My impression is that Bioware has had a leadership problems for years. Hearing about the development of Anthem and Veilguard, leadership refuses to make decisions or make them and then reverse them repeatedly. It's only when EA stepped on, for both games, that they crunched and got something playable put together. With Veilguard there was EA meddling as well.
Bioware had great writers, but they never grew past the "Bioware magic" culture, and it sank them.
Also had the issue of BioWare leadership grew to resent their writers and wound up chasing a lot of them off because they felt the reliance on good writing was "holding the studio back".
the reliance on good writing was "holding the studio back".
I still can't believe this sentiment can exist in a studio that wants to make role playing games. Like, I'm sorry, what kind of game did you want to make, exactly, where the writing doesn't make or break the game? Pacman?
Yeah. That’s the thing though, they DIDN’T want to make roleplaying games. They were trying to “branch out” and wanted to make the next CoD. Mass Effect to a degree was their experimental first steps in that genre, which is why each entry in the trilogy utilized less and less rpg mechanics. Anthem would have been their magnum opus in that regard (and we saw how that turned out).
People can blame EA all they want (sometimes rightfully so, absolutely), but at the end of the day, modern day Bioware has been nothing but a dysfunctional studio that has long relied on old merits – merits which were allegedly also born mostly out of heavy crunch and bad planning. The term "Bioware magic" is honestly a spit in the face on everyone who worked their asses off, missing sleep and family time, just to stick the landing.
Add to that a completely broken organizational management structure where there's no real leadership at work, and no one who wants to take decisions or stick to a firm vision. Voilá, you get hell for both development and it's developers.
The fallout is alao plain to see: three commercially mediocre games that cost unproportionate amounts of time and resoruces. Honestly, with that in mind, who can blame EA for shutting them down? The alternative would be to do a formal restructuring and then hoping for miracles yet again.
As much as it pains me as an avid Bioware fan, this is the logical decision.
Dragon Age 2 was way more impressive. The fact that they can make a game with that scale with actually decent story in 18 months was nothing short of phenomenal.
The ME team all got moved over to Veilguard to finish it. Then, when it disappointed in sales, EA laid off a ton of the studio. There was only 50 people left.
Part of the layoffs are definitely the result of EA being acquired in a leveraged buyout. EA is now saddled with a ton of debt and one of the easiest ways to remove some of that quickly is mass layoffs.
When Veilguard didn't perform (part of that is on Bioware and part of that is on EA), zero chance that the studio survived unfortunately.
Like I hate that we might not ever see another Mass Effect game, but honestly I had little faith the current Bioware would even be able to do it justice. They've had massive talent drain and clearly couldn't get development up and running.
Bioware was the one who wouldnt change or fix the endings that put the franchise in the position its in. They've never been able to take the franchise forward largely because they fucked up Mass Effect 3 with those terrible, dog shit endings.
You have Casey Hudson to thank for that. “Because we ran out of time and I loved Deus Ex so much, I’ll just pull a George Lucas by ripping off those endings and passing it off as my own.”
Casey Hudson was absolutely part of the problem. He and Mac Walters were the ones who locked out all of the original writers and wrote the entire thing themselves. Mac Walters is an idiot too
It would have been easy enough to retcon them. Use Audemus's Happy Ending Mod for a good example of what it should have looked like and go from there. I suppose now we'll never have that, but I'll always have that mod and how much it means.
Yes. Which most companies don't readily do, but they did mess it up and it'd be easier to just come clean with that. None of the endings make for a decent setup for a Mass Effect 5 or anything like that. So you have to do something, anyway. The lack of a canon ending is almost a blessing, at this point.
Would that I had billions to spend on it! Of course, then I'd be obligated to do something perhaps more productive, but still. ME5, official licensed Mass Effect Roleplaying Game, and more would be hitting the field, you better believe that.
Same here. I at least wanted to see them give it a shot so this sucks. Also I love Dragon Age too even though I didn't like Veilguard, same thing. I wanted to see them make another attempt. The only thing that makes this not sting so much for me is knowing we're getting 2 Mass Effect spiritual successors next year.
