Issues that emerged with Frostbite in Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem could also have motivated the studio to look elsewhere. Of course, the game’s release date is also a factor. Dragon Age 4 is currently slated to release in 2023 as per Grubb’s sources, leading him to believe that the next Mass Effect would arrive in 2025. Unreal Engine 5 would look substantially better than Frostbite by that point.

Regardless, BioWare is looking into various cutting-edge features that could be used in the next Mass Effect and wants to have technical parity with the industry, even if it ultimately goes with Frostbite. The title’s platforms and official name have yet to be revealed so there’s a ways to go yet. Stay tuned for more details in the meantime.

“You have full capability of exploiting on all EA services,” the hackers said on underground hacking forums. In the posts, which Waypoint obtained via screenshots from users who have access to the forums. In the posts, the hackers claimed to have stolen FIFA 21‘s source code, as well as the code for its matchmaking servers. They also claim to have the source code for the Frostbite engine, propriety EA frameworks, various software development kits (SDKs), and more. In all, the hackers claimed they had stolen more than 780 GB of data. They are currently trying to sell it. Whether they will have any luck doing so remains to be seen.

EA confirmed that the breach had occurred and that the hackers had in fact stolen what they claimed to. “We are investigating a recent incident of intrusion into our network where a limited amount of game source code and related tools were stolen,” EA said in a statement to Motherboard. “No player data was accessed, and we have no reason to believe there is any risk to player privacy. Following the incident, we’ve already made security improvements and do not expect an impact on our games or our business. We are actively working with law enforcement officials and other experts as part of this ongoing criminal investigation.”

Sony has yet to fully showcase the PlayStation 5, whether it’s the console’s design or price. However, it’s spoken quite a bit about its capabilities, especially with its solid-state drive. That being said, even with Sony hyping up the overall performance, the CPU and GPU numbers on paper don’t always tell the full story.

Yan Chernikov, a game engine developer who previously worked as a software engineer on DICE’s Frostbite engine, gave his thoughts on the console’s performance numbers in a recent YouTube video. He noted, “I don’t generally like looking at numbers like this, because in my experience, looking at clock speeds and frequencies and teraflops and all of that stuff, it’s fine and it might look good on paper. But when you actually start programming for that hardware and you start stress testing it and you have an actual full game that you’ve built up, which is a difficult thing to do, it’s not something you can get to within a few months of just having this new PS5 hardware.

“When you finally get to that stage, you may notice problems- and again numbers are fine, it’s cool it meets certain specifications. But to be honest, that means nothing until you can actually see that in practice. So, I don’t know… you know, this is just my opinion and my thoughts. But when I look at these numbers, it’s very difficult for me to be like ‘Oh! though it is a lot better!'”

That being said, according to Chernikov, when it comes to the solid-state drive, the numbers do offer something more concrete. “When I look at the SSD space and it says 5 gigabytes a second or whatever, that’s an amount that I’m sure that the console could sustain, and I can actually picture myself streaming 5 gigabytes per second- that’s like something tangible.

“But a clock speed and teraflop count, for me personally at least, it’s a little bit harder to look at that and be like ‘Oh, I can draw this many triangles, oh, I can make a game that suddenly supports this.’ Because until I start programming for that hardware and I see what other people have done and how sustainable it is and all of that stuff, it’s very difficult to see kind of a specific upgrade in a particular department. Even though obviously the numbers are there, but there’s a bit more of a disconnect, I feel, between those numbers and what’s actually capable of being achieved on that platform.”

Chernikov’s views represent something that’s been the case even when the PS4 and Xbox One launched. Despite those consoles being hyped up as similar to a PC’s architecture, it still took time for developers to fully understand and utilize the power available. Given how unpredictable game development can be, optimization is often the key difference maker.

As more games release for the PS5 in the coming years, we’ll know the full extent of the hardware’s capabilities. In the meantime, the console is currently slated to release this holiday season. Stay tuned for more details on Sony’s showcase for the same soon.

Ray-Tracing to Revamp Old Games

Ray-tracing may be all well and good for making games like Battlefield 5 look a little less boring. But its best application thus far is in revamping old games like Quake 2. Path tracing has been utilized to make the classic FPS look almost new. Quake 2 RTX also has over 3,000 Q2XP mod-pack textures, adds global illumination, real-time reflections, dynamic lighting and so on. However, the potential for ray-tracing to update games for a new generation (at least those with RTX cards) is immense.

Patrick Söderlund, current chief design officer for Electronic Arts, will be stepping down after twelve years at the company. Besides being in charge of DICE before and after its acquisition by EA as its CEO, Söderlund was also responsible for Frostbite’s implementation in various EA projects. He’s expected to officially leave sometime this year.

EA CEO Andrew Wilson shared the news in a recent open letter, noting, “Patrick has been a trusted business partner and a great friend, and his inspiring leadership has had an outstanding impact on EA. As an integral part of the management team for many years—including as head of Worldwide Studios and, most recently, Chief Design Officer—he’s been an agent of change and transformation.”

With Söderlund’s departure, Electronic Arts will see some reorganization, with Johan Andersson’s SEED team (which launched with the premise of researching technologies like neural networks and deep learning) joining the main studios’ group to “continue driving advanced design and innovation at the leading edge of games.”

Wilson further stated, “With new games and content playing a vital role in our networked future, the EA Originals and EA Partners teams led by Rob Letts will join our Strategic Growth group.”

