Yeah EA is mostly to blame, but so is BioWare. They just weren’t the same studio anymore. Despite the development hell that was Veilguard, it still showed they really didn’t have it anymore for writing which was their whole thing.
It's tricky to place blame because a lot of the newer staff at Bioware genuinely was pretty incompetent, but the only reason they were there was because the people that made the studio great left because they'd had enough of EA's bullshit. I would still say it's ultimately EA's fault but the mistakes of the staff over the last 12 or so years shouldn't be swept under the rug either.
That's not strictly true. Weekes was at Bioware from 2005 on and was very much the lead writer for Veilguard. Weekes was 100% part of the problem with Veilguard.
The reality is that the people that did stay through to this point were not talented or disciplined enough to be in charge, even if they were excellent in more minor roles. Sure you could blame EA for picking studio leadership that then put such people in charge, but at some point that's indicative of cultural issues inside of the studio itself.
Weekes' writing in Veilguard was far below what they did when under scrutiny from others, but I don't think it's fair to sat they're the sole reason the writing was so bad. Many writers worked on Veilguard, and all but a few bits of good writing here and there was abysmal work
I obviously don't think fault can ever be pinned on one person. At the end of the day though, when the writing is a weak point the lead writer at least shares in the blame and is particularly responsible for not cleaning up the lowest points.
That's fair, I'm just not sure I'd consider Weekes one of the people that made old Bioware great. Even if they did do good work with some characters as you said that was only when they had a more minor role and had to answer to higher ups.
Could be a hot take, but I think it's only tricky because it's been normalized that the default take is game devolpers are suffering heroes and the publisher is the real big bad.
Like, this is definitely true In A LOT of cases. The list is so long for publisher killed games.
But at the same time, bad game design is bad game design. Publishers aren't saying "don't put any content in your game" or "I want one gun to dominate them all" of "what if you made it crash constantly?"
I don't want to throw nebulous shade at devolpers that are just getting shit on by publishers, but I'm a Halo fan, so I'm very familiar with just having bad devs.
BioWare had such good writing that I stopped even giving them points for it. Like most games could be held up in terms of overall review score by good writing, but that is literally table stakes for BioWare.
From what I heard, all or most of the people who made BioWare games good in the past have been long gone, so even though the name holds some nostalgia, it’s not like they were putting out bangers this whole time
BioWare at this point is basically The Ship of Theseus.
The people behind the legendary bangers that revolutionized the industry moved on years ago. It didn't happen all at once, so there's no single event people can point at and say "yeah, here's where the studio went to hell."
It's still a sad day for the industry. But BioWare has been gone for a long time.
Personally, I'm kinda happy that EA didn't take one last dump on Mass Effect like they did with Dragon Age.
I'm kinda happy that EA didn't take one last dump on Mass Effect like they did with Dragon Age.
While I personally enjoyed it, I think most people at the time felt that way about Andromeda 😂 it certainly didn’t live up to the original trilogy but it was… serviceable?
Just compare it to Dragon Age 2 which they did in one year. It was an awful sequel in pretty much every respect, but the writing was still stellar. Some of the best in fact. There are faint traces of great original ideas in Veilguard, and EA maybe responsible for scrapping most of them, but not for the quality of the writing that did make it in. And that's just a hot mess.
Of course they didn't have good writing anymore. EA fired all of the lead writers during layoffs.
Idk why so many people in here are saying this is Biowares fault and not EAs as if EA isn't the parent company that decides budget and projects. As if EA hasn't been laying off senior employees and forcing the ones that are left into projects they didn't want to do?
Weekes was literally the lead writer and had been at Bioware since 2005. Sure, there were people laid off. But, the problem was that the people left from the good old days were not capable enough, not that they weren't there.
My bad, I didn't realize that the lead writer was the one that made the decisions that made the gameplay, stability, and forced all the awful live service elements.
Of course they didn't have good writing anymore. EA fired all of the lead writers during layoffs.
Idk why so many people in here are saying this is Biowares fault and not EAs as if EA isn't the parent company that decides budget and projects. As if EA hasn't been laying off senior employees and forcing the ones that are left into projects they didn't want to do?
