Frostbite 2 used in NFS: The Run because of cinematic requirements, says Black Box

Jason DeLong, executive producer at Black Box, has said the studio used DICE's Frostbite 2 engine for Need for Speed: The Run as it was intent on making a "Hollywood" experience.

The engine was created by DICE for Battlefield 3. Its been hinted that a Mirror's Edge sequel could also end up using it.

Speaking to Gamasutra, DeLong said the studio used Frostbite 2 to give the game a more cinematic feel than past story-based Need for Speed titles.

"When they decided to split the development across Criterion and Black Box to give each studio the time and development to create a quality experience, one of the things that we obviously had to do was to reinvest in our technology, because we hadn't been able to because of the yearly cycles in the past," he said.

"So we looked at several options: do we advance the engine that we currently have? What other third party ones are out there?

"And when we realised the game that we wanted to make, which we knew was based in a cinematic kind of Hollywood storytelling fashion, we looked at Frostbite and it seemed like, 'Well, it's internal; we can work closely with the dev team': it was the right choice. It allowed us to get a character in the game, have incredible, believable characters in addition to amazing worlds and amazing looking cars.

"Their visual effects work is second to none; the world destruction, their audio is incredible. And most importantly, one of the nice side benefits was that it's an incredibly content-driven tool, which allowed us to create more content than we've ever done before."

The Run is the first non-DICE game to use Frostbite 2, but Black Box did collaborate with the Swedish studio "on getting a very deep racing mechanic of handling physics into the game," according to DeLong.

"We did a cross-studio development on the Frostbite 2 engine that we're using. And yeah, it was a lot of collaboration and work with them to get things like our road tool, which is our internal tool that allows us to build a track very quickly."

Need for Speed: The Run launches on November 18 for PS3, 360, Wii, 3DS and PC. A demo on PS3 and 360 is out now.