Jedi: Fallen Order Has Just Saved EA's Star Wars
5. It's Built On An Engine That Actually Works
Perhaps an even bigger way it could turn the entire franchise around though, is its use of Unreal Engine 4. Now, a shift in game engine might not seem like a such a huge deal on the surface, but when it comes to pretty much every game EA has published since the dawn of the new generation, there’s always been one recurring issue: Frostbite 3.
Whether it was Bioware RPGs like Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect: Andromeda and more recently Anthem, or huge mainstays like FIFA, pretty much every team that’s worked with the technology for anything other than a first-person shooter has reported intense struggles. Though the engine is robust and downright beautiful, it was designed specifically for the purpose of creating FPS blockbusters.
Consequently, when EA made it law that all of their first-party studios needed to adopt the technology wholesale, a good chunk ran into trouble. According to reports, Frostbite just doesn’t have the tools or the baseline systems for something like a third-person shooter, or an open world game, or an RPG. Each time a team has had to start a project, they’ve had to develop even the basic tools from scratch that other studios have ready and waiting, easily accessible.
Unsurprisingly, Frostbite 3 was also cited as a major issue on Amy Hennig’s Ragtag. When discussing why progress was going so slow on that project, a former developer in the know was quoted as saying that:
“It was missing a lot of tools, a lot of stuff that was in Uncharted 1. It was going be a year, or a year and a half's work just to get the engine to do things that are assumed and taken for granted."
Jedi: Fallen Order has managed to buck this trend entirely. It’s being made on Unreal Engine 4, which should offset a lot of the development difficulties the previous Star Wars team encountered.
This could explain how the project has been turned around so fast. Even though it started development after Ragtag, it was hinted that Respawn’s game was actually further along in production than that title when it was cancelled.