What Söderlund’s plans are and where he’ll eventually end up – if he chooses to do so immediately after leaving – has not been revealed. Wilson did thank him for his work for the publisher. “He will always be a part of our EA family. And thank you all for leading us forward.”

What does this mean for DICE and Frostbite technology as a whole? What major shake-ups will we see in the coming year? Furthermore, who will assume Söderlund’s position? Stay tuned for more details in the coming months.

Bioware’s recent open world efforts have been facing quite a bit of backlash. Though Dragon Age: Inquisition has its fans and is a fairly good game, many took issue with its overall quest design. However, Bioware Montreal’s Mass Effect Andromeda suffered much more and was criticized for its lacklustre quest design, numerous bugs, unoptimized performance and shoddy world design.

Past reports (including one from Kotaku’s Jason Schreier) stated that Frostbite was one of the bigger issues for the game’s development. Bioware’s history of difficulties with Frostbite is no secret. Ultimately though, the decision to stick with it wasn’t mandated by publisher EA. As per former Bioware general manager Aaryn Flynn while speaking to Kotaku (via PCGamesN), it was all Bioware.

“It was our decision. We had been wrapping up Mass Effect 3 and we just shipped Dragon Age 2 and we knew that our Eclipse engine, that we shipped DA2 on, wasn’t going to cut it for the future iterations of Dragon Age. It couldn’t do open world, the renderer wasn’t strong enough, those were the two big ones. We thought about multiplayer as well, as Eclipse was single-player only.

“We talked internally about three options. We could have burned down Eclipse and started something new internally, we could have gone with Unreal Engine, or we could have picked Frostbite which had shown some really promising results on the rendering side of things and it was multiplayer enabled.”

Sadly, along with the other issues – including a procedural generation system that was scrapped after a year in development – Frostbite proved to be a major detriment to Mass Effect Andromeda. Frostbite 3 is still being used for the development of Anthem with the main Bioware studio at the helm and there are already rumours of trouble. The title’s delay to early 2019 also didn’t help.

Regardless of the results, Flynn feels it was the right call and praised the Frostbite team for their support. “Being part of a community – everybody at EA is on it now – that is powerful, it’s a good place to be. It’s a credit to the Frostbite team how they keep so many diverse titles on one engine, everything from FIFA to Anthem, it’s amazing to me.”

What are your thoughts on the same? Let us know in the comments below.

Looks like EA is doubling down on using Frostbite as the backbone of its internal game development pipeline. Speaking at their newest financial earnings call, Chief Executive Officer Andrew Wilson and Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen revealed that EA currently has 12 games in development using the Frostbite engine- including a new Battlefield game.

Battlefield 5 was only given a passing mention as “the next great Battlefield game”, while Amy Hennig’s Star Wars game was also spoken about. The game, which is confirmed to be under development at Visceral Games, will be an action adventure title set in the Star Wars universe- hopefully Hennig does with it the same things she was able to manage with Uncharted.

That aside, of course, EA has many other Frostbite games in development too, especially since they have made it the backbone of all AAA game development in the last few years- including FIFA, Madden, and Bioware’s ambitious shared world shooter, Anthem.

Frostbite Technical Director Johan Andersson was recently on record in conversation with SN Systems Optimizer Team Leader Greg Bedwell, who is currently working on the PS4 C++ toolchain on behalf of Sony. While in this conversation, Andersson was asked what he thought about the toolchain, and he said he thought it was “superb.” Followed by a very giddy exclamation mark.

“Great to contribute back, the PS4 C++ toolchain is superb!” Andersson said. He also said that while developing Battlefield 4 for the PS4, DICE almost went with SMAA T2X (Enhanced Subpixel Morphological Anti-aliasing) and tried to implement it in the game but found that the costs were too high and ultimately decided against it.

“We tried SMAA T2X and looks nice but cost was too high for BF4,” he said.

DICE, instead, due to the limitations of the consoles coupled with other things, stuck with the more conventional and commonly used FXAA.

The job description is essentially looking for some one who can “Explore existing research for relevant subjects”, “investigate and implement support for Occulus [sic] Rift SDK in the Frostbite Engine” and “investigate and implement techniques for improving user experience.”

Oh, and also? You gotta move to Sweden. How’s about that for the future of game development?

Now the question is: What could EA be planning specifically for the technology? NeoGAF is already talking about ideas involving a next-generation Battlefield or Mirror’s Edge that utilize the VR headset to immerse gamers further.

Currently, the Oculus Rift headset is available for $300 on pre-order and comes with both a development kit and SDK.

Source: PixelEnemy

DICE believes there’s still a lot of room for hardcore gaming and even though the current trends are saying otherwise, there will still be a lot of demand for games that push the hardware.

“People are generally correct that things are changing, and a lot of people in this industry are acknowledging that – some people don’t want to see it, though. But I would also say the people who are painting such a grim picture of where we’re going are wrong,” DICE GM Karl Magnus Troedsson told Edge.

Considering DICE makes advanced tools and engines for EA, it’s not surprising that they think games that utilize a lot of hardware will still be prevalent.

“There will always be a demand for games that require a lot of hardware to deliver a really hi-def experience. Whether that will be delivered by CPUs and memory sitting in your room, or somewhere else, I don’t know. Probably both. But one thing is for sure, people will continue to want to play the best-looking games out there,” Troedsson said.