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..
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u/Mantiquirk 8h ago
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.