. Speaking to GameSpot, FIFA supervising producer Andrei Lazarescu thinks that it’s the “best portable FIFA we’ve ever done.”

However, perhaps more interestingly, Lazarescu believes that FIFA 18 won’t be a one-off title for the Switch. “I think we are going to see more FIFA on Switch in the future,” he said.

Lazarescu also addressed some concerns about modes like The Journey not being present in the Switch version. Long story short, it’s because of Frostbite. The mode simply can’t exist without EA’s proprietary technology. “The Journey is a mode powered by Frostbite [the engine that current-gen versions of the game run on], it only exists because of Frostbite – they are not separate. You can’t just [put it on Switch] without taking the whole Frostbite engine. So because this doesn’t have Frostbite, it doesn’t have The Journey.”

That being said, Lazarescu doesn’t discount future iterations containing The Journey. “If we moved the [Switch] game over to Frostbite, then yes it could happen. But I don’t know if that’s going to happen. Frostbite is a very different beast.”

FIFA 18 is out on September 29th and will feature the usual improvements to the game, the return of Alex Hunter in The Journey mode and Ultimate Team mode. If the success of FIFA 17 is anything to go by, you can expect FIFA 18 to dominate charts, especially in the UK, for the year to come.

Bioware wants the upcoming Mass Effect Andromeda to look incredible- and it is something that they hope to have achieved in large part thanks to them leveraging the power of the Frostbite engine. In a piece posted on Game Informer, Bioware revealed that their graphics targets for the upcoming space RPG were the CGI trailers for the original three games.

Of course, the trailers being the targets doesn’t mean that the targets will be met- but it shows us what the developer is aspiring for, and aspiring for a higher level will lead them to land at a higher level even if they fail than if they were simply contenting themselves with settling for a lower level to begin with (that’s good life advice in general, folks). My only hope now is that they do meet the targets they have set for the game, and deliver a graphical stunner next year.

Mass Effect Andromeda is due out on PS4, Xbox One, and PC in Spring 2017.

EA have adopted a truly remarkable multiplatform strategy, where they are there to support just about any and every platform with long term prospects. At this point, you can get EA games on Xbox, PlayStation, PC, smartphones, tablets, and VR- a truly wide range of devices.

In an interview with The Verge, EA CEO Andrew Wilson spoke about the company’s multiplatform strategy, noting that preparing for a future where games will span across multiple devices, and the role that Frostbite Engine is playing in preparing the company for that eventuality.

“What we’re trying to do is prepare the company for a world where truly there are more devices capable of playing games, and players are refreshing them more often and likely refreshing them asynchronously,” he said. “You might refresh your mobile device at a different time than I do. You might buy the 8K, I might stick with a 4K. You might go down the Oculus VR route, I might go down the PSVR route. What I’ve got to do as a creator is try and keep you together with your friends inside experiences that you love, and the only way we can do that is at a core engine level.

“We talk a lot about our single engine in Frostbite. It will scale up graphics on a bigger device and scale them down on a smaller device, so that we can build once and publish to many devices. It’s a world where we’re no longer having to make a decision like, “Do we build for the Xbox or the PlayStation or both?” There’s literally 30 or 40 or 50 different devices, and we have to be able to build for all devices that are meaningful for players.

“We’ve been investing heavily on that front for the last four or five years. And we think now, by virtue of that transition, we get more games on the PS4 and Xbox One than any other publisher. You see us now starting to really grow our mobile install base. You see us get to the PSVR and Google VR in the same time frame. That’s the only path forward for us. In a world in which we have to build incrementally for every device, forget the cost implications of that, we literally just couldn’t do it from a person power point of view.”

He then discussed the future of games, where you can pick up and play the same game regardless of where you are, or what device you have. “As you think about us putting the entire experience into the cloud, what then happens is the nature of the experience isn’t governed by the platform that you choose to play on. The nature of the experience is governed purely by the screen size that you have access to, and the connected controller, and the amount of time you have to play,” he said.

“When you’re playing on a PlayStation 5 or 6 or whatever is available at that point, it’s going to look one way on your big-screen TV. When you’re looking at it through a mobile device, it’s going to look a different way. When you’re playing it on your internet-enabled fridge screen while you’re getting the eggs out in the morning, because you’re just doing a few quick trades for Madden Ultimate team, it’s going to take a different format.

“The most important thing is that none of that time is wasted. It’s not throwaway time. Everything accumulates to the value of who you are in that virtual world. That’s really our vision: to get to a point where we [don’t] discern for you where you should play or how you should play, only that every minute of play that you invest in the experiences that we create adds value to who you are in that virtual world. You’re not throwing things away from one device to another or one experience to another.

“That goes from device to device. It also goes from game to game, because again, we as human beings are the sum total of our experience. That’s what makes us who we are. That’s what gives us our character. We want to replicate that in the virtual space.”

This is, ultimately, in line with the vision that both Nintendo with the Switch and Microsoft with Xbox Anywhere are also pushing for- that no matter where you are, you are still playing the games you want to play. It is good to see EA pushing for this kind of a thing, too.

FIFA 17 promises to be one of the more substantial updates the series has had in years- two big reasons for this appear to be that the game is finally running on Frostbite engine, which the folks at DICE had developed, instead of EA Sports’ proprietary Ignite Engine, and the addition of the Story Mode to the game.

And as it turns out, the two are related: in their Gamescom update for the game this year (via Pure PlayStation), EA Sports revealed that the Story Mode was only made possible because of them using the Frostbite Engine for this game. They also revealed that they have made a lot of changes to the flow of the moment to moment gameplay: more control, more moves and stances available, better physics, more ways to hit the ball, more realistic responses, and just generally, a move towards trying to make the player feel as though they are one part of a team playing on a field, and not just a lone wolf.

It all sounds like it will add up to a substantial change for this year’s game over the previous few years’ entries. FIFA 17 is due out in September on Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PC.

Electronic Arts’ FIFA 17 is being developed on Frostbite, DICE’s proprietary engine, and not on Ignite according to Game Informer.

Furthermore, all future EA Sports titles including Madden, NBA Live and NHL will also be developed on Frostbite. Initially, Rory McIlroy’s PGA Tour in 2015 was the first to make the jump and FIFA 17 will follow this year with other EA Sports titles to transition over from Ignite “over the course of the next few years.”

The decision isn’t all that surprising. Frostbite is used in pretty much every single game under EA, from Battlefield and Mirror’s Edge to Mass Effect Andromeda and Dragon Age. Whether it’s desire for all games to share the same technology is the only reason it chose to leave Ignite by the wayside hasn’t been confirmed.

What are your thoughts future EA Sports titles relying on Frostbite? Let us know in the comments below and stay tuned for more details.

Yesterday, several game developers and publishers sent out April Fool’s videos and news to reinforce the light-hearted side gaming. Unfortunately, EA made a royal mess of the whole deal when it hopped on the bandwagon, as the Frostbite Engine Twitter proclaimed the engine to be arriving to the Wii U. It then went on to tweet about Half Life 3 coming to the Wii U as an exclusive and using quantum entanglement to fix its “net code”.

Needless to say, especially given EA’s spotty support for the console in the past year, few were amused which lead to the tweets being deleted. EA COO Peter Moore recently took to Twitter to apologize for the same. “Our apologies to partners Nintendo America and fan[s].

“Frostbite Engine’s poor attempt at April Fools not condoned by EA. Unacceptable/stupid.”

What did you think of the tweets? Too offensive for an important market of gamers or just innocent, albeit overbearing, fun? Let us know what you think in the comments.