The very core of the core talent were led by the co-founders, Ray and Greg, both of whom retired in 2012 to go live their best lives without the pressure. They weren't forced out, at all.
Ray's a casual friend and he had just had enough. He travels a lot, does some photography, invests some. Greg wanted to focus on craft brewing.
The games industry in the West has been fucked in the ass for several years now, and Bioware is not the Bioware of old. It happens. No organization stays great forever.
No. They just made bad games. There’s such a giant circlejerk with this “studio good corporate bad” even when studios such as Rocksteady tell you to your face “This is the game we wanted to make” with failures such as Suicide Squad.
It’s as if studios are completely incapable of making bad games.
Yeah, as much as I am anti-corpos, Bungie was operating without oversight for a long ass time and it didn’t stop their top talent leaving or them pushing out crap that sucked.
I know I struggled with this for a while, but we just need to accept that at the end of the day the studio is just a name. It’s the people who worked on the game that mattered, and virtually no studios from the “glory days” of the XB360/PS3 era remain at any of the “timeless” studios from that period.
There's a bit of Ship of Theseus to it. If everyone who made your favorite game from a studio leaves that studio and gets replaced by new talent, is it the same studio? And if that old talent goes elsewhere and makes a new studio, is that the same studio? If the old studio with new people says one thing a new studio with old people says another, which is right?
Neverwinter Nights released in 2002. How many people who worked on it worked on Veilguard 22 years later? The problem is seeing studios as singular people who can't change.
Yea. That's a fair take. Can this Bioware take credit for games nobody employed actually wrote meaningful code for? I mean can I buy the shell of blockbuster or quiznos then claim all their former accomplishments as my own?
That’s just how the real world works? The company I work for are the dominate manufacturer in their field. “We” are shareholders who bought their way in a few years ago. “We” are middle management who have nothing to do with the company’s start up. “We” includes me who only worked there for a year.
When the company communicates outward they will speak as if “we” are the people who built the company while the truth is those people took the check and sold the company a long time ago and “we” are a whole new generation doing way more advanced manufacturing then what they ever did. Some of our customers might be the same, most of them are not.
To be fair on the last sentence you mentioned, for the longest time back in the day a studio was it's producer or head devs. That still is the case in the indie and even AA world but for the truly giant studios obviously far less so. I've always clocked with games with that singular vision overseeing the direction of a game. Even modern examples like Doom 2016/Eternal having a guiding hand (Marty Stratton! Couldn't remember his name lol), and the obviously Indie studio, but back then Ultima was Garriot and Wing Commander was Chris Roberts, Looking Glass games Warren Specter - they obviously had teams that did varying amounts of work, often being put on spotlight too, but that was the idea. American McGee splintering off from Doom to make awesome games type of stuff.
Now, the really big dev teams don't have the same focus, the heads are managerial and HR bands stuff out a bit too much etc.
They started Mass Effect 2 about the time EA bought them. Every game they made after that was worse than the last, every game they made before that was a masterpiece.
Usually it's not that clear cut, but this time it is. They started making bad games right after EA bought them.
We've had Respawn and Motive make great single player games under the EA banner. Bioware is washed. Respawn has managed to tell better stories in their Jedi games than whatever Bioware has churned out since Inquisition.
That was like 10 years after Bioware went to shit. And the Jedi games are simply good but no more than that, while any Bioware game up to ME2 is among the greatest of all time.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that current BioWare ie the devs who made Veilguard are talented. But you can still put blame on EA for driving away their talent all those years ago. The talented developers who made those classic games clearly loved their games, but they left. EA failed to retain them, that’s on EA
Yet it was BioWare of today that can be blamed for replacing that talent with mediocrity. People leave game studios all the time for countless reasons, it's ultimately on BioWare itself for choosing who replaces them, and they chose bad game developers.
I'm sure the dev team that is desperate to keep their jobs amidst massive layoffs and corporate mergers are going to say that they are behind their project. To do the opposite would ensure they'd be on the chopping block.
You're a fucking shill for the investors. Absolute braindead take.
I can’t tell if you’re trolling or just a midwit. Good job.
“They weren’t responsible and if they said they were then they were coerced into saying it!” is such a low IQ argument. You should be embarrassed of typing that out LOL.
That's so fucking funny because the person I'm replying to is so dense they don't understand that the team that made KotOR and DA:O left almost a decade ago. This is absolutely the problem with EA and more recently the pedo ass Saudi investment fund that's running the show now.
You have such a stunted view of the way things work it honestly baffles me.
I'm pretty sure I wasn't working on a car when I played Elden Ring. You know one of the developers that doesn't add microstransactions and makes great games. See Larian as well.
Companies like EA and Ubisoft are not a barometer of gaming
Very sad and true, but that’s kinda the reason I’m okay with it being killed. It was already a shell of its former self, being paraded around like it was a weekend at Bernie’s.
Watching the Anthem streams was like watching a hostage scenario. I was innundated with micro-cues and subtle indications that they were developing a game they did not like and they knew would be received poorly.
Then they should have gotten their shit in order a lot sooner, then they could have just "made what they wanted"... they didn't... someone had to put a foot down, BioWare failed.
Yes, I have... and as such I know that internal Management can be a right Bitch...
Mind you, I am not talking about the individual Developers, I am squarely talking about BioWare Leadership which hasn't been on the line since the Founders left.
Two of them deserved the flak but I still stand by Andromeda being a genuinely fantastic game that was over hated because the early game had a few bugs despite every Bethesda RPG being a bug ridden sometimes nearly unplayable mess.
I strongly disagree. Andromedas writing was so bad. Everything was filled with marvel humor and bad animations.
You use Bethesda games as a comparison but you fail to mention that its common knowledge that andromeda was made in like 18 months because they wasted years on trying to find the game and what it even was.
Bethesda games aren't made like that and when they are (Starfield) it shows just like in Andromeda.
That guy expects us to forget how bad the game was. I attend by you, none of Andromeda systems were good AND the game for clowned on for good reasons too
Both Andromeda and Starfield are 7/10 games overall. The issue with Andromeda is the Bioware infighting and the main studio dumping the change in animation software on the people making the game at the last minute
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u/TheyStillLive69 8h ago
They've made three big failures (both in revenue and reputation) in a row.