Project Atlas, EA’s new baby

Electronic Arts are one of the biggest companies in the gaming industry. With multiple studios under their belt, it isn't a surprise to think that the gaming company giant would often try to find the next biggest title or project to entice us players. Here is their announcement for their new big thing, Project Atlas.

Project Atlas is a new platform designed 'to seamlessly converge EA’s Frostbite game engine and game services as well as artificial intelligence'. Essentially, EA wants this platform to be a focal point for everything including development tools (which were separate pre-Project Atlas). This would allow new ways to push the limits what could be done before, especially when it comes to cloud-native gaming.

This puts us in the next step of gaming. There will be new ways for developers, players and modders to enrich their experience with what EA is offering. "Some of these capabilities exist separately, but are too hard to use, and have to be manually connected and configured as each new capability emerges." Many developers and players had probably used many of the features already shown in Project Atlas but the fact that it was cumbersome or unintuitive often ended up taking more resources than it really needed.

What does this mean? Project Atlas is going to streamline all of these features and take out the hassle most developers and other creators face when working with games. We could possibly see more games being developed smoothly, mods being dished out faster and perhaps see a new side of gaming we won't even think of yet. It would also mean that cloud gaming will be more personalised in a sense for each player and become more of the mainstream part of gaming.

It is important to note, this is more than just the technicalities of a video game. Graphics, gameplay, music and so on are just one part of the components that EA is trying to deliver. EA also intends to enhance the other aspects video games could provide such as social mechanics (e.g. think guilds or clans), online security and competition. Though there are still more work to be done in this particular platform, it would be interesting to see where it would take EA's next generation of games now that something like this will be integrated into EA's toolbox.

What do you think EA could do now that they have this Platform in the forge right now? Should other major gaming companies consider something similar for their next generation of games?