I'm not gonna say games were better 20 years ago, but at least their technology had some character.

Remember when you could make and distribute skins for free? My son spent something like $20 on a single skin for some stupid game. Ugh.

I love how the progressively awful video game market is slowly radicalizing millennials to the left as they see a once free and open hobby wrecked by capital.

;1214960']frt the old PC deathmatch games provided a really unique opportunity for character modelers that I didn't really appreciate until it was gone.

So there are no modern games you can mod anymore?

I still remember when DICE basically called the modding community morons who couldn't figure out their editing tools. LOL, as if their monkey work game devs are more competent than the modding community.

Over the past few years, one of BioWare’s biggest obstacles has also become one of EA’s favorite buzzwords: Frostbite, a video game engine. An engine is a collection of software that can be reused and recycled to make games, often consisting of common features: a physics system, a graphics renderer, a save system, and so on. In the video game industry, Frostbite is known as one of the most powerful engines out there—and one of the hardest to use.

Developed by the EA-owned studio DICE, Frostbite is capable of rendering gorgeous graphics and visual effects, but when BioWare first started using it, in 2011, it had never been used to make role-playing games. DICE made first-person shooters like Battlefield, and the Frostbite engine was designed solely to develop those games. When BioWare first got its hands on Frostbite, the engine wasn’t capable of performing the basic functions you’d expect from a role-playing game, like managing party members or keeping track of a player’s inventory. BioWare’s coders had to build almost everything from scratch.

(Over the past few months I’ve heard a great deal about Frostbite’s challenges. In August of last year, I went to BioWare Edmonton’s studio and interviewed many of the leads on Dragon Age: Inquisition for my book, which tells the full story of that game. In short, they had a very, very hard time.)

By the time BioWare entered pre-production on Mass Effect: Andromeda, the Dragon Age: Inquisition team had built some of the tools that they’d need to make an RPG, but not all of them. Engineers on Andromeda had to design many of their own features from scratch, including their animation rig. “Frostbite is wonderful for rendering and lots of things,” said a person who worked on the game. “But one of the key things that makes it really difficult to use is anything related to animation. Because out of the box, it doesn’t have an animation system.” (Frostbite was later attached to an animation system called ANT, that source said, but it was full of “duct-taped issues.”)

While describing Frostbite, one top developer on Mass Effect: Andromeda used the analogy of an automobile. Epic’s Unreal Engine, that developer said, is like an SUV, capable of doing lots of things but unable to go at crazy high speeds. The Unity Engine would be a compact car: small, weak, and easy to fit anyplace you’d like. “Frostbite,” the developer said, “is a sports car. Not even a sports car, a Formula 1. When it does something well, it does it extremely well. When it doesn’t do something, it really doesn’t do something.”

“Whenever you’re trying to do something that fits the engine—vehicles, for example—Frostbite handles that extremely well,” the developer said. “But when you’re building something that the engine is not made for, this is where it becomes difficult.” Designing the large maps of Andromeda’s planets became a struggle on Frostbite, where the maximum size of a map was initially 100 by 100 kilometers. The Andromeda team needed their maps to be way bigger than that. Other struggles included the streaming system, the save system, and various action-RPG mechanics that Andromeda needed in order to work.

“It’s been painful,” said a developer. “The pain started with Dragon Age: Inquisition and continued on with Andromeda as well.”

Is the Sith engine a Yugo that easily catches on fire?

(Last year Valve was taking 94% from Dota 2 skinners. IIRC it’s only 75% for Skyrim. They aren’t upfront about either number so I’m not sure if it’s gotten worse since then.

Valve doesn’t do **** to deserve their platform rents to begin with. Taking 94% from fan modders is beyond the pale.)

I'm not gonna say games were better 20 years ago, but at least their technology had some character.