The only specific component you mentioned was writing. So no shit my comment is going to focus on the writing. If you wanted a broad discussion, you ought not have fussed on writing.
Weekes was literally the lead writer and had been at Bioware since 2005.
Weekes was the lead writer on Veilguard, the most recent game, not the decade only Anthem, which would only be marginally relevant for a discussion about the impact of layoffs on writing that posted dated its release.
This guy made a comment and blocked me to get the last word. Always the sign of a winner.
But to clarify, I did not focus on writing I had multiple points I made. Once again you chose to focus on writing. 2nd EAs constant layoffs and restructurrings of Bioware are heavily documented for all to see. We don't have to go off vibes for this and I fail to understand why we are defending the megacorporation.
The writing was on the wall for a while Bioware was in trouble. Especially when respawn were allowed to make jedi survivor when Bioware are the KOTOR (and SWTOR) guys who had decades of experience with star wars.
Andromeda was a good start of a new trilogy. It had the best combat gameplay of the whole series and some amazing companions. It didn't deserve the hate it got from a very toxic community.
combined with the anticipation built up from the trilogy
That's exactly what I'm saying. People were expecting a ME4 from a game that clearly had no intentions of every being that. It was always meant to be the start of a new trilogy.
The game never would’ve survived unless it’s a 9/10 game, that’s just the reality of it. It might be remembered better if BW got the chance to finish the new trilogy though, really sucks we never even got the dlc
It was a very good addition. Why should players be stuck to static cover locations? Why not be able to move around much more? You couldn't even jump in the games before Andromeda.
Because it means that there's no way to be punished for bad positioning?
Yes there is, what are you talking about. If you stand in the line of fire, you will die. That was true for all the ME games. Andromeda just didn't have the focus on pushing one button to solve that problem, you actually had to move around. It had higher stakes.
If it had gotten a moderately positive reception, we would have two more mass effect games by now.
Yeah let's just ignore how the community jumped on a hate train in the first week because of a minor lighting issue. A hate train that continued even though the issue was fixed quickly. That's also why the user score on metacritic is much lower than the actual reviews which were absolutely fine.
The game died because the some chronically online people dunked on it so hard that the publisher feared for future profits. A little less hate, a little bit more rational thoughts and we would have had DLCs and another two games.
Andromeda had gameplay but it's story was just bs just like new aliens we've got. That's not even talking about how they advertised about being a pathfinder and everything was already explored before you.
it had a bland story that didnt deserve a 2nd playthrough, which is funny because your choices also didnt really matter/ have an impact - which bioware games were known for and would gives you the desire for multiple playthroughs
Two single player game releases, 7 years apart, plagued by horrible writing. Yeah, I'm shocked they survived 2 more years after Veilguard. And it's not like Inquisition was a good game. It just wasn't the dumpster fire that came afterwards and looks better only in retrospective, but it was just the last step on a downtrend that continued into a freefall.
One of the biggest advantage Origins had is that they weren’t anticipating a sequel, so they can go all out in terms of choices and how the story goes.
I was kind of on this train that Bioware's hand was kind of forced by out of touch EA executives after Veilguard, but after Trick Weekes' comments on BlueSky where they straight up didn't understand why people didn't like Veilguard it uh... Kinda became obvious what was happening.
EA gave them plenty of time and money to work on Anthem and they still shit the bed, had to be basically forced by EA to put out a product. Bioware was both severely internally mismanaged and had to deal with EA.
I will never understand the bending over backwards to excuse Bioware. EA meddled because they couldn't be trusted. They fucked around with Andromeda and wouldn't communicate, as Schreier extensively documented. He also documented how badly they fucked up Anthem and the one part everyone loved was the part Bioware kept trying to cut that EA told them to leave in (the jet packs).
Bioware did this to themselves multiple times over. I'm sick of people pretending EA is the lone boogeyman like it absolves them of the shitshow they put on for years not having any sense of direction.
Brother, if you're thinking thatif EA wasn't meddling in their affair and that game will be good, I respectfully disagree. They are the one who botched a Dragon Age: Dreadwolf into whatever monstrosity that came out.
