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.
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u/CallofDo0bie 8h ago
Wish it could've been different, but EA ruins everything.