Right? They mismanaged the game since inception and then had the audacity to blame its failure on the pandemic. Anthem could’ve been an IP defining title like Destiny and Warframe but the suits couldn’t pull their heads out of each other’s asses to make it happen.
what little gameplay was there was actually pretty solid but I recall completing the main stuff with a friend (via xbox gameshare) in the span of 2 days and we tried to figure out what we were supposed to do next and the answer was "you're at endgame".
I’d raise the question, “where are those Jade Empire developers today,” and expect to quickly find that they are doing important work, after 5 minutes of googling:
I wouldn't be too unhappy if someone else carried the torch of mass effect the property elsewhere. I'm assuming that EA still holds all rights for those games?
I think the closest thing we'll get is the game Exodus.
It's being made by some former og Bioware devs, including the writer. So hopefully the game can hit that same mark.
Veilguard that was also "in development" since the end of Inquisition in... 2014. Restarted several times, put on hold for Anthem and Andromeda, etc etc and then launched to a fairly mid response.
They have been absolute garbage at producing quality for over a decade.
Veilguard was way bellow mid, it was slop. Completely homgenized mechanics to be another shit 3d action game and took out all the love that origins and inquisition had. Then it sealed it with a terrible plot.
The fact that they're not even too embarrassed to mention Anthem tells you a lot as well. This isn't EA doing EA things, it's a studio that has been lost to mismanagement for over a decade.
Yep, they were. Big budget, lots of leeway. Management sold the idea really hard but mismanaged and didn't deliver.
It seems like the only condition EA really put on it was for it to be online-only live service.
It's crazy how they fucked that game up. It was so cool concept wise and beautiful. And they had Warframe and Destiny to go by. They just had to mix those two with a cool world, story, and exosuits.
I'm betting that "we" aren't even the people/bosses that allowed their existence.
Pre-Saudi Purchase EA seemed squarely willing to support Bioware no matter what because those bosses seemed to believe in "Bioware-magic". The Post-Saudi Purchase EA bosses clearly do not share that faith in the Bioware-magic.
That well runs dry after over a decade of not producing a game that makes money. They have not put out anything of success in over a decade. Would you rather just continue to burn through cash as a business to prop up a segment of your company that just brings nothing to the table?
This was honestly overdue. The BioWare magic has been gone for a while.
Yeah, no studio can survive the dry spell Bioware has had.
-Mass Effect Andromeda (100 million budget)
-Anthem (100-200 million budget)
-Dragon Age: The Veilguard (200-400 million budget)
The budget is part of it. These games all flopped horrendously, with Anthem's end of service this year accompanied by no refunds representing the most severe hit to player trust. But the main thing was the time. That's like 12~ years of development time that didn't let them make a single decent game. Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League ate Rocksteady's entire output for about 8 years by comparison, which was still a huge failure.
In 12 years, From Software released Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Dark Souls II, Bloodborne, Dark Souls III, and Sekiro, as well as DLC for the various games. 12 years of CD Projekt Red output got us Witcher 2, Witcher 3 and two game-length DLCs, Gwent, Thronebreaker, and Cyberpunk 2077. 12 years is a long fucking time.
Maxis, Westwood, Bullfrog, Square before Enix, Blizzard North, LucasArts, Sierra, iD, hell I'd even throw in Midway coz NBA Jam and NFL Blitz were great. At least Capcom and Konami have had a revival these days.
u/FuckIPLawRyzen 9 7950X3D | MSI Suprim X 24G RTX 4090 | 64GB DDR5 RAM5h ago
I hate how Origin never ends up included in these things. They even desecrated its corpse and used the name for their online store for a while. At least they let the others have the dignity of staying dead.
Imagine if EA didn't buy Pandemic Studios and instead they somehow had enough funding to stay private or at least get bought up by a company that wouldn't hollow them out.
Mercenaries would probably would have been one of the bigger and popular open world IP's today.
100% this! Dragon Age Origins (DAO) was the last classic Bioware game. It was all downward from there. Even though EA acquired Bioware before the release of DAO, the majority of DAO's production was done before the EA acquisition.
Getting out of early development has been the problem for at least 3 of their games of we include this. 2 others were Anthem and Andromeda, they had bad project leadership.
Why do game companies with successful, groundbreaking IPs keep trying to branch out with new projects and wear themselves thin when it's time to work on their mainstays with millions of fans? Looking squarely at you, Bethesda.