Yeah because it's not like team originally proposed a story driven mission game, which EA mandated had to be changed to a live service. Then pulled most of the team off to work on anthem. Then after the failure of Anthem and backlash, changed the game back to single player in the final year of development while still releasing the game built like a live service platform.
Look up the development history, plenty of mistakes by Bioware true but EA also made them change course multiple times throughout development, moved teams and resources and leadership around.
I'm not saying it would have been good, but EA is definitely partially at fault for how bad it was.
Anthem was on bioware though. EA was almost entirely hands off until they realised Bioware had completely fucked it and had to pull the leash.
The project management was a total clown show, sending out emails telling employees not to research similar games because it would "corrupt the bioware spirit" or whatever.
Anthem was foolish idea to begin with. Chasing the live service golden goose.
Not defending Anthem, I'm saying they reassigned staff from the Dragon Age team to the Anthem shitshow.
I'd like to find the video, a youtuber did a way deeper dive on this. But originally Dragon Age Dreadwolf was pitched and written as a story driven heist game, something akin to Bethesda's dishonored. EA wanting to capitalize on life service games had it changed.
During Anthem's development struggles, they pulled a lot of the Dragon Age team off the Veilguard to get Anthem over the finish line. Plenty of the old Bioware staff and leadership working on Veilguard began to leave. The original story was abandoned and the game was modelled on live service
After Anthem's immediate failure and the success of single player RPG's they changed Dragon Age back to single player, but there was basically no story because that's not a focus on live service.
So they moved the Mass Effect team on to help finish the Dragon Age game which was basically written in less than a year.
Plenty of mismanagement by Bioware, but my point is this.
If you go to an engineering team that builds planes and tell them to build a helicopter, then in the final year tell them to instead build the original plane again and bring in a team that builds submarines to help, is it any surprise that the plane is terribly built?
It's a plane that glides like shit because it has a bunch of parts used in helicopters hastily retrofitted in a year by a team who builds subs.
Those management, design and resourcing decisions were EA. No one in development would intentionally make their life hell by making that many changes.
Funny you say that when the modern live service genre has a LOT of games that continue to stay relevant from story progression that has people continuing to come back to experience it. FFXIV/Genshin/Reverse 1999/Limbus Company- a lot of other extremely successful titles people to tell you to play even completely alone despite being an MMO or despite gacha mechanics.
It could've worked in theory it just required a level of love and creativity that neither EA and Bioware could pull off even if you gave them ten years development time and a hundred million dollars to do it.
The problem is live service games fail all the time. As you say need to really have something unique to stand out.
Bioware was always a single player rpg developer, creating a live service game is not to their strengths, I don't think it's a matter of creativity.
EA is trend follower and profit maximizer, as to some extent they should be, but should have realized Bioware was not up to the task. Creating a generic live service clone seemed to be the entire plan.
Anthem, based on the articles and interviews was a Bioware blunder. But dragon age? Your entire existing fanbase is single player RPG enjoyers. What would possess anyone to try and convert the series to a live service game? That's like converting a total war strategy game to a first person shooter.
It was a nonsense plan, and by the time EA realized it and changed it back there was not enough time. That one to me is EA's fault.
Live services game can work and be great like you say. Marketing a conversion of a single player rpg into one made by a team that is not specialized in making them is not a recipe for success.
You're speaking aa if submarine and airplane is totally different. Meanwhile they both have similarities, such as electrical and in this term is the writing. Now do you really think the team in Mass Effect wrote down the story you see in Veilguard? Do you find any similarities orMass Effects identity among the whole Veilguard campaign? I sure as hell not.
Sure EA is pushy, but mind you Bioware did most of the choking by wrapping the last plastic bag over their own head.
Bud the entire story was written in a year, because prior to anthems failure and BG3's success it was going to be a live service game. A year is not enough time to a write a game of that size. The entire writing process was probably grabbing whatever was first draft because EA told them to switch the game twice. Bioware wanted to make a story driven game from the start. Look up the development history. EA has a trash reputation for good reason.
