DICE executive producer Patrick Bach has discussed the long-term ambition for the studio’s Frostbite 3 engine, stressing that its going to take full advantage of what next-gen consoles are capable of.
Speaking with OXM, Bach said that starting work on the engine early has helped DICE gain a technical foothold, “I think we made the right move a couple of years ago when we actually started, a couple of years before Battlefield 3 was even announced, we said what do we want games to be five years from now?
“And we can see now that the level of “next gen”, if you want to call it that, on Frostbite is pretty stable. We’re still, I would argue, one of the best looking next gen games – I don’t want to say the best-looking next gen game, but we have an engine that truly takes advantage of the next gen machines.”
The interview was conducted- pre-Battlefield 4 release, and interestingly Bach forewarned about bugs in the code. “If we’d wanted to play it safe,” he said, “we wouldn’t have created a new version of Frostbite – we would have stayed on the right side of the fence. We are trying to push things as far as possible. That doesn’t mean you will have loads and loads of bugs, of course.”
Loads indeed. But as DICE continues to chip away at its long bug-list over time, Bach reminded the world that engine development is equally as evolutionary, and that Frostbite will change and improve over years to come.
He concluded, “Talking about an engine as a finite thing in space and time is slightly misleading. Engines are constantly in development and they’re constantly changing. And that’s something you particularly see with Frostbite, there’s a lot of under the hood stuff that goes on, so it’s a constantly evolving animal. There are all these things from all those different game studios being rolled back in. It’s never going to ‘run out’, per se.”
