Bioware still had the talent, that's what's so tragic. It just got utterly squandered by EA's bone-headed live-service nonsense demands. That's half the reason DA:V and Anthem ended up the way that they did.
Dude Anthem was fully on BioWare. This has been a well known fact for a while now. Ex employees have come forward that EA gave BioWare free reign to do whatever they wanted. The only thing EA forced them to do was keep the flying mechanics as that was going to be removed
I don't disagree. But if your corporate overlords come and tell a traditionally single-player studio to go "dowhateveryou want....as long as it's a live service", a genre they had no experience or discipline expertise in, I think it's pretty obvious how that would play out.
Actually, if open letters are to believed, ea might be the only reason anthem was as good as it managed to be. . . And that the entire clusterfuck around it was mostly biowares fault, or rather managements fault. Over reliance on "bioware magic" or last minute crunch to literally anybody else. Its said that half the staff didnt even know what they were making till the e3 "real gameplay footage" came out then had to scramble to make what was in the trailer.
The whole thing was a hot mess and a crystalized example of corpo beauracracy and too many managers
My contention is that Bioware had no business making a live-service title in the first place. A decision to pivot an RPG developer into that style of game out of nowhere reeks of corporate meddling from the very beginning. If EA salvaged it, it's because they wanted the live service gamble to desperately succeed.
SWTOR was made by BioWare Austin, a completely separate team that got spun up specifically to make that. BioWare Edmonton (the RPG-focused studio) tried to pivot into live service themselves with Anthem. That was the real misstep.
Anthem was always envisioned as an online multiplayer game, according to developers who worked on it, but it wasn’t always a loot shooter, the kind of game where you’d endlessly grind missions for new weapons.
The whole development process was insanely sloppy... the live service part of it really doesn't carry most the blame when they struggled to even choose a name for the game
the studio leadership just sucked... they would've failed even at making a single player game.
We keep seeing it too, Suicide Squad, everything Sony keeps forcing out, studio heads are so blinded by dollar signs, jealousy watching Pubg, Fortnite, GTA online, print money, they keep forcing stupid out the door..
Dragon Age: Inquisition turning out okay was the worst thing to happen to Bioware. Their development process was already awful by then, but the result did well enough they didn't see a need to change. That led to the Andromeda and Anthem train wrecks.
And it wasn’t even that good. It had its moments but it was a weak year for games and Witcher 3 really outclassed it the year after. Gotta say the Trespasser dlc saved it a bit but the main game story was poor.
The EA execs forced Bioware to shove out mindless moneymakers in a competitive market instead of true sequels to ME and DA. They should've all been fired when BG3 became a smashing success within the traditional WRPG genre, which is what DA3 should've been. If they wanted to make a live-service, f2p style game, they could've spun off the already successful ME3 co-op mode. I see the same thing happening with Blizzard, where SC3 has been deprioritized despite all indications that it would sell extremely well in the current environment. The RTS market has been completely desaturated and internet speeds are great while GPUs prices have gone through the roof.
Anthem suffered much the same way No Man's Sky did: Rushed by the publisher to make a quick buck, launched amidst bigger AAA games, then the publisher got mad when the game flopped due to over-hyping a game they rushed.
What sucks is Bioware saw working on fixing Anthem when EA shut it down. They had completely redone a lot of the systems, but EA would rather pull the plug than actually try letting devs make a good game.
No Man's Sky came back from this scenario and is one of the best space exploration games today, so I think Anthem could have become something amazing if EA wasn't a bunch of cowards.
It's not about faith of cowardice. Those things don't even enter the equation. EA is an entity of pure greed. There isn't a single consideration in their hearts except immediate profit. I imagine an oil company that decided to pump money out of people's pockets instead of viscous liquids from the ground.
It just got utterly squandered by EA's bone-headed live-service nonsense demands. That's half the reason DA:V and Anthem ended up the way that they did.
They actually didn't demand it. This has been talked about by former Bioware employees. Mark Darrah for example has a YouTube channel talking about this.
Gist is that higher ups at Bioware were the ones to push the live service angle for both Anthem and DA thinking it's what EA wanted to hear. EA was actually a bit skeptical about it but okayed the pitches. While I understand the instinct to put all blame on EA, because they absolutely deserve it, Bioware's downfall is almost entirely self-inflicted.
From the stories being told EA was being ludicrously hands-off with them and gave them way too many chances. It is kind of crazy how much they let Bioware get away with.
Completely WRONG. There have been plenty of evidence that if it wasn't for EA, the studio would have closed doors long before that. EA, of all publishers, on the contrary gave way too much leeway and had way too much tolerance for Bioware's bullshit. There wasn't any talent remaining and you'd have to be crazy to believe otherwise after seeing what the last Dragon Age turned out to be ...
It's pretty well-documented at this point that a large part of the reason DA:V was such a middling flop was because it got rebooted to be a live-service (at EA's behest), and then rebooted again to move it back to single-player after Anthem crashed and burned. So I'm not as willing to lay that mess entirely at the feet of Bioware. EA can keep their corporate profit-chasing meddling and shove it.
EA worst move with BioWare was mandating the use of the Frostbite Engine which just wasn’t suited for story RPG games that BioWare specialized in.
Nearly everything else was on BioWare. They made the choice to go with a live service looter shooter and ignore competitors like Destiny and the Division. They are the ones with issues with mismanagement (BioWare spent 6 of its 7 years on developing Anthem on pre production. It took EA to mandate the best feature flying like Iron Man in the game) and crunch culture (BioWare Magic.) EA didn’t make BioWare treat its subsidiary studios in Montreal and Austin like crap.
I love BioWare for its incredible games with KOTOR and the Mass Effect Trilogy. But BioWare brought it on itself with 3 bombs in a row with Andromeda, Anthem, and Veilguard.
137
u/Mantiquirk 7h ago
Bioware still had the talent, that's what's so tragic. It just got utterly squandered by EA's bone-headed live-service nonsense demands. That's half the reason DA:V and Anthem ended up the way that they did.