One of the most historic studios is closing down. Unfortunately it was dead long ago. Fuck EA
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Fun fact: same-sex sexual activity, both male and female, is not only illegal in Saudi Arabia, it is a capital offense punishable by death.
Fun fact: Bioware’s parent company, Electronic Arts, is now owned by Saudis.
I’m not sure we got the same definition for fun. You seem to have the Saudi version.
I am still kind of interested how long the sims will still exist in its current form under the new leadership
So we have an official end-state for SWTOR?
Yeah, exactly what we expected to happen when Saudis bought it.
Saudis are Islamic, there are no pride parades in Saudi Arabia. There will be no more “secular” games from Electronic Arts, so somehow EA has found a way to suck even more.
The Saudis are an embarrassing US ally, not even getting into the royal family. They’re no better than Iran in my opinion.
I can understand doing business with them, I think trade is the best way to open doors and find common ground. But an ally?
It’s against my religion.
I wish people would get less emotionally attached to these corporate game studios. Like, it’s not the same people. Not the same leadership. Not the same artists. And so on.
It’s just a collection of IP’s, that’s about it. Bioware from 2000 is not the same bioware from 2015 or 2026.
Same can be said for the vast majority of game studios except a handful of indie shops, but do they really count as indie if they’ve been nurturing one IP for 15 years?
Electronic Arts in the 1980s was amazing.
Why do you assume it the studios they’re attached to and not the IPs? I for one am devistated that a) people are losing their jobs and b) I’m losing beloved future games I was hoping for.
Maybe try a little empathy. Your comments constantly lack it.
Because the IPs fuckin suck under the studio. Nobody cares about Anthem. Andromeda was a mid cashout of Mass Effect. Lord knows wtf they were going to do with Dragon Age. Few, if any people, like these IPs as they are; you like the promise they once held, because you forgot the one rule to responsibly engage with fiction: Good stories get to end. The games still exist. They’ll always exist, or at least as long as you or I are alive. Thus the IP always exists. What goes away is the studio, which, OK, bye
Civvie11 on the YouTubes often lists some of the fine Studios the EA has voraciously consumed only to spit out when their bones are dry. Raven Software (via Activision merger) comes to mind. Also Neversoft… and MAXIS…
Isn’t it a shame that a tiny handful of rich old assholes get to make unilateral decisions that affect all of us?
Also Jade Empire! An under appreciated gem of a game. This is truly a shame, Bioware were one of the last big ones that actually gave a shit about making good games.
God, they listed Anthem and not Jade Empire - look how they massacred my boy.
Yeah I’m really not sure why they’ve decided to put anthem on the end of that list.
Leak the source code on the way out. Fuck EA.
BioWare died 11 October 2007. We’ve been holding an open-casket wake ever since.
DA:O and the Mass Effect trilogy are quite good games, both story and gameplay-wise.
See I believe in reincarnation I saw BioWare just the other day they go by Larian now. 😁
Ew no.
Veilguaed made me really sad. Dragon age was my favorite franchise. I really wish I didn’t play veilguard, it was such trash.
Ban corporate ownership of other companies. It has no positive effects on the economy or the world.
May EA burn.
Bold of them to put Anthem on that list. They built an interesting world then told a boring story in it.
IIRC there were numerous articles after launch talking about how it was EA that actually made them add the flying mechanics, easily the best part of the gameplay, after it got stuck in development limbo for years.
Whether that was truly accurate or not, it does fit the extended development timeline, the lackluster story in the end product, and the failure to revamp the game after launch like the developers very publicly said they were trying to do. If they couldn’t do it the first time, and couldn’t do it the second time… it seems they were the problem, not EA (for once).
I do not believe it for the simple reason that the levels are very vertically based, iirc. If core verticality was a mandate from shitheads after production started rolling, it would’ve come out in an even worse state.
Are you looking at the same game? The world was vertical in the sense that you had to fly anywhere… but none of the combat or gameplay used it in any way beyond going from one place to another. That’s exactly what would happen if verticality and a new map was added later in development. They just put clearings in to place the flat missions.
Eh, that doesn’t necessarily define where the source of pressure came from. Making unique games is an entirely different level of skill/time/commitment than what they were given.
IMO, it’s nigh equally likely that they started with the verticality design as part of it and didn’t have the time to cook the idea into something neat, vs it being a later mandate after some core designs had development. The only thing that really leads me to believe that the ideas were in early is in the character designs: They were clearly meant to fly in some way, even if it might’ve been in a Halo jetpack sort of way early on. (which has less evidence)
This is one of 94747252795 reasons to NEVER give these big corporations a single ounce of control over anything.
IMO, it’s nigh equally likely that they started with the verticality design as part of it and didn’t have the time to cook the idea into something neat, vs it being a later mandate after some core designs had development.
