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.
yeah, it really wasnt needed and was tacked on, but it was really fun. playing a geth supreme walking up and melee any enemy to death is something i miss to this day
The phrase "BioWare Magic," sounds to me like leaders/execs excusing/ignoring their failures of planning, management, and strategy because the end product turned out fantastic.
I've seen it in other businesses too, where "revenue covers all sins." The delusion that because the end result was good/profitable, that most of the decisions and structure used to get there must be roughly as good as the end product.
I imagine that many times someone raised a concern, leadership essentially said, "We don't have to do it the RIGHT way, we have the BioWare magic!"
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"
Do you have any names or articles or anything like that? Not really that I'm doubting you, but I haven't really ever kept up with the actual bioware employees who were around at that time despite Mass Effect 1 and DA:O being in my top 5 favorite games lol. I'd love to get a bit more insight about why it all went to shit.
I will say ahead of time that Jason doesn't actually outright name any employees because he cites that many of the employees whom he talked to as telling him that they were explicitly told "don't talk to the press".
To put it simply, Origin was a mess of development with management flying by the seat of the pants and the devs pulling massive crunch time because management could never truly settle on what they wanted and where they wanted to focus.
The fact that it turned out great was what was coined as "Bioware Magic" (which in most other companies/industries is understood to actually be "one manager or director who trades years of his/her life expectancy in order to desperately pull the threads to hold a project together to get it to a successful launch")
Anthem flopped but oddly enough it might have made a tiny loss or be in the black. So many were still huffing Bioware hype that it made ~$105m in the first month. Of course those sales dropped off hard when it became obvious that the game was trash.
Veilguard was a disaster and the company rightly died off after that debacle. It was hilarious how all the game reviewers gave it 80%+ and called gamers hating on it right-wing lunatics. I guess EA spent some of their marketing bux to make that happen.
I dunno, I think was really how bad the release of Anthem was that killed them. Not only was is a direct competitor with Destiny (which was at the time like envy of the gaming world) and if it had been even remotely playable and at all fun at release, it could have reinforced the studio and kept them healthy. Or if they had fixed it and supported it like CP77, they could have recovered.
Instead it was a broken, dogshit release with bad balance and lazy mechanics, and no endgame at all. When the release wasn't great, it was promptly and completely abandoned. Veilguard was a pathetic last gasp, Anthem was the killshot.
And anthem was BioWare demanding ea let them make it, not ea making them make it. Pretty sure they made up half tbt game day before ea was showing up to see a playable demo to keep finding rolling or just scrap it.
Maybe it was like that forever ago, but I have had credits go to escrow multiple times only to sub and get them back and I’ve been playing since 2020. Buy a sub and you’ll get your credits back
It's literally never worked the way he said lol. He encountered a bug and instead of trying to fix it or asking customer service for help, he decided to hold a grudge for years and slander the game when it comes up. Quite the choice lol
That is definitely not supposed to happen, I've subbed multiple times after long periods of being preferred status and I got my escrow credits back every time. If you still care enough you can probably put a ticket in with support and get your credits back.
And if you had googled that for all of 5 minutes you would see that that isn't what is supposed to have happened and you probably could have contacted customer service to resolve it?
it's always the same. Everything bad = EA. Everything good is the developer.
Like, EA said to bioware why don't you take 5 years to think about the start of maybe getting into the early stages of development of Mass Effect 5. Obviously they don't want that.
EA has regularly been shown to actually be pretty easy to work with.
Even when people look back at some of the old classics like Sim City 3000. EA were able to acquire Maxis purely because they were going broke. We don't get that masterpiece without EA. And of course EA just lets them finish development and then work with Will Wright to do The Sims and then Spore.
You can dislike EA and criticize them for 100s of things. but largely they seem to be a pretty good publisher.
EA bought Bioware in 2007, TOR was announced in 2008, Dragon Age Origins came out in 2009, and Mass Effect 2 came out in 2010. It was a slow death primarily caused by their own incompetence when the OGs left the company, EA just enabled it while trying to suck as much as they could out of it.
yes they had a say in it as they helped fund it. Thats how that works. So did microsoft who actually published it. Your notion of how all this works is really naive. Check the reporting Jason Schrier has done on Bioware to get a better look at how this all works. You will find that EA actually did very little to manage the studio and they let them run themselves. EA at times was so removed that they didnt even know that Anthem was a mess for years. Only discovering that when bioware asked for a delay
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