Yeah looking forward to that one and the expanse. But damn Bioware used to be such good world builders and I've played the trilogy and dragon age so many times, so it's sad.
First 3 Dragon ages games are great. My first ME was Andromeda and I enjoyed it. Then played the legacy collection and was blown away, beat the entire trilogy multiple times now. This hurts. Best case scenario they get other studios to work on these IPs. But I wouldn't be surprised if both go dormant.
Thats one of the biggest problems with modern triple A games. The studios get so overrun with corporate bloat that shit that could be done by like 40 people in 6 months ends up taking 5 years and 1000 people. Thats why so many indie games are blowing up now. Theyre better than these giant studio games, have more content, dont take a decade to make, AND theyre actually, you know, in a playable state at launch unlike most triple A games these days it seems. Its ridiculous. Also, why the hell is Anthem on that list? That whole game was a shitshow.
Yeah, my reaction as well. Shows what bullshit artists they are. They pedaled it like they were in active development when really they were prob story boarding at most.
Bioware. Bioware has been going on for several years. I wish this was surprising but after 3 long form Schreir articles of "What Went Wrong With [Insert any Bioware Title from the last decade]" none of this is surprising to me.
I’m a bit confused about how this community was under the impression that there was a big team working on this game. BioWare has had a skeleton crew for years, and were fighting to come up with a proof of concept that could save the studio. Looks like they didn’t impress EA.
Basically everyone had already been laid off, there was probably an extremely small number of people actually working on ME5.
I knew the end was coming after the disaster of Andromeda’s development.
That was purely BioWare’s fault. Complete lack of focus, getting late to development and then tearing it all down and rebuilding because someone had a good idea but it required the entire thing to be redone.
The last dragon age being very poorly regarded just accelerated it.
I wouldn't say it's completely their fault because especially in the case of dragon age EA originally wanted that to be a live service and then they had to pivot back to single player and I feel like you can tell in the final product that it was originally intended to be a live service. But I do definitely think that there was a lot of mismanagement on the part of BioWare too.
Now a days, video games can be in development for several years before somehow they scrap and start over, it could be creative changes, technology advances that dictate that the engine is now outdated and needs to be changed, or other similar things
"Early development" can mean a lot of things. From what we can gather they had a very small team working on it, basically making prototypes and vertical slices since Veilguard was released, i imagine this project got kind on a freeze when EA was sold as the new owners would want to evaluate for themselves and OK budgets, this is the Saudis making final decisions and cancelling a lot of things.
that's not entirely fair to the DA team, leadership dropped the ball hard by constantly pulling talent off the DA team to work on other games (anthem most notably) and then constantly shifting the demands and scope of the game while denying them resources only to then turn around and say yes to the Mass Effect team when they asked for the exact same things the DA team got a firm "no" too.
Not to mention, ME4 was still only in PRE-PRODUCTION when the team got called in to finish veilguard, which was only the last 18 months of development (reminder, they ANNOUNCED ME4 in December of 2020, so they spent almost 3 years actively NOT working on it before getting called in by BioWare management to aid the DA team due to problems caused by BioWare management themselves.
nothing, and lets be real thats the real issue , not EA closing them down. They released that teaser how many years ago? and they have done NOTHING... yeah if u are paid to do a job and dont do it ur done... simple as that.
Honestly part of the reason why I'm not 100% blaming EA here. Like Bioware announced the new Mass Effect game 6 years ago, and they finished development of their last game 2 years ago. How are they still in early development?
Just piss poor upper management and investor decision making circling the drain for years and years. Andromeda got shot in the foot by being forced out before it was ready, had a terrible launch and no follow up, which made the IP unprofitable to investors. Then Veilguard wasn’t profitable enough either, after a troubled long development. Mass Effect 5’s announcement was a fund raising round for investors to prove the IP still had value. They didn’t actually start developing it until recently.
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u/-ForgottenSoul 7h ago
This is depressing so the IP is basically over.. I dont understand why they wouldnt release the game when its been in development for ages.