#alchemylab

It wasn’t just a problem with Frostbite. Bioware had already gone through most of the Frostbite growing pains with Dragon Age Inquisition and still managed to get a great critical reception and sales that exceeded expectations. Sure, there were going to be engine limitations in place. There always are - even with Unreal (or any other out-of-the-box engine), there were engine issues that they had to deal with - it’s one of the reasons the leadership decided to switch engines in the first place. The biggest reason that sunk Mass Effect Andromeda was that they poured a huge amount of development resources and time into building an extremely expensive procedural planet generation system that wasn’t fun enough and was eventually cut. 

Procedural environment generation is an enormous feature that is extremely engineering-heavy. Environments are already one of the most expensive kinds of content to build. Normally you need designers to handle layout, environment artists to make the world look believable, prop artists to create objects to populate the world, lighting artists to make sure it looks right. It can take months to build out a single environment. When you make environments procedural, you also need all sorts of engineering to make it work as well - engine programmers, tools programmers, gameplay programmers, graphics programmers, and so on. Because it requires such a heavy engineering workload in addition to the usual environment art requirements, it means that such a feature would naturally siphon resources away from other features.

The original plan was to have a bunch of hand-crafted critical path worlds (the ones that made it into the final game), but also a near-infinite number of non-critical procedurally generated planets where players could fight bad guys, hunt for resources, find items, and so on. One of the technical goals was even to have a seamless transition from planet to spaceship (and vice versa) without needing a loading screen. Frostbite deals with large open world maps pretty well (as shown in Inquisition), but procedurally generated environments are a different beast altogether. The procedural content generation turned out to be an iceberg feature and just kept growing in size until it had consumed far more resources than it should have. 

The team leads eventually made the tough decision to cut it because the writing was on the wall - even after months of crunch to make it work, they could see that the feature still needed far more resources to get it into a shippable state than they could feasibly fit in the schedule. There was just no way for them to build both it and the rest of the game with the available resources in the time remaining. So... they salvaged what they could from it, but much of it (especially engineering time) was a lost cause. That’s one major reason why ME Andromeda felt incomplete at launch… because it had a huge chunk carved out of it in the last year or so of development. 

As an engine, Frostbite can do a lot of things. It worked for Battlefront, it worked for Madden and FIFA, it worked for Need for Speed, and it worked for Dragon Age Inquisition. There are always growing pains when making an out-of-the-box engine work for a game’s development, but the real issues with Andromeda were primarily scope-related. They misjudged the resource cost of the features they wanted to build within the engine and it bit them hard.

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I once—on a repeated playthrough, mind you, after having beaten the game multiple times and once on Master Quest—managed to fuck myself over in the Water Temple by somehow using the small keys in the wrong order so I could no longer access Dark Link (and thus couldn’t clear the temple because he’s the miniboss and you only get the Longshot after beating him). I have no idea how I managed to do that, but I did.

And yet I’m still not as frustrated as I am right now.

Actually it’s funny you bring this up bc actually... it’s not?

tbh dicks like really gross me out