EA is ENTIRELY at fault for what happened to Veilguard, this is coming from someone who actually liked the game, and enjoys it more than Inquisition, Veilguard would’ve been a billion times better if EA just fucked off
Mass Effect 1 and Dragon Age Origins were the last true BIOWARE games because they were so late in their development process after the EA buyout that EA didn’t have the opportunity to meddle in them at all outside of making Shale a day 1 free DLC, after that though? Dragon Age 2 is infamous for being one of the most rushed games of all time thanks to EA deciding that the Origins DLC it was meant to be should instead be its own game, but the talent of the devs made them able to make it easily one of the best written RPGs ever and exceptional in its own right despite the insanely short development time, Mass Effect 2 is where we can immediately see the difference in EA’s meddling, it’s a great game but the fact that EA forced them to cut all the gay romances from the game out of fear for FOX News was just a huge misfire, it also is honestly a pretty short game that barely touches its own main plot choosing to instead focus a ton of resources on each individual squadmate, which is cool but it definitely is noticeable if you ever do a run where you solely focus the main story. Mass Effect 3 and Inquisition is where you can REALLY see the meddling in full force. ME3’s working conditions forced multiple crew members to quit during development which is why things like Legion being a completely different character and Ashley being nothing but a drunk bimbo happen, the ending needs no explanation, and Javik being cut from the game just so he could be a day 1 DLC was just so stupid. Inquisition is obviously EA’s attempt to cash in on the Skyrim popularity with semi-open world maps that are big for the sake of being big and have almost 0 actual content, if you do a playthrough where you use a mod or exploit to remove the power-walls preventing you from playing the story / companion storylines, you’ll find that this 200+ hour playthrough game can be finished in 14 or less with all the DLCs included, it’s an extremely short game when you’re not forced to clock in your shift at chasing rams and hunting crystals, almost every single quest in that game has 0 dialogue outside of the Inquisitor monologuing the scrap of plot they have to the player
Andromeda, Anthem, again they need no discussion, everybody already knows what happened there. Veilguard is the result of EA forcing them to completely restart the development process of the game three separate times, it’s a miracle it came out at all, and you can tell almost the entire first act of the game was completed in about a month or two because it’s just so so so bad in every single way, everything between stopping the ritual in the prologue and choosing which city to save is just irredeemably bad, and since that’s the start of the game most people never sat through it and gave the game a proper shot, it gets steadily better and better after the cities all the way to the end and I can say I genuinely enjoyed the whole way through after that dark point, it’s no more flawed than any other BioWare game really, it’s just the beginning that’s super shit rather than having the shit be spread equally like the rest of them do
It’s all EA’s fault, this isn’t a Bethesda situation where BioWare was sitting on their asses getting free paychecks for years, this is a situation of actual creative and talented people being pushed out by an overbearing corporate entity snuffing their creative freedoms, forcing them to create stuff they aren’t good at (let’s have the single player RPG team make a live service multiplayer shooter what could go wrong amirite?), and meddling in stuff they shouldn’t have to try and squeeze every penny they could out of the “players”
I disagree actually. The gameplay was pretty darn good for Veilguard. If it had one creative vision start to finish we’d be talking about it totally differently.
If the story and characters weren’t a mess… Too many cooks and changing priorities from boardroom nonsense.
And as we now know from multiple interviews, thats something the BioWare heads couldn't wrap their heads around and quietly grew to resent, which ultimately caused them to become hostile to their own writers and drive off some of the foundational members to what made BioWare storytelling great.
All because they wanted to be the next CoD makers.
Mass Effect 3's combat was fantastic, and I absolutely would have bought a standalone version of the multiplayer. Hell, the servers are still active til this day.
And while I was disappointed with the story/writing during the first big chunk of the game... the second half and especially the last 1/4th of the game (including the ending) surprised and genuinely impressed me. It gave me ME2 suicide mission vibes, the climax was truly amazing old school Bioware. The game only got better and better the further you got into it. Unfortunately, most people never even gave it a proper chance because of all the negative online commentary (and anti-woke outrage from the usual suspects)
It's the opposite for me and I recently finished it. It starts like a Disney movie. Then the gameplay and some character's growth fool you into believing this can be good. Then Taash breaks everything. And if you manage to push past that wreckage of a teenage writing and reach the end you find yourself thinking of what might have been and lost potential.
