The Frostbite 3 game engine has been cracked, and modders are now starting to modify and tinker with the tools. The first game on the list has been the 2015 outing of Star Wars: Battlefront from EA and DICE. They’ve focused an entire community on taking apart and fingering around the insides of the Frostbite engine in order to create some all new gameplay experiences in DICE’s Star Wars title.
There’s a Reddit community that popped up called BattlefrontModding, which is being flooded at nearly all hours of the day with new mods now that the code has been cracked and the tools are making their way out into the public sphere.
One of the mods out there now called Skirmish AI improves Star Wars: Battlefront‘s enemy AI so that they utilize the geometry of the map to take cover, utilize flanking routines, and generally behave a lot more like real life humans as opposed to static bots.
It’s not just script mods that have surfaced; texture reworks, lighting alterations and shader mods have also begun popping up, and not just the basic ENB mods that first surfaced from back in 2015. Real mods, such as the Magma Stormtrooper mod by DeggiaNox.
Some of you might be thinking “Wasn’t Battlefront always moddable?” Well you could do some basic ENB shader mods, some file swapping, and some other mostly insignificant mods, but actual conversion mods, mesh mods, texture mods, AI script mods, or anything that altered the core functions of the game or required digging out the engine structure was basically off-limits.
According to one of the community leaders, JakeGreen163, the community has been working together to crack open the Frostbite and really get to the innards of Star Wars: Battlefront to create some unique new mods, it’s all about sharing and exploring the content to grow the community…
“The community that we’ve setup is all about helping one another and trying to learn from each other as well, nothing is held back from the community because learning how to do something and then not letting the rest of the community know only hurts it.”
DICE and EA had mentioned before that they wouldn’t be releasing mod tools for the engine because it was too complicated for the modding community. Thus, they encrypted and made the Frostbite exceptionally hard to get into, preventing actual mods from being made for their newer games from Battlefield 3 onward, much like how Rockstar encrypted the image data files for GTA V.
It took some time but it looks like even the Swedish encryption wasn’t powerful enough to keep out dedicated modders. The only question now is if EA will come down on the modding community the way Take-Two Interactive has come down on the GTA modding community?
Anyway, you can can scope out the new mods being made available for Star Wars: Battlefront over on the BattlefrontModding sub-Reddit.
