The Frostbite 3 later on became one of the best gaming engines, but it was Battlefield 4 which took a huge risk by implenting it for the first time.

Battlefield 4 was one of the most iconic games in this popular franchise. It also became one of the fastest-selling games after its release in 2013, but it also had its fair share of problems due to the brand-new Frostbite 3 engine used at that time. Before BF4, this particular game engine was never used.

Battlefield 4 was released on October 29, 2013. | Credit: DICE

But the developers at that time at DICE took the risk of implementing this unsteady gaming engine into their newest title and fortunately, it turned out in their favor. It had initial hiccups, but those were fixed by several patches, and after that DICE never had to look back. But it’s pretty commendable how big that risk was.

Battlefield 4 was the first ever game to try out the Frostbite 3 Engine

Battlefield 4 was made on a completely new and untested engine. | Credit: DICE.

Frostbite is visually stunning, and one of this game engine’s best features is how clear the graphics are. Even its ardent supporters will have to agree, though, that some people may find the load times of games powered by this engine to be a bit too lengthy, particularly on old HDDs. While there are bugs in the engine, Frostbite has demonstrated more advantages than disadvantages overall, making it a solid game engine that only needs to be fine-tuned.

But that fine-tuning wasn’t done before the release of Battlefield 4. So the developers at DICE played a massive gamble by making BF4 with that engine. In an interview with Eurogamer in 2013, this is what one of the game’s developers, Patrick Bach, stated:

There’s been a lot of work. Frostbite 3 grew out of where we were with the Frostbite 2 engine. Like Frostbite 2 was tailored to Battlefield 3, Frostbite 3 is now tailored to deliver Battlefield 4. We are the guinea pigs, pushing what is possible to do from a game engine perspective.

However, after the release of BF4, there wasn’t any concern regarding the engine as all the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ were fixed through several patches by DICE, which led to one of the finest games in Battlefield history.

But that wasn’t the case before its launch. Even after having some continuous patches, the developers found it pretty hard to make the game graphically optimized due to the brand-new engine. And it seems the developers of Battlefield 6 are also going to find it pretty hard as well.

How good was the Frostbite 3 engine?

The Frostbite 3 engine had some unique perks. | Credit: DICE.

Gamemaker DICE and Frostbite developers once used scenes from Battlefield 4 to showcase the game engine’s amazing features in a YouTube video. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to put your hands on your chin and wonder how DICE was able to pull this off more than a decade ago. And we hope the upcoming Battlefield game will remind us of this 2013 masterpiece.

The Frostbite 3 engine manages elements like trees swaying in the wind; the game engine generates “weather,” and the weather’s regulations influence the motion of the trees, the ocean, and even the clouds in an attempt to provide realism and plausibility. The waves are now a part of the gameplay when you’re on the water, and you have to take their rise and fall into consideration.

Battlefield 4‘s “levolution”—where a multiplayer map can be drastically altered by, for instance, a building collapsing—further develops the idea of the destruction that dynamically alters a map. In order to create more emotionally convincing characters, a lot of effort has also been put into creating subsurface scattered models and eye details, such as parallax animation in the iris and pupils.

Yes, it was a huge risk to put an untested engine to work on a popular installment like Battlefield 3, but that risk ultimately paid off and we got one of the finest games and engines at that time.