The rebellious teen character is written like a rebellious teen, what did you expect? Taash wasn't my favorite but it's just your typical coming-of-age story and it ends strong. One companion falling flat is not a big deal when there's plenty of other companions that are better. All of the parts involving Solas, and all the bigger moments in the last half of the game, especially the "twist" and the climax, made up for a lot of the flaws
If Taash is a teenager then we have bigger problems with them being romanceable. If Taash is not a teenager they shouldn't act like one.
Their age is never mentioned but for the better result (still a bad result) we must pretend they're an adult that acts like a child being thrown into the fight of all fights and still acting like a kid. It stills breaks the immersion of being in slavery land fighting the apocalypse with a mental children, but at least you (or Harding, who also acts incredibly naive) are not a pedo.
I mean, creative vision didn't produce the atrocious writing. There are full live service games that are leagues above what Veilguard was, so the switch to and back shouldn't have affected writing to that degree. Inquisition had just as much of a development hell, shit Andromeda did as well. Veilguard is hands down the worst showing of writing and story that Bioware has ever shown in any of their games, and the good parts are almost direct copies of Mass Effect 2.
It’s an upgrade, and this sentiment is not cohesive with what all these comments are saying which is that you don’t play a DA game for the gameplay but for the story
It's not an upgrade if you liked the first game. It's a strategy game and they stripped it down to an action game. Inquisition at least somewhat kept some of the strategy elements that made it interesting. Veilguard was a sub par action game. The writing was good up until Veilguard as well
Look man, we can talk about hypothetical what ifs this or what ifs that. No one knows for sure. But if you look at Veilguard and telling me that theyare trying with their own core principal back in dragon age origins? Then you're lying to yourself.
I love Bioware man, I played all their games, even Andromeda. But don't tell me people play origins or kotor because of the gameplay. It's becuse of the story, and veilguard doesn't feel like it was a bioware game.
Sure EA have some to blame, but majority of the fault came frok Bioware itself. AFAIk, EA never really care about the stories of the game, look at Dices Cal Kestis series or even the most recent Zero Company. All publishes by EA and none of their story particulary bad.
You're objectively wrong then. The literal director of those games has his own YouTube channel and has been releasing multiple videos talking about the failures of Anthem, Dragon Age, and more.
He talks extensively of how hands-off EA was with them, and how Bioware was given WAY more leniency than they really deserved. Check out his channel Mark Darrah on Games, and trying to place the onus on EA for Bioware's disasters is just not factual at all.
People want to conveniently ignore dragon age veilguard was meant to be an MMO. People clearly don’t understand timelines, budget, deadlines. But no it’s ALL BioWares fault. /S
I'm so sick of this bullshit narrative. Like with Anthem, sure EA gave Bioware free reign to do whatever they wanted... as long as it was a multi-player live service game that hit impossible earning goals. Just absolute malpractice, which is par for the course.
In a way I'm happy because Mass Effect was the one and only property EA had left that I cared at all about. Now I can sit back and laugh as Jared Kushner and the Saudis run it into the ground.
"Monstrosity" is a massive exaggeration. The game's writing disappointed me at the start for being overly shallow Marvel-esque dialogue with a player character that was too one-note, but I will say that the second half of the game (and especially the last third and the climax) absolutely made up for it by having some of the best cinematic moments in any Bioware game. Almost everything involving Solas was incredible old-school Bioware, and the final mission had big ME2 suicide mission vibes. But barely anyone gave the game enough of a shot to get that far.
Dude aside from the last couple bioware has put out nothing but gold for the most part. Meanwhile ea has been consistently shit since around 2017 (atleast that's when I noticed it) most of their sports games you can't even compete in unless your willing to fork out lots of money on microtransactions
I definitely put this squarely on ea thats the company that need to just tap out and let gaming get back to how it was
The last really good bioware game I remember playing was Mass effect 3 and they didn't even land that ending so it was good until it wasnt. Andromeda sucked, Veilguard sucked, Anthem reaaaally sucked.
