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.
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u/ItsYaBoyBackAgain 7h ago edited 7h ago
RIP to one of the most legendary studios of all time. It's a shame how they became a shell of their former selves the last decade or so. Fuck EA.