When Electronic Arts unveiled Battlefield 3 last year it appeared too good to be true. How could a game look this good, and still be intended for the current generation of consoles and PCs? As it turns out, it wasn’t.
At least that’s what EA’s Patrick Soderlund reveals in a candid talk about all things Electronic Arts, including Battlefield 3, DICE’s Frostbite 2.0 Engine, and the inclusion of that engine in Medal of Honor: Warfighter. While the first Medal of Honor utilized Unreal Engine 3, DICE was able to convince developer Danger Close to use Frostbite based solely on the success of Battlefield 3 and the strength of the engine.
How strong is DICE’s Frostbite 2.0 Engine you might ask? Well, Soderlund reveals that it was in fact developed for the next-gen, and is only operating on a base level with tons of room for improvement. Yes, Frostbite 2.0 can scale as well know, but it won’t truly be able to shine until the next wave of consoles – Microsoft’s Xbox 720 and Sony’s PS4 – are released.
Obviously both CryTek and Epic Games (purveyors of CryEngine and Unreal Engine respectively) are working on their own next-gen versions of their graphic engines, but it appears that DICE has got the jump on both of them. While Unreal Engine 4′s true power is only just being revealed to us, Frostbite 2.0 is being implemented in current gen games like the aforementioned Warfighter and last year’s Need for Speed.
Running Battlefield 3 on the PC, or just seeing the game in some of its more beautiful trailers, has given us a slight hint of what Frostbite 2.0 is capable of, but if that is only a base level gamers should be in store from gorgeous looking games in the future. While EA will most assuredly encourage all of its titles to support Frostbite, it will be interesting to see how they changes the look and feel of many of our favorite EA franchises.
Do you agree that Frostbite 2.0 is a next-gen engine released a couple years too early? Would you like to see Frostbite incorporated in more titles behind shooters?
Source: Gamasutra
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But then why aren’t PCs pushing the engine harder? don’t get me wrong, bf3 is one of the best looking games on my pc, but it isn’t next gen beautiful. in fact crysis arguably looks better and that’s old now, even if it did melt its generation of PCs, lol
I think that there are a couple scenarios you might want to consider as to why Frostbite 2.0 isn’t beyond the “base level” on PCs. For one, it’s possible that they didn’t want BF3 on the PC to look leaps and bounds better than the console versions. They already restricted them to 16v16 while the PC enjoys 32v32 and the PC version already does look better. Perhaps they were afraid the console versions wouldn’t sell at the typical pricetag if they were dramatically inferior.
The other thing you should probably think about is PC hardware that was current at the release of the game. In order to run BF3 at absolute maximum settings with no slowdown at all you need a high-end PC. So basically what that says is that even current PC tech needs to be at the high end to run the Frostbite 2.0 engine at its basic level. We all know how quickly tech improves and it’s getting faster in some areas. The next generation of consoles (PS4 and 720, not Wii U) will likely not be out until 2013. That’s the earliest. By then things will have improved dramatically and DICE can take advantage of the fact that both consoles and PCs will be at the same level for about a couple years maybe.
Crysis looking better than Battlefield is most definitely arguable and I would say that Battlefield beats it by a slim margin but I would also add that Crysis didn’t require its specs to handle up to 64 people blasting the hell out of eachother.
Hmm, I thought BF3 at max settings was next-gen… good to know it gets better. Somebody want to buy me a GTX 690?