It's been what 14/15 years of failure? Game development is competitive, you can't produce slop for that period of time and not get shut down. Other studios get shut down after one bad release.
Edit: Forgot inquisition from 2014, it was fine. I enjoyed it. It wasn't the best dragon age, it wasnt the worst.
I'll agree with you on the ending of 3 they definitely dropped the ball there. To me andromeda only sucked in comparison to the original trilogy on its on its not bad I like the story of it, the other 2 I have no defense for they were just failures.
So maybe your right and i was just looking at bioware with rose timted glasses
“Monstrosity” haha, this chronically online attitude toward games is fucking crazy. It’s absolutely far from perfect, could have and should have been better, but it’s a good action RPG that plays out like pretty much every BioWare game.
i mean idk lets be honest, the fact they just straight up cancelled mass effect instead of reassigning it to another studio means bioware has nothing substantial even after 6 years...
regardless of how we feel about EA, cancelling a game is a heavy decision that means they really don't like what they've seen
I looked into it recently thinking about buying it (loved the first one) and some of the decisions were baffling. The whole no player blood magic reasoning is especially hilarious
I didn't believe you at first. Their response was that the gameplay is in the working class Dock Town where slaves don't exist. They only exist in the "elite" areas.
You can't make this shit up lmfao, they really thought the player base was that stupid.
Yeah because who'd ever employ slaves in an area known for intense physical labour? Obviously slaves would only live and work in the gilded halls of their masters and never toll in the fields. What an utterly idiotic idea Bioware had there, with all of it actually.
There were certainly errors made with the writing approach. There was a lack of teeth; like why can I as a Qunari and Bellara as an Elf walk around Tevinter freely?
But, come on. Don't we pretty much know they had a year to write the game? EA fucked with that project relentlessly. It's not completely on them, it's kind of a miracle it didn't turn out any worse. Hell I'd take it over Andromeda.
You kinda contradicted yourself in the second paragraph. Even with just about a year, the basics of the places we went to were laid. They scrapped established lore and even took away all 'mean' options.
The fucked up the writing and atmosphere so badly. It was a purposeful choice to design the game that way. Andromedia you could at least tell people to fuck off
Veilguard came right after Anthem which was a huge bomb. You lose your publisher that much money you are not going to be able to keep them off of you on the next game.
And Anthem failing was almost entirely Bioware's fault. They painted themselves into a corner.
The problem is that EA has never made any good company better. I mean yeah I get that they were right to lean on Bioware after Anthem...but they aer the worst publishers and can't get anything right also lol
That is the most gutpunching stuff about this game. From gameplay stand point, it's like miles away from Inquisition. But the fact that they failed to be good at what they used to be good at (writings) is the cause of their downfall
It sucks ass because it muddies the discussion enough that you can't look at why a game went broke without getting lost in a sea of irrelevant (and highly unpleasant) discourse.
Ya I mean, you’ll always have weirdos that mod Wyll to be white or whatever. Theyre just a lost cause, but the issue well and truly comes when you’ve got diversity AND a bad game. It opens to door for people to do the whole “go woke go broke” stupid shit.
Last of us 2 comes to mind, I still loved the gameplay and the levels, very on par with the first game, but the story was just NOT as good and then all the forced media interaction with Druckman trying to tell the fans they weren’t sophisticated enough to understand the point of the narrative.
They really just put in a bunch of faux-diversity, ignoring the interesting world-building from previous titles (including an actual trans character from Inquisition in Krem) in favor of "pulling a Barv" (uggh).
The best way to describe it is 'toxic positivity'. No one can be negative or mean, everyone is Always positive, never fights or argues, and everyone always gets along at the end of the day.
I'm completely fine with the idea of a Qunari exploring gender identity. That actually is a good idea given how Qunari gender themselves based on workers and soldiers, Sten talked about it way back in Origins.
But when you start throwing around words like trans or non-binary, I'm immediately thrown out of the experience. Not because I'm against those things but because it just feels so 21st century.
