Madden NFL 18 Will Be Powered By Frostbite

Electronic Arts has confirmed that it’s shifting its popular Madden NFL football series to the Frostbite graphics engine. The company revealed this as part of its recent earnings release. It confirmed in the material information shared with investors that starting with Madden 18, this franchise is going to be powered by the Frostbite graphics engine.

EA has previously used this graphics engine for games like Battlefield 1 and Star Wars: Battlefront. Frostbite was created by Battlefield developer DICE and EA now maintains an engineering team that’s dedicated to updating and maintaining these tools.

EA promises that the shift to the Frostbite engine for Madden is going to provide “major visual advancements and new gameplay experiences.” It says that this is going to excite dedicated Madden players who have stuck with the franchise for a very long time.

The publisher first said back in 2013 that it would shift most of its internal development to DICE’s tools. EA’s sports franchises like FIFA, NHL, and Madden lagged behind primarily due to their annual release timelines and for giving more time to EA engineers so that they could update the physics modeling in Frostbite to properly handle sports simulations.

FIFA 17 finally shifted to Frostbite last year and fans of the franchise liked what they saw even though the title held on to many of the animations that EA Sports developed for previous games in the series. That’s how it’s likely going to be for Madden as well but at least Madden 18 is going to bring a visible graphics improvement. It remains to be seen if that’s going to be one that fans like.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Gaming
Tags: EA, FIFA 17, Madden 18