Convergence at BioWare

BioWare is the developer of triple A role-playing game franchises such as the Mass Effect series and the Dragon Age series. Both series play similarly in terms of their RPG elements, and share many gameplay features. While at MIGS, I attended a session held by Blake Grant from BioWare. The session was titled Convergence for Success. The title was vague and I had no clue what it would be about, but I went anyways.

The session began with an explanation of how the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series shared many features, and highlighted a few like the dialogue wheel and real-time cut-scenes and whatnot. The speaker then revealed - at least to me this was a revelation - that the games were built on two different engines. Mass Effect was built on the Unreal Engine, while Dragon Age was built on BioWare's own Eclipse Engine. So while the two game shared many features, the work was basically done twice when a lot of it could have been done once had they developed both games on one engine.

Now once development had started on both franchises, it would have been difficult for either team to switch to a new engine and redo all the previous work they may have done in developing a framework around their respective engines. It would have also taken time to sift through all  After the development of Mass Effect 3, the company decided to plan for a way to share the work between BioWare RPG games to reduce development costs and development time by moving to EA's Frostbite Engine.

However, moving to Frostbite alone still presented the same problem to both the Mass Effect and Dragon Age teams; they still have to add new features to their respective games, and seeing that they are being developed at the same time, this means that work would have to be done twice. The next step for BioWare was to create their own version of the Frostbite engine named BioWare Frostbite. The BioWare Frostbite Engine would contain all the shared features that both development teams would require.

The next step for BioWare was getting all BioWare development teams (Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and a third new team) to communicate with each other to determine which features would be shared, and in turn added to the BioWare Frostbite Engine. Shared features could range from something very genre specifc, such as the previously mentioned dialogue wheel, to things like artificial intelligence behaviours and even shaders.

The communication is the hardest part to manage for BioWare but the process of convergence and sharing the work has proven to be extremely successful in the early stages. The first game to go into production was Dragon Age:Inquisition BioWare's first next-gen title. Out of 141 man-months worth of work, approxiamtely 60-70 of the work is being used in both the next Mass Effect title, and BioWare's new IP. The process of convergence in my opinion has been successful at BioWare; the Dragon Age team has cut-down the development times of both the next Mass Effect and their new IP by sharing the work.

Other EA studios are also moving to Frostbite, however whether or not they are implementing convergence is another story. I could definitely see this process being implemented in many large studios, not just EA. It makes me wonder if games like Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs and even Prince of Persia would benefit from a development process like this.

I find the process of convergence is simply the next logical step in the development of game engines. Convergence introduces a third layer in the process of developing a game engine. As opposed to having a general purpose engine, then a game specific layer, we have a general purpose engine layer, a more game genre specific engine layer, and then the game specific layer.