Yeah, I agree. One of the great qualities of fiction is it allows you explore real-world topics in ways you never thought of. The exploration of gender and class in Qunari society and how those are linked was very interesting to me, and it really soured on me that they did not follow through on this.
Diversity had a little bit to do with it... or rather how you handle it in the game, if you do it like bg3 its good, because its not a lecture in progresivenes. If you let the story suffer in your attemt to lecture people, its bad.
I have not played it so cant say but if i understand you the story is about, or have a general theme of social justice? And thats fine, the problem i se is when someone tries to shohorn a message in to a game and the story suffers from it. "Suffers from" is ofcours subjective but I feel like there have been a few games the last couple of years that suffers from it. So diversity is not the culprit per se but the implementation, hence my: "little bit" :-)
I hate that every time people (not saying you) slam that game all they want to talk about is whether or not it's woke etc and not the fact that it's just such fucking garbage writing. Like the big massive twist half way through the game that only works if literally everybody in the story is a fucking sociopath. I get suspension of disbelief I mean I play fucking video games where I can set things on fire with my mind but the idea that such a big thing can happen and literally nobody mentions it at all or references it... Obviously I'm trying to avoid spoilers for anyone who does want to play it.
The worst part is that you can kind of feel the backbone of a good game under there but it's like they just fucking phoned in so much important shit and half arsed the writing. I didn't give a fuck that Taash was trans what does every single fucking conversation I have with this particular person have to be so fucking hostile and abusive and one note like they went out of their way to make them as unpleasant and unlikable as possible.
And for a game company that's renowned for its storytelling and it's lorr you would think you'd say a little bit more of that shit in their flagship game but it was just hey forget about everything that happened in the last few games...
It’s on them but you’re ignorant if you don’t think they’re constantly getting pushback from their parent company to make the game how they think it’ll be best based on focus groups.
Veilguard has an 82 on meta. Should we close half of Nintendo’s studios because Kirby air riders, legends ZA, Metroid prime 4, Mario tennis fever, switch sports resort all landed in the 70s?
And a 4.0 user score. Granted, a lot of those negative reviews are just idiots whining about wokeness, but still there's a huge gap between critics and players in how this game was received
I doubt it it was all on them. EA execs surely did meddle with Project Joplin which was what the team actually wanted to do and then had them change the Exec project again on into Veilguard on short notice.
Absolutely could be - their owners have little interest in it. Not a very high chance though unless someone is willing to pay a lot, which I don't really see happening
It could. It won't, but it could. Maybe when the whole enterprise gets gutted for parts, but don't hold your breath on the new owners seeing that IP as anything other than a way to pump money out of the remaining fans. It won't be picked up by anyone who will cherish it and restore the passion for it that the original creators had.
That, and it's likely that any studio that would be able to make a solid memorable product with the IP knows they're better off investing that money into producing their own new ideas that they have a passion for rather than try to reignite someone else's work in a way that doesn't feel "off" to some significant portion of the fans they'd be trying to chase. That's why the buyer is almost always some investment group that does not give a damn about preserving the IP and has no creativity of their own.
No, it's bioware's fault for making a shit product.
All of the old crew that made Mass effect and dragon age so good are long gone. Whatever that slop was that they called dragon age veilguard was just the last nail in the coffin.
It's probably best that Mass effect 5 got canceled, because they only would have sullied IP. I get no joy out of saying that.
The big thing to understand is that BioWare became incompetent. The people who made the games we all know and love left the company a long time ago, or lost their minds and thought releasing Anthem to the public was a good idea.
The BioWare we like died a long time ago, the BioWare that made Anthem and Veilguard was what was just put down.
That being said, EA probably manufactured the incompetence because they always tend to sabotage their own studios.
Arguably some of their best works were under EA. Bioware just aren't the studio they once were. EA didn't interfere and left Bioware alone to make Anthem. The final game was all they had to show for it.
From everything I've read over the years, this is almost entirely on incompetence in Bioware's leadership. The fact that they're still in "early development" 5 years after releasing a cinematic announcement trailer tells a pretty clear tale if you ask me.
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u/CallofDo0bie 8h ago
Wish it could've been different, but EA ruins everything.