I don’t understand how what EA does isn’t just a straight up crime. There has to be some kind of checks and balances that prevent a corporation from buying another profitable corporation and making it unprofitable on purpose almost immediately every single time.
I guess Mass Effect andromeda after they fixed the game. Everyone hated on it, because of the bugs. It overshadowed everything. No one was actually talking about how the game was in general.
I am the guy, who is willing to look past bugs. I played Red Orchestra 2 on launch day.
It was one of the most buggiest games I have played at that time, but when the game worked, like it was supposed to, nothing comes close to it. The intensity, the atmosphere, everything was just amazing.
I played Andromeda years after it came out with zero expectations and it was still kinda buggy but I just didn't like it. The moment-to-moment writing was just so far below the standards of the trilogy and the story beats never impressed me. Even the visuals look uglier than ME3 outside of a few moments where the lighting effects look cool (this one I can blame on EA forcing Bioware to use the Frostbite engine).
I can overlook bugs too, I played Cyberpunk on release and finished it within a couple weeks of it coming out and despite the bugs I thought it was a really good game that could be great with some polish (no pun intended) and tweaks to the skill tree.
It was one of the first games to be thrown under the bus by undeserved rage campaigning against ”Wokism”.
I played it at launch and while it would have been better to get polished a month longer, it was just fine, a couple of patches and the facial animations were fixed as well.
Kotaku leaked that EA didn’t give them that month because they needed sales for their quarterly report.
Out of those two major issues EA had complete power over the release date. If they’d prioritized maximum sales and a good release they’d let them push the release date back a month and the 8/10 reviews likely would have been enough to counter the hype train against woke companions.
It’s all on EA in my book. The game is fine and would have been great with the planned DLC content.
The management were/are completely out of touch with anything that isn’t a new touchup of a sports game.
Andromeda and Veilguard were decent games, both sitting somewhere in the range of a 7/10 Metacritic score, they just weren’t the exceptional games that BioWare was known for.
That is not correct. Both Anthem and Andromeda were the fruits of the failure but not the initial failure.
EA pushed Bioware to push out games in very quick succession. When DAO was a hit EA pushed Bioware to develop a game for the 2011, even though it was less than 2 years of dev time after DAO's DLC. Inquisition wasn't supposed to be the third game it was supposed to be the second game. But DA2 got made because EA wanted a financial boost.
They also pushed to develop ME3 in 2 years.
Between 2007 and 2013 Bioware released 6 games. Two whole trilogies. Each one with dozens of hours of gameplay. And you could see how each game had issues because they didn't get enough time to fix them.
This is what pushed Bioware into failure. It gave both Bioware and EA the false sense that at the last moment they will make a game great no matter what.
but the writing is not an isolated process. The writing failure is all part of the bigger issue. The writers don't just get to write whatever they want so that it would be put into game straight away. Whatever they wrote would have to be read by many people and approved by several people. Not just Bioware people but EA people for sure. That's how corporate works.
And it's not like ALL the writing is bad, but the output of several writers clearly wasn't up to the task like Trick Weekes. Whatever happened to them in between has had a negative consequence on their writing, or they lost whoever was doing the editorial work for them.
All that was written, especially for the fully voiced conversations and cutscenes would have had to go through an approval process. This means multiple people either failed to notice how bad it is, which I somehow doubt or there was another reason or reasons why the writing was approved despite the drop in quality.
It could have been another case of toxic positivity, which wouldn't surprise me considering how Bioware seemed to have bent over backwards to do certain things and why so many dialogues in DAV feel like they were written in the presence of HR. If no one was allowed to criticise the writing done even when it was clearly bad because of WHO the writer was then the result really is not a surprise.
Plus, the issue with writing didn't start with Andromeda. The ending to ME3 proves that they had an issue already and their belief in the "bioware magic" clearly was not correct.
it simply took many more people leaving over the years for the issue to come to the front.
The problem with andromeda is certainly not the game engine. Mass effect 1 is extremely janky and still more core compelling. All the best talent left the company.
Frostbite is a great engine when given time to learn it and develop the parts that weren’t available. It’s well known they had issues but I agree, Andromeda runs great and easily has the best gameplay of the mass effect games.
When they pushed it out early they got a lot of flak for facial animations, it was fixed pretty quickly in the second or third patch but together with the antiwokeism hype train it gave enough bad press to tank the sales.
Patrick Söderlund literally gave an open directive that ALL IN HOUSE GAMES MUST BE DEVELOPED USING FROSTBITE. They MIGHT have chosen it themselves at one point, but it WAS forced on them, and they were shooting themselves in the foot. Theare are a LOT of issues with Andromeda, Anthem, even DA:I, but we'll never know how many of those could have been avoided/lessened, if they didn't have to fucking rewrite the SAVE SYSTEM for every single game because frostbite didn't even natively support that! Not to mention the dialogue system and everything else. Anthem is the result of stupid exec decisions, not in last place the fact that they decided to push it onto the Bioware B team who has never developed something like that before, them generating a fake trailer for E3, generating fake playable builds for the execs, etc.
Bioware and Bioware Montreal not sharing stuff was entirely self inflicted by drama between the studios.
EA had to force them to accept help from DICE and the Need for Speed team respectively, which is why the flight system and NOMAD are the most polished parts of either game.
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u/HankTuggins 7h ago
I don’t understand how what EA does isn’t just a straight up crime. There has to be some kind of checks and balances that prevent a corporation from buying another profitable corporation and making it unprofitable on purpose almost immediately every single time.