DICE wasn’t entirely telling the truth when it said Battlefield 3‘s Frostbite 2 engine would never be licensed. This is not a bad thing.
Back in March, DICE told Joystiq that its proprietary Frostbite 2 engine – which looks gorgeous and won’t run on Windows XP – would never be licensed out to other studios. “The Frostbite engine is solely created to make Battlefield games.”
Apparently, someone at DICE changed their mind since then: EA announced that the next Need For Speed game, The Run, would be running on Frostbite 2.
This is hardly a bad thing – as we’ve seen, the latest iteration of Frostbite is stunningly gorgeous, so it will likely be a good fit for a series which is (at least partially) glorified car porn. Need For Speed has almost always been a good-looking series, so putting it on a powerful engine just makes sense.
As for The Run itself, all we have to go on (other than the engine announcement) is this teaser trailer that you see above, in which a man named Jack is trapped upside-down in a crashed car, and flashes back to the hot pursuits that (presumably) brought him there.
The trailer makes it look like this will be a more story-focused game than past Need For Speed titles, but it’ll probably still be told via races where people go very very fast.
(1UP)
