Even before finishing Dragon Age 2, Aaryn Flynn and Mark Darrah were looking for a new engine for their fantasy franchise. Their in-house game engine, Eclipse, felt creaky and obsolete for the type of gorgeous high-end games they hoped to make. Basic cinematic effects, like lens flares, were impossible for Eclipse to handle. “Graphically, it wasn’t fully featured,” Darrah said. “It was getting long in the tooth from that perspective.”
On top of that, the Mass Effect series used the third-party Unreal Engine, which made it difficult for the two BioWare teams to collaborate. Basic tasks like rendering a 3-D model required a totally different process on Eclipse than they did on Unreal. “Our technology strategy was just a mess,” said Flynn. “Every time we’d start a new game, people would say, ‘Oh, we should just pick a new engine.’”
Flynn and Darrah powwowed with one of their bosses, EA executive Patrick Söderlund, and came back with a solution: the Frostbite engine, which the EA-owned studio DICE, in Sweden, had developed for its Battlefield games. Although nobody had ever used Frostbite to make RPGs, Flynn and Darrah found it appealing for a few reasons. It was powerful, for one. DICE had a team of engineers who worked full-time on Frostbite’s graphic capabilities, beefing up the visual effects that made, for example, trees sway in the wind. Because this was the video game industry, they also spent a lot of time making it look pretty to blow things up. The other big advantage of Frostbite was that EA owned it. If BioWare started developing all its games on the Frostbite engine, it could share technology with its sister studios, borrowing tools from other EA-owned developers like Visceral (Dead Space) or Criterion (Need for Speed) whenever those companies learned cool new tricks for enhancing facial capture or making it look even prettier to blow things up.
The other big advantage of Frostbite was that EA owned it. If BioWare started developing all its games on the Frostbite engine, it could share technology with its sister studios, borrowing tools from other EA-owned developers like Visceral (Dead Space) or Criterion (Need for Speed) whenever those companies learned cool new tricks for enhancing facial capture or making it look even prettier to blow things up.
In the fall of 2010, as the bulk of the Dragon Age team was finishing up DA2, Mark Darrah pulled together a small group to work on a prototype they called Blackfoot. This prototype had two major goals: to start getting a feel for the Frostbite engine, and to make a free-to-play multiplayer game set in the Dragon Age universe. The latter never happened, and after a few months Blackfoot fizzled, hinting at bigger challenges to come. “It wasn’t making enough progress, ultimately because its team was too small,” Darrah said. “Frostbite’s a hard engine to make progress with if your team is too small. It takes a certain number of people to just keep it on.”
By the end of 2011, with both Blackfoot and the Dragon Age 2 expansion pack canceled, Darrah had a substantial team available to start working on BioWare’s next big game. They resurfaced the old Inquisition idea and began to talk about what a Dragon Age 3 might look like on Frostbite. By 2012 they had a plan in place. Dragon Age 3: Inquisition (which later ditched the “3”) would be an open-world RPG, inspired heavily by Bethesda’s smash hit Skyrim. It would take place all across new areas of Dragon Age’s world, and it would hit all the beats that Dragon Age 2 couldn’t. “My secret mission was to shock and awe the players with the massive amounts of content,” said Matt Goldman, the art director. “People were complaining, ‘Oh there wasn’t enough in Dragon Age 2.’ OK, you’re not going to say that. At the end of Inquisition, I actually want people to go, ‘Oh god, not [another] level.’”
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Ambitions were piling up. This was to be BioWare’s first 3-D open-world game and their first game on Frostbite, an engine that had never been used to make RPGs. It needed to be made in roughly two years, it needed to ship on five platforms, and, oh yeah, it needed to help restore the reputation of a studio that had been beaten up pretty badly. “Basically we had to do new consoles, a new engine, new gameplay, build the hugest game that we’ve ever made, and build it to a higher standard than we ever did,” said Matt Goldman. “With tools that don’t exist.”
If an engine is like a car factory, then in 2012, as Inquisition entered development, the Frostbite engine was like a car factory without the proper assembly lines. Before Dragon Age: Inquisition, developers at EA had used Frostbite mostly to make first-person shooters like Battlefield and Medal of Honor. Frostbite’s engineers had never built tools that would, say, make the main character visible to the player. Why would they need to? In first-person shooters, you see through the character’s eyes. Your body consists of disembodied hands, a gun, and, if you’re really lucky, some legs. Battlefield didn’t need RPG stats, magical spells, or even save systems—the campaign kept track of your progress with automatic checkpoints. As a result, Frostbite couldn’t create any of those things.
“It was an engine that was designed to build shooters,” said Darrah. “We had to build everything on top of it.” At first, the Dragon Age team underestimated just how much work this would be. “Characters need to move and walk and talk and put on swords, and those swords need to do damage when you swing them, and you need to be able to press a button to swing them,” said Mike Laidlaw. Frostbite could do some of that, Laidlaw added, but not all of it.
Schreier, Jason. Blood, Sweat, and Pixels (pp. 125-127). Harper Paperbacks. Kindle Edition.
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