Anthem: 9 MAJOR Revelations From Kotaku's Exposé

8. The Reason So Many EA Games Fail Is Because Of The Frostbite Engine

Chances are you've heard of Frostbite, the game engine pioneered by EA's DICE studio, and something that results in genuinely phenomenal visuals and physics.

The catch?

It was built for first-person shooters, and has now killed the potential of three third-person games in a row: Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect Andromeda, and now Anthem.

Why does this continue to happen? Because DICE's Patrick Söderlund ushered in an "initiative" to get all of EA's games on the same engine, regardless of compatibility to the vision at hand. In theory, this should've led to shared knowledge of the engine's pitfalls and potentials, but as one of Bioware's devs noted "The amount of support you’d get at EA on Frostbite is based on how much money your studio’s game is going to make".

As such, FIFA became the priority after they too were moved onto the engine, and that meant diverting staff off Anthem or other Bioware projects.

When it comes to general workload across their studios, EA set up an external "helpline" of Frostbite professionals, reducing game developers to a number of grandmas struggling to figure out their emails. Bug fixes would take days or a week to implement, and as another Bioware employee said, “If it takes you a week to make a little bug fix, it discourages people from fixing bugs”. “If you can hack around it, you hack around it, as opposed to fixing it properly.”

Apply that mentality across year's worth of dev time, and you get a launch game that bricks PS4s if you attempt to play it.