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.
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.
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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.