With bioware it was already reported that they got lucky with a couple of their games going super nova so it made leadership believe in bioware magic. So they didn't feel the need to improve on any of the issues with production because in the end bioware always came through because of their bioware magic....until they didn't
Relevant music trivia: Saliva (of Click Click Boom fame) still produces music, but is an entirely different band than the one people probably think of or hear on the radio.
Speaking as a Command and Conquer fan, it won't happen. They'll just sit on the IP's collecting dust until they eventually enter the public domain so they can occasionally put out a shitty mobile game and collect some revenue from the property this way.
I remember when EA took over and both SWTOR and Mass Effect started getting shittier and becoming more and more cash grabs... RIP Bioware, but they died a long time ago.
Downfall of BW started when EA acquired them and made them move away from the identity of making single player narrative rpg choices matter games to stupid multiplayer games with MTX, implanting a toxic culture at work, making them release half backed DA2 then forcing them to move to Frostbite engine which had no tools to make a proper rpg games.
ME3 was celebrated for being "the best multiplayer mode of the "force multiplayer into everything" era".
Also, a lot of Bioware's mistakes are Bioware's own fault:
The ME3 ending was Casey Hudson and Mac Waters locking themselves in an office to rewrite the ending months prior to release, and stepping out to tell the scenario writers " you have 4 weeks to make this new ending work".
Many of Bioware's staff are on record for saying that "The worst thing that ever happened to this company is the success of Dragon Age: Origins" because that's when the Bioware management started sniffing their own farts and believing that "Bioware Magic" could solve everything.
Andromeda was heavily meh because Bioware choose to send it to their Montreal office which at the time was entirely made up of newly promoted managers who hadn't learned how to be game dev managers and devs who were fresh in the doors and weren't ready to pick up an IP with as much weight as Mass Effect.
Anthem flopped because EA gave Bioware 7 years of dev time and Bioware blew 5 of those years on nothing, not even having an elevator pitch for what they wanted the game to be; in the Jason Schrier autopsy interviews, devs reports that managers would go into a meeting needing to make critical decisions, argue for 8 hours and leave at the end of the day with no decisions being made and thus nothing for the devs to work on.
I know I'm going against the hivemind but most evidence points to Bioware more or less doing themselves in. EA put them on life support but Veilguard and "early development" ME5 got them to finally pull the plug.
Except that isn't true. People forgot that these studio's while under the EA flag were pretty autonomous and could make their own decisions. The fact that some of these games did poorly, were fully developer choices, not EA corporate choices.
The choice to close bioware also wasn't EA's decision but the Saudi owners decision as they were bought by the Saudi's in august. That Saudi take over also left EA with a massive debt.
Exactly. Lots of EA hate, which they usually deserve, but still being in early development after 6 years would get any studio canned. Not to mention the turds they’ve dropped over the past 10 year
That's not on the devs, that's on the marketing team, & the point of those super early trailers is to hype up investors. Most devs think it's just as dumb as we do.
The BioWare that brought us those games has been corporatized and diminished by bigger forces to provide experiences that BioWare was never really providing in the first place, all just to maximize potential earnings.
Every product since around 2015 has been of pretty bad quality, and it only kept getting worse.
Typical corporate stuff....
They forget that the identity of products and services is basically created by people, and replacing those people changes the identity of the product completely.
Andromeda, Anthem, Veilguard. All subpar games with a "promise", but no real innovation, awful writing, and mediocre gameplay.
Not sure if they were just juggling employees around or what, but BioWare basically had no identity and was producing products for almost no one. Like, I would genuinely love to see their marketing team doing research and then instructing them to provide completely different visions from the past to satisfy the current market.
But what market? For who? For what?
I really dont get who the Veilguard and Andromeda supposed to be for ? It's not like Bioware is a new thing producing a new product... You already captured the market, you already know what the markets want...
That's like Apple doing Iphone without Camera... Like WHY WOULD YOU CHANGE SO MUCH? For what reason?
Andromeda was 100% them trying to cycle up a second studio since it was made by the ME3 multiplayer guys and not the main team. It just didn't work out so they abandoned the idea.
Inquisition was the death twitch after the dagger was buried in its heart.
It was undeniably a step down but if you bothered to sift through the debris there were still veins of gold in it. Cullen battling addiction, Solas as the secret villain, Cassandra, Dorian and Iron Bull as characters, Tresspasser setting up a potential great finale that was never to be.