Well it’s a good thing that we have commentary directly related to this then, alongside basically ever major development decision… Because that’s apparently what happened…
https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964
As development progressed, it became clear that some of the Anthem team’s original ideas either wouldn’t work or weren’t quite solidified enough to be implemented. Take traversal, for example. The mandate was that Anthem’s world would be massive and seamless, but how would you get around? The team played around with prototypes, exploring different ways in which your exosuit could move vertically across the world. For a long time they thought it’d be climbing up the sides of mountains and ledges, but they couldn’t get that quite right. Early iterations of flying—which, developers say, was removed from and re-added to Anthem several times—were more like gliding, and members of the Anthem team say it was tough to get the system feeling all that fun. Every time they changed the traversal, it meant changing the world design accordingly, flattening and stretching terrain to accommodate the latest movement style.
The most common anecdote relayed to me by current and former BioWare employees was this: A group of developers are in a meeting. They’re debating some creative decision, like the mechanics of flying or the lore behind the Scar alien race. Some people disagree on the fundamentals. And then, rather than someone stepping up and making a decision about how to proceed, the meeting would end with no real verdict, leaving everything in flux. “That would just happen over and over,” said one Anthem developer. “Stuff would take a year or two to figure out because no one really wanted to make a call on it.”
Certainly sounds like the developers had no idea how to make the game.
One longstanding BioWare tradition is for their teams to build demos that the staff could all take home during Christmas break, and it was Anthem’s turn during Christmas of 2016. By this point, BioWare’s leadership had decided to remove flying from the game —they just couldn’t figure out how to make it feel good—so the Christmas build took place on flat terrain.
Around the same time, Electronic Arts executive Patrick Söderlund, to whom BioWare’s leadership reported, played the Anthem Christmas demo. According to three people familiar with what happened, he told BioWare that it was unacceptable.
Now it was time for a new build. “What began was six weeks of pretty significant crunch to do a demo specifically for Patrick Söderlund,” said one member of the team. They overhauled the art, knowing that the best way to impress Söderlund would be to make a demo that looked as pretty as possible. And, after some heated arguments, the Anthem team decided to put flying back in.
So they removed flight entirely by Christmas of 2016, that would mean the entire map design had to lose the verticality. If you can’t fly, then you have to flatten the world do accommodate for ground movement instead.
And it was an EA executive that got them to put flying back in as a focus, flying that the team had removed entirely by that point. Even if they weren’t specifically told to do so by EA. And then designed the entire game’s map and movement based around that flight by the launch just over 2 years later in Feb 2019.
They were clearly meant to fly in some way, even if it might’ve been in a Halo jetpack sort of way early on. (which has less evidence)
I love that you try to hedge your comment and try to say that jetpack jumps and gliding are somehow even remotely in the same ballpark as flying around like Iron Man. You’re honestly trying to say that Link or Aloy on a glider is similar to Anthem’s flight? That’s a ridiculous thing to try to compare as similar.
So then, that really begs the question: Why were they not allowed to take it back to the design board when the design fundamentally changed?
Again, this is not a “developer” problem, but a fucko owner problem.
Why were they not allowed to take it back to the design board when the design fundamentally changed?
I feel like they were, effectively. There is no reason for them to not reuse assets they created from before flying was added back in after X-mas 2016, that was still 2 years before launch. 2 years is enough to develop a game, especially if the assets already exist.
That’s where the other development issues at the studio come in.
The most common anecdote relayed to me by current and former BioWare employees was this: A group of developers are in a meeting. They’re debating some creative decision, like the mechanics of flying or the lore behind the Scar alien race. Some people disagree on the fundamentals. And then, rather than someone stepping up and making a decision about how to proceed, the meeting would end with no real verdict, leaving everything in flux. “That would just happen over and over,” said one Anthem developer. “Stuff would take a year or two to figure out because no one really wanted to make a call on it.”
That’s not a publisher/owner issue, that’s a developer issue.
Was any developer who contributed to Baulders Gate 1 present for Anthem? I highly doubt it. The bioware I cared about stopped existing decades ago.
Anthem but not Jade Empire?
They’ve been zombies for at least, what, 10 years now? It’s also amazing how ME:Andromeda, Anthem and DA Veilguard all sold over 1 million copies, yet were still “failures”
I may be the only person alive who enjoyed Andromeda, but I do agree that Veilguard was completely unforgivable and also…inexplicable?
You’re not alone, Andromeda’s take on combat was so much fun - the skill synergies and the mobility was properly thrilling. Though definitely lacked on the story side, however, it was still quite enjoyable.
Thank you, I feel like its an unpopular thing to say but I actually really had fun and played through it twice. To each their own, I guess.