BioWare spent the last of what it was in Inquisition and it managed to put enough of itself into it to fool plenty of people for a decade longer, I count myself as one of them
"Early development on the next Mass Effect project is ending" After 6 years and they were still in early development..Seriously?
Fuck EA, sure, but who in their right mind would keep funding a team like that?
I'm just pissed off about Mass Effect. Andromeda had really good moment to moment gameplay with totally forgettable characters and setting, and I was cautiously optimistic for ME4 and now we'll never get it. Feels like the games industry is collapsing before our very eyes with closure after closure and mass layoffs across the board.
ME4 development was just going to be a repeat of Anthem. To languish for years with an occasional vague marketing attempt. Before EA puts their foot down and BioWare rushes a “game” out after a decade of development.
Then we would find out that development restarted twice. The game we ended up getting was rushed in 3 years after sitting around for a decade. Story, gameplay and everything else being all over the place.
I enjoyed the initial experience. The flying felt great, the atmosphere was fantastic. There was just absolutely nothing to the game. Mile wide but and inch deep.
You can't put it all on EA. Bioware was a highly mismanaged company and it was their own fault. Their development cycle was dick around for several years then try to churn out a game in one year.
EA played a major part in the poor performance of their last 3 games
Let’s not act like BioWare are entirely blameless, a lot of the staff that made their games iconic left and they’ve been making crap for 3 games straight.
As to my last point: dragon age origins for me is up there with BG3 in terms of great RPGs, I absolutely adored the art style, the way the characters interacted and the world created. I launched into dragon age veilguard when it came out as a huge fan of the series and it was honestly one of the most jarring games I’ve ever played, it was like the people at the studio hated everything the series had been and went out of their way to annoy old fans. There’s innovation and then there’s self mutilation. BioWare as we knew it was gone long before EA shut it down
Every form of journalistic media had the same title in their reviews of DA:Veilguard.
“A return to form.”
They had to buy their way into every media outlet to make the game look like it was Origin but better, instead of actually creating a game that was true to its name.
The game actually made me enjoy the other Dragon Age installments less.
That tagline was so disconnecred from reality. It implies that they would be moving away from Inquisistion yet its story, visuals and humor was basically Inquisition part 2. It also implies they would be more like Origins, yet there is no Origin style start.
Read the Veilguard art book if you ever see it. They briefly touched on doing focus groups for the art style, but decided against it because they were going to do it regardless of the focus test results.
Making crap for 3 games straight over the span of nearly 10 years.
The constant cock-teasing with Mass Effect 4 (5?) got so boring. After a short while I just resigned myself to the thought of never getting another good bioware game ever again, so this means absolutely nothing to me.
Whoever wrote this didn't even include Jade Empire in the list of titles. That is telling.
I can forgive them for not including classics like MDK2 or TOR, since they are derivate titles of base franchises... but Jade Empire is one of the last, original, martial arts games and made while independent. It was an integral part of their history.
a whole squad of just absolutely insufferable pieces of shit who make everything about their own issues and you literally can't even tell them you dont like them
Out of the games listed in bold. Not one of those franchises have had a hit in the last 15 years. Which is a shame. Some of my favorite games of all time. But id were being honest the same people who made those games do not work at there anymore
Game play has never really been their problem, they couldn't ripcord and pull Anthem around soon enough on the end game narrative and game cycle. The writing on Andromeda was not fully up to spec through the red lense of their prior games.
I cannot tell you the number of hours I spent on Neverwinter Nights 2 and the mods. I know it was Obsidian's by then, but they made the engine underneath it. NWN and NWN2 were a formative experience in my now lifelong love of D&D and roleplaying games in general.
I get that shitty people made shitty decisions along the way, but there are a lot of nerds like me who found passions thanks to this studio, and a lot of well-intentioned nerds at the company whose livelihoods just ended because of corporate greed and mismanagement.
This isn't a victory. No one should be celebrating this.
Inquisition was their last decent game. Since then smaller studios crafting better genuine role playing experiences have put out much better work. Sad to see Bioware end its life as a hollow shell of itself.
Yeah, serves them right after what they have done to the Dragon Age franchise. I loved old BioWare. BG1 and 2, KotOR 1, Mass Effect Trilogy, DragonAge Origins. Fond memories. But I won't shed a tear after what BioWare has become in the last couple of years.
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u/SadlyItsSearles 7h ago
Refusing to even mention Jade Empire but including Anthem is a rough choice.